Here's an article with an interesting take on middle-age. The writer
indicates that prominent over-fifties rock stars are setting a standard.
Following are excerpts:
It isn't, thank goodness, like that any more. Since Bob Dylan, The Rolling
Stones and Pete ("Hope I die before I get old") Townshend went roaring past
the half-ton milestone with no strain of credibility, there's been less
stigma attached to 50 than ever before. The model Marie Helvin can announce
her return to the photo-shoot although the coverline to the accompanying
article asked "Do You Think I'm Fifty?", as if amazed that anyone could
admit to such antiquity. For Tony and Marie and Pierce and Ruby and Michael
and the other 50-imminents, life is no longer dominated by thoughts of death
and the dwindling of their powers, but with how organised their lives have
become: their careers and relationships mobilised, their emotions
equilibrated, their health properly assessed.
<snip>
Fifty is now the watershed year for redundancy and panic about one's
mortality, but also for a new self-empowerment among the rock'n'roll
generation. Heaven knows whether such thoughts will occupy the mind of Tony
Blair when he celebrates his half-century on 6 May. But if he should wonder
whether the colossal strains of his current office might usefully be
swapped, from now on, for a new life spent playing the guitar every evening
in some lamplit bistro in the Camargue, he would, assuredly, not be alone.
keets
Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation,
Aquarius, Aquarius.