TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

A friend of mine said recently, “You seem younger now than when I met you! It’s like you’re reverse aging.” I laughed. I’m not reverse aging physically, mind you. I have more lines around my eyes than ever before, and some new ones around my mouth, too. (The poet in me takes some pleasure in the terms for these wrinkles: crow’s feet and marionette lines.) It helps me to remind myself that all of this is from smiling. It’s all evidence of joy, etched into the face I’ve worn for almost 49 years. If there is going to be evidence of any emotion on my face, let it be joy.

I think what my friend meant by “reverse aging” is that my spirit seems lighter. It feels lighter. But why? My life isn’t easier than it was when I was in my twenties. I’m solo parenting two kids. I’m self-employed. My parents are aging. My house is aging. I’m aging. I have more big adult challenges than ever, but most days — not all days, but most days — I feel lighter. 

How strange that with more burdens to carry, I feel less burdened. It doesn’t make sense. The only way I can explain it to myself is that with age comes perspective. I know what matters, and I really do try to let the rest go. 

Midlife has upended everything I thought about aging. It’s not at all what I expected. Certainly, when I was a child, I thought of people in their forties as old, and now that I’m closer to 50 than 40, I laugh at that. I feel … young! I feel younger, in many ways, than I did ten years ago.

I admire how today’s poem describes time, and what it feels like to reach the middle of one’s life only to be surprised at what you find.

Midlife Crisis
by Jane Zwart

Some rivers you put into trusting to the livery
downstream, to the hirelings who will wade
into the shallows and hand you from kayak
to bank; I thought that was the deal I’d made

with time: that I would live until interrupted,
that I would be swept where the current said
and at the last alight. How strange, then,
to learn that being was a palindrome I’d read

to its hairpin middle. I thought it was a river—
how strange, hull spun on a backwater, to learn
that my route ran out and back, to feel myself
grow younger. I did not think I would yearn

for the silver to change to rust, to be as beautiful
bent double, unsteady again. Well, now I know 
the tributaries of Adam’s ale. Now, unable to forget
there will be an end, with awful strength, I row.

“Midlife Crisis” by Jane Zwart from ODDEST & OLDEST & SADDEST & BEST © 2026 Jane Zwart. Used by permission of Orison Books.