They were interlopers—after 30-odd years of molding his 6 acres of Catskill hardscrabble with scythes, brush hogs, hoes, and chain saws, he knew the location of every perennial plant and when it would appear: The deer-resistant daffodils poked up during the third week of May, you could find wild strawberries on the southern edge of the lawn the second week of June, the lilies bloomed in July, the bee balm in August. These pale beauties hadn’t been here last year. What fair, fertile wind had deposited their seed on his lawn? He picked a bunch and brought them to his wife, who he knew would be delighted, her appreciation of natura naturans quite a bit more evolved than his. She held one up as she searched for its name in a field guide, the flower’s neon-green stem curving ever so gracefully, like the long, beautiful neck of an aristocratic Parisienne in a Modigliani painting. “They’re called bluets,” she announced, setting the flowers in a vase. “Tiny but perfect.” 
He flashed on another time she’d used that phrase—about 20 years before when the last of their children, the twins, were born. Exhausted but blissed out, she lay on the hospital bed with him as they admired their creations, now dozing peacefully between them in their little blue and pink caps. She prised a finger into each baby’s fist and they instinctively tightened their grasp. “Tiny but perfect,” she’d declared. MORE: Is This The Life You’re Meant To Live? He missed the kids, now far away at college—missed playing hockey with his son, squash and music with his daughter. But after more than 30 years of having children in the house, he and his wife were eager to inhabit their emptied nest. They could order takeout and a movie for dinner without being accused (by the junior cultural snobs) of philistinism, travel when they wanted. They no longer needed to close their bedroom door. Just like before, preprogeny, they loomed large in each other’s eyes—and they still craved what they saw. Years ago, a famous psychiatrist he was interviewing remarked, “Wait until your 60s. Then things really open up.” It seemed preposterous at the time. In your 60s? When you’re old and shrinking? But now, though still a few years shy of that mark (and decidedly not old), he had begun to understand what the esteemed doctor meant. Decades-long preoccupations—professional achievement, social status, money, gaily duty—were beginning to loosen their grip. His focus was becoming less goal-oriented, softer, more flexible—expansive enough to marvel at the richness of an ever-deepening lifelong partnership, keen enough to witness exquisite discoveries, like bluets. It was as though an existential gene had switched on. The journalist in him knew that the blossoming of his “spiritual” side, for lack of a better term, was a well-documented phenomenon of midlife. In his eight-stage model of lifelong development, the great psychiatrist Erik Erikson observed that the primary preoccupation of middle adulthood is, or should be, creative and meaningful pursuits that benefit not just the self but also the next generation. More recently, in their studies of “socioemotional selectivity,” Stanford psychologists documented the profound shift in focus that occurs in middle age. In youth, when you have more time in front of you than behind you, you’re strongly motivated to acquire new information, skills, and experiences because your sights are firmly trained in the future. Later, when your future is not so open-ended, you’re more attracted to the familiar and to pursuits that will yield emotional gratification. You concentrate on “sure things,” and absorb and savor the good ones before you, right now. There are several reasons older people report being more content than younger people, but this focus on the present moment may be the most important. Still, he was surprised by his attitudinal shape-shift. His exposure to organized religion had been spotty at best, and his latent cynicism had caused him to suspect the New Age pursuit of “self-actualization” was just more boomer narcissism. As certain older friends preceded him down this path, he questioned their sanity. They were going back to the churches they hated as kids, throwing over lucrative careers for volunteer jobs in Africa, dispossessing themselves of a lifetime’s worth of stuff, hoping purity and enlightenment would fill the void. On the final leg of their vision quest, would they migrate en masse to Sedona so they could sit all day in lotus position and groove to the music of the spheres? MORE: How To Heal Anytime, Anywhere, From Anything But then he had an “experience.” On a reporting trip to Israel, after tucking the obligatory slip of paper bearing the names of his loved ones into a crack in the wall of the ancient holy shrine, he sat for a few minutes near the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Magically, as if recorded on an inner tape, his entire life scrolled before his eyes—a fast-forward presentation of every achievement and victory, humiliation and defeat, every lost friend and found lover, every birth and death. He sat very still, eyes wide, fixing on the middle distance, dumbfounded as the images crossed the back of his eyes, telling himself, Just stay with this. When it was over, the thing that struck him was that no event in his life was more significant than any other. They all just were. He felt, perhaps for the first time in his life, completely at peace.  Since he realized that everything is okay, he’d developed an affection for certain aphorisms he’d once consigned to his flaky-phrase book: There are no coincidences. Everything is connected. They had an acceptably secular tone, part particle physics (you can’t move an electron here without a corresponding response somewhere else), part wisdom of the ages: Stop and look or you’ll miss the miracle. All you have to do is pay close attention. Now, deep into autumn, the woods stripped bare and the grass matted and sere, no sign exists that the bluets had ever graced his lawn. Would they show up again next year? He consulted the field guide, where, on the page that detailed their unique taxonomy, his wife had thoughtfully pressed a single bluet. He removed it and closed the book. That was then, this is now. He held it up to the light, admiring the graceful curve of its stem, and showed it to her. She nodded, smiled, and went back to her work at her desk, pulling her hair back with both hands and knotting it at the back with a pencil, exposing her elegant neck. It, too, arched gracefully, like that of a beautiful woman in a Modigliani painting. MORE: What Is Takes To Be Happy Now