Your Own Middle Ages

A castle at Lisbon, Portugal

Your own Middle Ages have just ended. The time has come for change, for opportunity, for a Renaissance — the one you wished for so many times, and hoped, on so many occasions, would finally become real.

You got the car you had been waiting for. The house. You finally took that trip, and the photographs are still on your phone, in a folder you haven't opened since. You got married, or had a child, or became someone's father. You settled down.

And almost immediately, you start asking what comes next. What the next goal will be. The next opening to grow into, the next ambition to carry you higher. You don't know how any of it will turn out. So you turn it over in your mind, again and again.

Eventually you decide. You say: I'll do this. I'll do that. And the Middle Ages come back.

Or so you think — because for the moment, you are still free. But the freedom is short-lived. It lasts exactly as long as it takes for the decision to become a desire. And then the desire becomes a chain.

Our elders used to say we are never satisfied with anything. They weren't wrong. Constant desire leads to constant pain, and constant pain to constant restlessness — an endless loop that carries you backward while you are convinced you are moving forward.

Before you notice it, you have been sentenced to a lifelong wanting you never chose. Because — between us — what you wanted was the goal. Not something that would last a lifetime. A wanting that ended for good would take the will to grow along with it, and you know that too.

And so the return of the Middle Ages feels true and contradictory at once. This time, they seem to have come to stay.

But you try to handle it. You work hard. Harder. Harder still. Until one day you get what you wanted. And you are not satisfied. And you want more.

Until you understand that the Middle Ages were nothing more than the beginning of an end — a beginning you had already decided to bring to a close. And that the Renaissance was never one of the things on the list. It was never something you would get.