Excerpt:
Today the daughters of these runaway moms, having arrived at the shores of middle age, are taking flight, too. But they’re not, by and large, dumping their husbands. They’re not looking to the job market with expectations of liberation. Instead, they’re fleeing to yoga, imitating flight in the downward-gazing contortion called the crow position. They’re striving, through exquisite new adventures in internal fine-tuning, to feel more deeply, live more meaningfully, better inhabit each and every moment of each and every day and attain “a more superior, evolved state of being,” as Claire Dederer puts it in her just-published book, “Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses,” the latest installment in the burgeoning literature of postboomer-female midlife crisis.
“Poser” tells of the author’s attempt, via the calming effect of yoga, to transcend her anxious perfectionism by being more perfect herself. It follows a steady stream of books — Dani Shapiro’s yoga-infused “Devotion,” Melanie Gideon’s “Slippery Year,” Gretchen Rubin’s “Happiness Project,” Katrina Kenison’s “Gift of an Ordinary Day” — in which the trope of female midlife rebellion, the go-out-and-find-yourself exhortation that has floated in the popular imagination ever since “Passages” put the phrase “midlife crisis” on the cultural map, is turned on its head.
Read the rest of the article here: Fear (Again) of Flying
BeyondChron: Opinion piece relating to Fear (Again) of Flying
01/17/11
