A Lifetime

Like Wood,
I grow.

Like Fire,
I expand outward.

Like Earth,
I learn to carry the weight of life.

I come to know the world through my family.
From my parents, I learn about love and relationships.
From society, I learn its rules and expectations.
And through everything I experience,
I gradually become who I am.

Not all of it is hurt.
Not all of it is wrong.

It is simply life, at that stage,
using everything available to it
to shape the person I was then.

I respond to my parents’ expectations.
I adapt to the ways of the world.
I take on the roles that life gives me.

This is not losing myself.

It is simply
life growing outward.

And then,
somewhere along the way,
the direction begins to change.

Life gradually enters Metal.

What once moved outward
begins to gather inward.

And perhaps this is what we often call
a midlife crisis.

But perhaps
there is no crisis in the turning itself.

The turning
is simply part of life.

The struggle begins
when life has already changed direction,
but I am still trying
to live in the old one.

I have spent years learning to grow,
to achieve,
to respond,
to carry,
to meet the world.

So when life begins asking me
to turn inward,
I may resist.

I may try harder
to keep moving outward.

And in that resistance,
the person I have been
meets the person
I am beginning to become.

Perhaps much of the crisis
is born in this collision.

So maybe the answer
is not to fight the turning.

When life expands,
I expand with it.

When life asks me to carry,
I carry.

And when life begins to turn inward,
I allow myself
to turn with it.

I begin to meet
the person I have become along the way.

Some of me came from family.
Some from society.
Some from everything I have lived through.

And some were simply the ways
the person I was then
learned to meet
the world I lived in then.

They were all once part of me.

But they do not all
have to remain who I am.

Some I keep.
Some I let go.
Some I choose again.

This is not about repairing
a supposedly wounded self.

Nor is it about finding
a self that was somehow lost.

It is simply life
changing direction.

In the first half of life,
I form myself in relation to the world.

And when the turning comes,
I follow it inward—
returning to myself
and choosing anew
how I wish to live in this world.

Perhaps this is the rhythm of a lifetime:

to gather,
to grow,
to expand,
to carry,
and then
to return.

There is no need
to resist the turning.

When life turns,
I turn with it.

I wrote this reflection through the lens of the Five Elements — Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, and Metal — not as fixed stages or rigid age categories, but as a way of understanding the changing movements of life: gathering, growing, expanding, carrying, and returning inward.

If you’re curious about the Five Elements in Chinese medicine and would like to understand this perspective more deeply, I’ve written more about it here: