Little Pot Belly (Source: Geo Davis)

What little pot belly? Me? Are you kidding?!?! [Suck in gut. Turn sideways. Gaze confidently into mirror.] Nope. No little pot belly. Nothing. Not me! I’m trim. Fit. Svelte. Looking better than my thirties.

Little pot belly… whatever!

Billy Crystal’s Midlife Crunch

So you’re feeling optimistic. You’re advancing on your midlife quest for greater creativity and curiosity (and a healthier, happier you.) No midlife crisis for you!

Good. Optimism is good. Really, really good.

But it’s not enough.

And Billy Crystal’s midlife monologue as Mitch Robbins’ in City Slickers offers the perfect reality check…

[If the video above isn’t working for you, you can read Billy Crystal’s midlife insight (as Mitch Robbins) in City Slickers) below.]

Value this time in your life kids, because this is the time in your life when you still have your choices, and it goes by so fast. When you’re a teenager you think you can do anything, and you do. Your twenties are a blur. Your thirties, you raise your family, you make a little money and you think to yourself, “What happened to my twenties?” Your forties, you grow a little pot belly you grow another chin. The music starts to get too loud and one of your old girlfriends from high school becomes a grandmother. Your fifties you have a minor surgery. You’ll call it a procedure, but it’s a surgery. Your sixties you have a major surgery, the music is still loud but it doesn’t matter because you can’t hear it anyway. Seventies, you and the wife retire to Fort Lauderdale, you start eating dinner at two in the afternoon, lunch around ten, breakfast the night before. And you spend most of your time wandering around malls looking for the ultimate in soft yogurt and muttering, “How come the kids don’t call?”, “How come the kids don’t call?” By the eighties, you’ve had a major stroke, and you end up babbling to some Jamaican nurse who your wife can’t stand but who you call mama. Any questions? (City Slickers, Billy Crystal as Mitch Robbins)

How’s that for a little optimism damper? Little pot belly. Another chin. Minor surgery. (Mine, an inguinal hernia repair came a decade early.) Consider me precocious. Or an overachiever?

If Billy Crystal’s midlife monologue offers a useful takeaway (aside from slightly awkward laughter) it might be something like, don’t yield. Fight back. Fight back! Or at least laugh at yourself as you migrate from paunchy midlife to surgical midlife to…