Center for Midlife and Meaning

You bring a lifetime of experience. You may also be bringing new questions.

Perhaps your work is changing, your children are leaving home, or you’re caring for someone you love. You may be approaching retirement, living through loss, returning to a long-held interest, or wondering what deserves more of your time. Familiar roles can shift. Priorities can change. Possibilities can emerge before you know quite what to do with them.

The Sarah Lawrence Center for Midlife and Meaning offers a place to explore these questions through learning, conversation, and creative discovery. Bringing together the liberal arts and the experience of adults in midlife and beyond, the Center helps you understand what is changing, consider what matters, and take thoughtful steps toward what comes next.

What is a midlife transition program?

A midlife transition program creates structured time to reflect on your experiences, explore your priorities, and consider new directions alongside others asking similar questions. Guided discussion, individual reflection, and practical experimentation help you connect what you learn to the life you want to lead.

At Sarah Lawrence, that exploration begins with a question that matters to you. Who am I as my responsibilities change? What gives my life meaning now? What do I want to contribute? What would I like to learn, or try, for the first time?

You can arrive with a specific transition in mind or simply a sense that something is shifting. Your experience, curiosity, and uncertainty all belong in the conversation.

Why explore midlife at a liberal arts college?

The questions that arise in midlife reach across every part of being human. Understanding them calls for more than one perspective.

Psychology and biology help us explore how we change, adapt, and continue learning. History and anthropology reveal how ideas about work, family, retirement, and aging have been shaped, and how they might be reconsidered. Philosophy invites us to examine purpose, responsibility, and what makes a good life. Literature, writing, and the arts offer ways to understand experience, imagine possibilities, and give expression to what can be difficult to name.

Together, these perspectives can make a personal turning point more understandable. They help us recognize inherited expectations, consider alternatives, and make choices with greater awareness.

Sarah Lawrence’s education is built around asking meaningful questions, connecting ideas across disciplines, and pursuing an individual direction with guidance and support. The Center brings that approach to midlife: close conversation, thoughtful mentorship, creative practice, and learning shaped by the questions you want to pursue.

Find your starting point

The Center offers several ways to participate, from a single conversation to a sustained course of exploration.

• Designing Your Next Chapter Differently: An eight-week online seminar exploring how to understand a transition and shape a purposeful next chapter.
• Five Ways to Understand a Longer Life: A free public symposium bringing faculty and guest thinkers together to examine aging through the liberal arts.
• The Midlife Collection: Courses and creative workshops, offered online and in person, exploring identity, retirement, connection, lifelong learning, and the stories we tell about our lives.
• The Next Question Series: Facilitated conversations that open new perspectives on the questions people are asking in midlife and beyond.
• Individual Advising: Brief conversations to help you connect ideas, choose your next learning experience, or plan a small experiment in your everyday life.

Through connections with Sarah Lawrence’s Writing Institute, Signature Learning Community, Extension courses, and community partners, the Center opens further opportunities to learn, create, and build relationships.

Midlife takes many forms. Your questions will be shaped by your circumstances, responsibilities, and hopes. Here, you can explore them in a community that values both your experience and your capacity to keep discovering.

What question will you pursue next?

Explore our programs – launching 2027