Riding the Coil: How a Midlife Crisis Changed the Way I Think about Life

Staring into the waves, hearing their hypnotic crashes, I started thinking about my dad—about all the summer vacations we spent at the beach, about his sudden and unexpected death two years ago, about his impermanence against the permanence of the waves.

That’s when the thought crashed into my mind, uninvited: “Your dad is dead and the beach doesn’t care. And the beach will still be here long after you’re dead too.” And thus began my midlife crisis.

This seemed a bit premature—at 42 I don’t even need reading glasses yet. My external world is not falling apart. I love my wife, four kids, and pastoral work more than ever. But internally the load-bearing walls were crumbling.

As I searched for supports, a trifecta of coping Lally columns emerged. I spent about half of the beach vacation, with the help of my enabling sister, exploring my genealogy. In the weeks that followed I watched nearly all of the Coen Brothers movies, some of them on repeat. And I started studying a book of the Bible I had never understood: Ecclesiastes.

This is by no means a recommendation. Many find genealogical work pointless, the profanity of Coen movies excessive, and Ecclesiastes obtuse. But these were the nearby material during my existential storm, so I grabbed them and started rebuilding.

To my surprise, they each presented the same elemental question: Is life a circle or a line?

This may not seem like the most pressing concern, but for me, it got to the core of my crisis. I needed to know what life even is.

Genealogy work has a very linear look, whether your tree goes up or your ancestors branch out sideways like an inverted March Madness bracket. Yet, after typing in a few dozen birth and death dates and reading enough wills, you realize life is inherently cyclical. Circular imagery dominates the Coen Brothers’ oeuvre as well. Whether a ceiling fan, a clock, a Hula Hoop, a bowling ball, a coin, a hubcap, a space ship, a mobster hat, or a tumbleweed, the Brothers insinuate circularity into nearly all of their films. Yet these are still movies, and they all have a beginning, a middle, and—with varying degrees of satisfaction—an ending.

The biggest surprise came from Ecclesiastes. Though I have read the Bible regularly for 30 years and hold a seminary degree, I was still shocked by these opening verses:

“A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.”

Ecclesiastes 1:4-7

Circles and cycles, around and around.

I puzzled over this for longer than I care to admit. We represent our lives as a sequence of events in a timeline as straight as the dash between the dates on a tombstone, yet live in the constant cycles of seasons.

Is life a circle or a line? One morning over breakfast, my wife Rachael asked, “What if it’s both? Like a coil?”

She cracked the code. With a Slinky, no less. Life is both linear and circular, just as a coil is both a straight line of wire and one wrapped around a cylinder. Our lives wrap around numerous cycles. Every 24 hours we go to sleep just as every 7 days is another Monday. Moon cycles, four seasons, birthdays, Bowl Games, Oscars, elections, and Punxsutawney Phil—there are more cycles in life than hula hoops in The Hudsucker Proxy.

Yet we do not make our way through these cycles like a goldfish circling its bowl. We grow, mature, evolve, change each time around. Like a bead moving steadily along a Slinky, we are going in circles even as we move forward.

Reckoning with the coil has changed how I think about life in a handful of ways.

It has helped me calm down, releasing me from the notion that I need to be important or change the world. The first cycle God gave humans—have dominion over the earth for six days, rest on the seventh—reminds me that I am a steward, not a savior. I can let go of panicked ambition and a frenetic pace. I can do my work with faithfulness then pause and enjoy. Besides, “sometimes a person who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave everything to be enjoyed by someone who did not toil for it” (Ecclesiastes 2:21).

It has reminded me that life goes on. In my family history are Scottish lords whose castle now lies in ruins, colonial governors who were disgraced, Huguenots who fled France for their lives, Revolutionary patriots who were betrayed, cotton farmers who were bankrupted by the boll weevil, and one moonshiner who went to the penitentiary for an act of violence involving an axe. Yet even when it seemed, in their world, that all was lost and everything was ruined, the world kept spinning. The bead kept riding the coil. Life goes on.

Reckoning with the coil has also given me permission to pay attention to the times when the Slinky compresses and past experiences feel very present. If life were only a straight line, I would wonder whether something so far behind me should really have any bearing on how I move forward. But the proximity created by a particular anniversary, song, smell, or photograph confirms that, while life goes on, the past still matters to my present. So when the coil compresses and I remember that moment of shame, of fear, of exhilaration, of inadequacy, I pay attention. Yes it may have happened 35 years ago, but it’s the same me feeling it, and God may have a drop of oil waiting to drip down and soothe past hurts or remind me of past goodness.

Finally, this reckoning—especially the part where I will die—has helped me be present. Cliché though this may sound, it has been one of my biggest takeaways from Ecclesiastes. Even though the book grapples with havel—literally “vapor” but metaphorically vanity, futility, or enigma—it does not despair. Rather, the author writes, “I commend joy, for man has nothing better under the sun but to eat and drink and be joyful, for this will go with him in his toil through the days of his life that God has given him under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 8:15).

For me, this means pausing to be present in moments of joy—receiving the fresh opportunity of studying and preaching this week’s text, tasting each bite of an exquisite meal, lingering at the table with my teenagers after dinner, setting down my phone to observe something ordinary through the window.

The place where I feel most present lately is bounding on the trampoline with my five year-old, Samuel. With sublime elegance he soars through the air, arms out, flying like my Pop in his World War II glider or my dad in his Delta jet. At the weightless peak of the jump, time stands still. The bead stops on the coil. Our history is all present. Then gravity calls, time resumes, the bead moves again, and we land on the bounce mat, ready to bound for another brief taste of the eternal.

These shifts in thinking have made life seem manageable. I can embrace the fact that I will die, that the vapor will fade, that one day the bead will fly off the end of the coil. Or, like my dad, perhaps my coil will be cut off from what seemed to be its natural length.

I don’t know what the passing of moments will be like after that. The Bible is spare on details about how the afterlife works. Wherever Heaven is and however its calendar runs, what makes it heaven, to quote the final words of Ezekiel, is “The LORD Is There” (Ezekiel 48:35). The whole Biblical narrative, enigmas and all, finds its denouement in being present with the I AM—“Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (Revelation 21:3).

At my dad’s graveside service, Samuel, then three, sat playing in the fresh dirt that covered dad’s casket. There we were—the Davis “line” reckoning with the circle of life. I asked my son, “Where is Grandpa now?” and he answered, “He’s into God.”

Sounds good to me.

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