The hoops you used to jump through without much thought get harder to jump through. The rest you used to dismiss as laziness starts to feel like the only sane response left. Jung called this the afternoon of life, and had a gift for making the phrase sound less like a decline and more like an invitation. He was right, though it took me most of my own forties to believe him.

This is a free ninety-minute evening for anyone in that stretch — whatever is currently prompting it. A job that no longer fits. A relationship in transition. A quiet, persistent sense that something needs to change and no clear idea what. I'll introduce four real creatures — a crab, a jellyfish,

an albatross, a salmon — and the four energies midlife tends to call on: resistance, surrender, vision, and striving. Most of us are only fluent in one or two. You'll hear the biology behind each, which is stranger and more useful than you'd think. There'll be space to talk with others about where midlife has actually got you. And a short guided visualisation, so you can feel each energy in the body rather than just understand it in the head.

You won't leave with a diagnosis, and midlife isn't a problem to be solved. You'll leave with a way of asking yourself, on any given difficult day, which of your four inner creatures the moment is actually calling for.