Things to bear in mind. For the future. Yeah, that's it. The future.

Meet my hot new stripper wife / Turns out the mid-life crisis is a cruel global phenomenon. Can it be stopped?:

"...researchers compiled data from a couple million people across 80 nations and every income level and social status and gender and demographic and hairstyle, and the conclusion was pretty much irrefutable: The famed mid-life crisis, that feeling of depression and angst and what-the-hell-happened-to-my-dreams, is universal.

It's true. No matter where you live or how much money you make or how much of your mortgage payment you spend on lap dances in Las Vegas, somewhere between ages 40 and 50 (closer to 40 for women, 50 for men) feelings of futility and spiritual barrenness peak, and you feel like it's all been for naught because you're suddenly on the slippery slope toward cold, beckoning death and you never got around to writing that novel or opening that combo porn shop/laundromat/tattoo parlor or having 2.1 perfect kids or hang-gliding naked over the Swiss Alps.

And now, well, now it's just too damn late, because you're all paunchy and sagging and hair is growing where it shouldn't be and you have mysterious shooting pains in your colon and an inexplicable fondness for televised gardening shows, and no one under 30 wants to have sex with you ever again. You know?

...The angst, the heavy sighing, the overwhelming need to accomplish, to Get More Done, to reclaim some vigor and maybe rush out and buy a ridiculous Corvette or a giant silly Harley and couple it with very bad taste in leather jackets and an expensive membership at Sports Club/LA, and top it all off with a gum-snapping semi-hottie 22-year-old girlfriend who loves her some Red Bull and who gets icked-out by sashimi and who says "like" a lot and doesn't get a single one of my references to Spinal Tap or single-malt scotch or rec.arts.erotica, but who has an ass like Mary Magdalene's banana creme pie and makes cute little purring sounds in bed and makes me Viagra smoothies while dancing pornographically in skimpy boy shorts to Justin Timberlake remixes. What, too much? Sorry.

...Alas, there is no talk of prevention. Amid all the research and evidence, no one says what might alleviate or even eliminate the fear and the vague sense of doom, what might help you cruise over the mid-life hump with something resembling wisdom and gratitude and insight.

My guess is it starts with the usual combination, a personally customized admixture of regular, vigorous exercise, conscious food habits and minimal reality TV and great heaping doses of travel and nature and mental stimulation and truly excellent bedsheets, combined with absolute refusal to be fixed in time and place, to shrivel and hunker down and cling, as so many do, to one set of rules, one ideology, one notion of How It's All Supposed To Be. It is the knowledge that real ecstasy has nothing to do with external accomplishment, and everything to do with internal awareness.

...Isn't that the real secret? The simplest truth? Isn't that what the gurus and wise ones have been saying since before Jesus was a tingle in the loins of God? To be so present, so hotly, divinely connected to the moment you are in that time loses all relevance and age means nothing and opportunity shows up exactly as it should, and the real accomplishment, the real sense of achievement comes from celebrating each and every breath like it was a shot glass of molten meaning?

Yes. I'm going with that. What a lovely, Zen-licked, tantra-soaked perspective. I hope to suck down great heaping gallons of it, before it's too late."