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The Slowdown is taking a week to return to some of our favorite episodes from Maggie’s tenure so far. Today’s poem is Midlife Crisis by Jane Zwart. We’ll be back on Monday, March 30 with new episodes.

Today’s episode was originally released on January 7, 2026. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Midlife has upended everything I thought about aging. It’s not at all what I expected. Certainly, when I was a child, I thought of people in their forties as old, and now that I’m closer to 50 than 40, I laugh at that. I feel … young! I feel younger, in many ways, than I did ten years ago.”

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