I thoroughly enjoyed reading in today's Washington Post's Health Section, the articles "What Crisis?" (pages F1 and F5) by Stefanie Weiss, as well as "Lulled into Numbness" by Douglas LaBier (page F5). They are about the midlife crisis, whether it exists, when it hits, if it hits at certain intervals, why it hits and what to do. There was a little box, too, which urged readers to share their own experiences, which I did, immediately proving I am squarely in midlife, because only people who are send letters to newspapers. At least this one was solicited. Sort of.

When I was 47, my hair started to get thinner and fall out. I lived in Africa at the time and suspected a weird exotic disease until my sweet hairdresser remarked, "Dahling, you're getting older, hadn’t you noticed? Your skin is getting thinner, alright, so why not your hair?"

Not every person senses, wants to sense, or wants to acknowledge physical or mental changes as keenly as the other, or at all. But they exist and I suspect that those who deny them are either dense or lie through their nose. Or maybe we pick and choose what we are going to be bugged about, like Nora Ephron had to write a book about her sagging neck. Well, nobody sympathized with my hair lamentations, some were even callous enough to call my frizz "stunning curls".

But then I met an old friend whom I had not seen in several years. Eight years older than me, she used to have lots of very thick straight hair – but when I saw her again it had dwindled to a stylish but wispy helm. I sighed with relief and, expecting her immediate empathy, launched into the long and sad story of my crowning glory's demise. "I can't see any difference", she established matter-of-factly (she is Dutch), “it  is still the same as always. Like mine." Then she entered into a sad discourse about her dental woes. I looked at her teeth – they were all still her own and all still as straight and white as ever.

Like all of us, I have personally experienced many external life changes that prompted anxieties and they probably masked the crises meant in the Health Section articles, of the kind brought on by birthdays or other milestones in time. There was leaving home, splitting up with boyfriends, graduating, finding a job, changing jobs, illnesses, injuries, falling in love, marriage, deaths, birth of child, moves to various countries, loss of career, watching loved ones go through difficult times, empty nest. There was only one period during which no one particular external change, but time changing something deep inside me, caused anxiety. That coincided indeed with a milestone, that of my 50th birthday, as it occurred in the period between roughly 48 and 54. I had ceased being a lawyer, and was slowly emerging as an artist. It was the most difficult time of my life, a protracted and deeply felt mid-life crisis, deeper than, but not unlike, the awful weirdness and senselessness of it all that one feels as an adolescent. I think it had much to do with cellular changes and dwindling hormones, but then to me the mind and the body are intricately connected. If the body goes through menopause, why not the mind?

We may not all experience crises every 9, 10 or 12 years as the articles in the WP's Health Section proposed, but life does have its phases. These phases are cyclical, not like stops along a subway line. There are the biblical meager and fat periods, alternating every 7 years or so. There is the cycle of our bodies renewing all its cells so that every 10 years there is not a single cell left that is the same - and that, of course and significantly, includes our brain cells. Seems to me that as a result we can expect to act and think somewhat differently every 10 years or so. And finally, a generation is about 20-25 years long and the distinct phases of our life – childhood and adolescence, childbearing years, mid-life and old age, are each roughly the length of a generation.

So, there are many natural indicators to prove the reality of our life crises. But these are less visible nowadays and the boundaries are becoming blurred as we live longer, can decide when and whether to have babies, and are much, much less ruled by nature. Some of us have no contact at all with nature. We have forgotten that, on the purely physical level, our function is a limited one: to go forth and multiply. The drive to fulfill that function is a very powerful one, which for a long time fuels us along, keeping us happy and ever forward-looking (like it or not, consciously or not, that would be looking forward to the next mate or the illusion of one) until the bottom (our hormones) falls out. But that drive is being sublimated by civilization into such acceptable urges as acquisitiveness and ambition which, unlike the bare urge to procreate, are not meant to have a natural end. Where the two kinds of urges collide, Viagra begins.

We also have forgotten that the linearity of time that rules man-made life is unnatural, and things are not getting any better. Even clocks no longer have hands that go round. Time has become linear, and is chopped up in equal parts. We don't need scientific proof that that is a big fat fallacy, because we all experience how some hours and days are much longer or shorter than others, or how time can race by, go around in circles, stop moving altogether, or do all of the above, all within one day. Africans have a totally different sense of time than do "Westerners" and they illustrate the difference rather neatly when they say that Westerners have watches and Africans have time.

Nevertheless, underneath all the linear veneer our lives remain essentially cyclical and we are like insects that must fly forward in a circular motion along the straight wall of our linear time. No wonder that along the way we periodically "hit the wall". Much of our life crises stem from our unnatural man-made environment. It makes us live by a ticking clock instead of like in olden times by the silence of the rising and setting sun, of the waxing and waning moon, the coming and going of seasons, and by our not so silent appetites and desires, and our pregnancies and those of our children and grandchildren. Back then, we slowly saw our functions change as we ourselves changed from child to adult, from adult to parent, from parent to grandparent, each time receiving distinct new tasks, until finally we found ourselves sitting at the edge of the village to watch others do the many busy things we had become to tired and weak to do ourselves. 

There is no such direct and immediate connect anymore between us and the passing of generations; often, when they are ready, our children go off to faraway schools, marry strangers and live in unknown cities, leaving us parents with the feeling, not of a new function in the same familiar life, but of an entirely new and unknown life.

Inasmuch as we have lost the understanding that time doesn't really exist, that only change exists, and that time is nothing but an imperfect, limited and limiting way to keep our activities coordinated with those of others, we have also lost touch with the natural changes that nevertheless occur in ourselves and with our innate knowledge about what those changes mean. Our fake world reinforces that disconnect – it holds up only one virtually immutable ideal human form which we ourselves can only attain or approach, if at all, during a very brief period in our life. As such we can easily be deluded, and basically are every day of our lives by those who sell the world's many kinds of snake oil, into hoping, desiring and believing that we can live forever, can remain young and beautiful forever, strong and vigorous forever, and consequently remain happy forever, as long as we drive certain cars, eat certain foods, run five miles, go to church, solve the crossword puzzle, make charitable donations, floss every night, mind our finances properly, file our tax forms, extend our cell phone plan, have sex on a regular basis, limit our alcohol intake and join the AARP. If we don't do that we will get old and sick and we will die, and it will be our own fault. Now, doesn't that make you depressed, especially if, like me, you have failed one or two of the above tests, and your hormones have moved to Florida?

At the same time it is wonderful that our unnatural environment allows us to find ways to seek fulfillment beyond physically contributing to the perpetuation of the human species. I much prefer living now than being an old woman sitting at the edge of a village, no matter how natural a state of being that might be. And while our bodies still become weaker with age, our mind can remain fresh and if the circumstances are right, and we are lucky, we can become President of the USA at an age when the man in LaBier's article sadly wonders: "How do you start over when you can't start over?" If the mind keeps functioning, we can do whatever we want at whatever age. Look at Ronald Reagan, Hillary Clinton, my uncle Albert who still goes rowing at 90, my mother-in-law who wrote a novel at 80 and my old legal mentor Piet Sanders who still sits at his desk and gives lectures at 96. Or take Louise Bourgeois, who at 97 just finished a suite of gigantic drawings more or less all on how her bowels and other aging body parts still function. To my chagrin, my mother, who, of course always discreetly, raged, raged against the dying of the light, felt there were things she couldn't wear, say or do anymore after 50 and she warned me sternly that I, too, would “sing a different song” once I’d hit that age. Times have changed. We gained more power in and over our lives. I pretty much wear, say, think and do things in the same impetuous and unladylike way as when I was 25, and I intend to continue for a long time to come. But that is not given to everybody and I might still find out that it isn't given to me either – and then that would be so and it would be nobody's fault.

Actually, it's quite OK to be depressed at certain times, and to experience a "winter of the mind". It's quite alright to feel that way each time we are reminded that everything in life, including man-made things, has a finite season. And each time when we feel the existence of that internal, natural time-keeping mechanism that cannot be rewound even as life, in its seeming eternity, continues to speed by, and will ultimately do so without us. Go ahead, be depressed. The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind is only given to those who have had a lobotomy.