The Part of Our Life We Too Often Forget

Reinvention can often seem like an inevitable part of getting older. The midlife crisis is practically baked into the American life cycle, at least in popular culture—a moment that can yield a new career, a new marriage, or, at the very least, a flashy new car. The 1960s radical Jerry Rubin wrote in his memoir Growing (Up) at 37 that he needed a completely new belief system to bring him back from a crisis so deep that, as he put it, “I felt dead at 34.” For him, as for many, the idea of a clean…