The developmental psychologist Erik Erikson identified eight major life stages, each of them marked by a tension between two different aspects of the human experience. For instance, he saw our 30s as a time when we bond or detach in our relationships; by age 40, Erikson believed, people have settled into a dominant relational mode that is rooted in either intimacy or isolation.

And today I’m turning 37, just three more years to 40. No pressure, kid!

Obviously with none of Erikson’s stages did he mean for them to be viewed as prescriptive but as general tendencies. Yet he is undeniably onto something and today I am here to send out a dispatch from the trenches of middle-aging: entering your upper 30s is a milestone. (FYI, in Erikson’s next bracket, age 40 to 65, the tension is between generativity and stagnation. It’s all ahead of me.)

In my experience, the only age transition even remotely analogous to my current phase was the teenage years. Erikson characterises this period as a search for identity over confusion, and again I confirm his theory. My teenage years felt as though I was living under water and simultaneously intoxicated. The big difference is that in your teen years people know you’re going through a transition, whereas no one is there to hold your hand when you’re crossing over into full-on, irrevocable adulthood. The things that were normal and even original and cute at age 18 are considered irresponsible at age 37.

If our teenage transition brings great changes in our identity, our late 30s are marked by dizzying adjustments in expectations and assumptions. There really is no certainty? All those sage middle-aged people were actually just winging it? How speedily life disabuses us of our basic assumptions. Who decreed for so much disillusion to happen in such a compacted chronological space? Yet as Parker Palmer rightly points out, dis-illusion in itself is positive. Taken literally, it simply means getting rid of our illusions and what could be better than that?

Disillusion, then, provides a sure path to enlightenment. Think of it as a syllogism. Getting older leads to disillusion; disillusion leads to enlightenment; therefore getting older leads to enlightenment. Or as Anna Halprin said, less pretentiously but probably more effectively, “Aging is enlightenment at gunpoint.”

I hate to be so dramatic but I suspect that the majority of the human race flounders in the test Erikson identified as isolation versus intimacy. And I’m not blaming us. I mean, Lord have mercy, it is so hard to stay connected, even for children with their parents and parents with their own blessed children. Gosh, I even heard a guy on the radio say the average person would have a different wedding guest list every ten years.

And yet, “For all this nature is never spent . . . because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods” (Hopkins). The challenge of living into the full human condition stands as pristine and glorious as ever, beckoning each newly disillusioned 37-year-old to walk through fire without getting consumed; to witness immeasurable betrayal, pettiness, meanness, dishonesty and tribalism and still not sell one’s soul.

In the language of Erikson, despite the almost ineluctable human tendency toward isolation, we are free at any moment to seek intimacy – with ourselves, our neighbours and our God. Let no one forbid us.