Danger + Opportunity

Returning Crisis to its diseased roots

The best way to begin a story is in medias res, in the middle of things. “Into the thick of it,” goes that song you can’t get out of your head from the Barkyardigans.

Sandwiched between my subtitles for this newsletter promising introverted outreach and the kitchen-sink curios of my creativity, is the meatiest part of my theme: midlife-climate crises. 

Crisis! A word to grab you by the throat. The sky is falling! The house is on fire!

I would argue on both fronts—midlife and climate—that this “crisis” word has failed us. At least in the way we’ve come to regard it.

In contemporary usage, crisis comes only with the negative connotation of disaster and doom. You would think “climate crisis” together might be very motivating because who wants the world to end, but bewildered scientists—and poor Al Gore—have learned through the decades of shouting into the deaf vortex that the effect of pairing these two words has been only numbing and paralyzing rather than activating. 

Crisis seems to induce too much pressure and earnestly backfires into mere complacency or this new term I just found, “eco-anxiety.” Well if the world is dying anyway, then who am I—with my gasoline-fueled, hamburger-clogged life and 1,000 inconsequential disposable habits—to fix it, so at least the grandkids will have Mars and maybe a creepily preserved President Elon on Mars. Ambivalence is the most dangerous emotion there is, as it leads to absolutely nothing. The biggest crisis of climate is the feeling of inevitability that comes from the word crisis itself. Hopelessness. Despair.

But let’s relate this to voting. If we all tacitly choose to do nothing about the earth warming toward its doom at an increasingly faster rate, isn’t that the same in our U.S. elections as deciding not to vote and letting it all just go to shit. And aren’t we all encouraged here instead to participate in the verb of our democracy in order to keep a very fragile ideal intact. Whether or not your vote is going to decide an actual election is irrelevant—it’s the fact of being one among many, and only together how we might accrue. A tipping point is all that is needed to change everything.

The definition of crisis in contemporary usage often stops for us at the “time of intense difficulty, trouble or danger” but go further and you get this nugget from Oxford, the original definition where it spent most of its time:

“the turning point of a disease when an important change takes place, indicating either recovery or death.”

More on the etymology from etymonline.com:

early 15c., crise, crisis, “decisive point in the progress of a disease,” also “vitally important or decisive state of things, point at which change must come, for better or worse,” from Latinized form of Greek krisis “turning point in a disease, that change which indicates recovery or death” (used as such by Hippocrates and Galen), literally “judgment, result of a trial, selection,” from krinein “to separate, decide, judge,” from PIE root *krei- “to sieve,” thus “discriminate, distinguish.”

And this particular entry even goes as far as to get into the midlife part:

Transferred non-medical sense is 1620s in English. A German term for “mid-life crisis” is Torschlusspanik, literally “shut-door-panic,” fear of being on the wrong side of a closing gate.

Wait, so midlife crisis is just more mature FOMO? The Germans are the best at mashing words into these amazingly nuanced compound words, but contrary to the shut-door-panic, let’s stay in that moment when the door is still open. Synonyms abound in this space of the turning point. Here’s a long WordHippo list that includes climax, watershed, juncture, exigency, crux, cusp, nexus, peripeteia, flash point, moment of truth, zero hour, rising action, Dunkirk, knife-edge, pivot, dilemma, kairos, seminal moment, match point, pregnant moment, jumping-off point, and on and on.

I thrive in words full of potential like “liminal” and in these fertile spaces between. One of my stories in this archive is called “Gray Area” in a post called Crepuscular, for the creatures that thrive in twilights and pre-dawns. I once wrote a college essay about thresholds in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, having fun analyzing the dirty writing and symbols that fill a restroom door stall. Creativity abounds in the gray areas. The long list of words that define this space is a case in point that linguistic energy accumulates in these moments. Witness the great outpouring of artistic production from the pregnant pause of the pandemic. 

So, we can either find new terms for the climate crisis, like writers do in this Ecotopian Lexicon collection reviewed here in the New Yorker in 2020, or we can try to take back the original idea of crisis.

The fact of the disease in these early definitions is immutable—we are human, we will die; the earth has its own life cycle that will also inevitably expire—but there is still an empowering element of choice. We could opt for healing and care and do everything in our collective power (via masses of tiny individual decisions) to live much longer here in our precarious bodies on this precious planet. 

The pandemic was a liminal space, which proved for many a turning point as it provided the time and space for us to pause, reflect, recalibrate our lives to better align with our values. I emerged from the pandemic with so many things to show for it: a little rustic property in the Catskills, a chest tattoo, a major job pivot from a nonprofit to public service, a boyfriend after a solid handful years of happy and resigned solitude following separation and divorce. Add a shiny car (check) and one might also point to all these things as the red flags of midlife crisis, and admittedly I am a perimenopausal hormonal mess about to turn 50. 

But let me say without hesitation that the so-called midlife so-called crisis has been the best time of my life. This midlife crisis is pure possibility. It’s been invigorating. I’ve got my second wind, or maybe third or fourth. I’m finally understanding what I’ve heard before about women coming into their own as they reach their fourth and fifth decades. Who knows, by 50 like a phoenix maybe I will burst into flames, and it will have been worth it!

I love this Ted Talk from Jean Shinoda Bolen weaving together the threads of all these key ideas: crisis, liminal, pandemic, opportunity:

She describes what many of us might call the “flow”—how in these ripe transformative moments, should we remain open and receptive, opportunity just pours right in. There’s a magical thing I seem enjoy in my life, which is actually really far from magic, that a new career path appears to me the moment I need it, that I always find the finances to fund my next impossible project, that the aha moments are my compass.

Bolen, like many have all the way back to JFK, mentions how the word crisis in Chinese is depicted by two characters for DANGER + OPPORTUNITY.

"File:'Crisis' = Danger+ Opportunity (Traditional characters).jpg" by Jun Chen, MD is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

A point up for linguistic debate is that the second character really means more “turning point” than “opportunity.” In any case, point well taken. It’s not the danger part alone that makes all this compelling and important, it’s the call to action, the challenge at the crossroads to make the next move this way or that. 

(If we’re really parsing language here, I also take issue with word “midlife,” because who can say it’s the middle of anyone’s life when we don’t know when we die. “Midlife” assumes we live to 80, 90, or 100, when really we could die tomorrow via any sort of bus-off-cliff event. In any case, it’s a hopeful gesture to think that we might live to the average, or beyond, since that average sadly shortened during the pandemic. So, may I be so lucky to have this midlife crisis and live twice as long as this!) 

The Chinese Danger + Opportunity aligns with the Greek Disease + Healing and the idea that there could be options here, that we might have agency. We’re at crossroads, and how we live this life in our bodies, in our homes, and on our biggest most important home|body of our PLANET at this moment is still up to us. I’m certain that the way I’m celebrating turning 50 rather than cowering will inevitably extend my life, and that we can do the same for our planet.

Or we might go in some Barkyardigan circles and just remain lost:

We’re tramping through the bush.
On and on we push. Into the thick of it,
But we can’t see where we’re going.
We’ve made a stellar start.

To find the jungle’s heart.
But all we’ll find is nothing,
If we can’t see where we’re going!

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Do you have other better terms for Climate Crisis or Midlife Crisis? Weigh in below!