By Roderick Benns

A new study says that 50 is the perfect age to publish a novel if you want the book to become a best-seller. According to research done by the website Lulu, more authors have success at that age than any other. The researchers came to their conclusion by looking at the average age of the 350 writers who made it to the top of the hardcover fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List from the years 1955 to 2004. The number they came up with is 50.5 years.

"Unlike scientists or musicians, writers tend to mature with age," said Bob Young, the site's CEO.

Young says that the research was prompted by the suspicion that the optimum age for writers is much higher than many people assume.

This news article was fascinating from the perspective of the Chiron cycle. The Chiron Return occurs about every 50 years, a reliable measurement despite its elliptical orbit throughout the years before the Return. After the powerful, undeniable time of the Uranus opposition at about age 42 and then the accumulated semisquare arc a couple of years later, life has changed dramatically. Marriages may fail or new ones begin. Early retirements occur or a career shift is made. Children leave the home to begin on their own. In other words, any manner of significant life change may occur.

At age 50 we are ready for a different kind of change… a different pace of change and a different kind of creativity. At this age, change isn’t so much a life imperative as it is an inner voice that has a deep longing to be heard.

Rollo May’s The Courage to Create remains the seminal work on the nature of creativity, a beautiful book I reference in Chiron: Facilitator of Destinies. In The Courage to Create, May writes of imagination as the fountainhead of human experience and discusses the creative impulses that require liberation. (Chiron leaving behind Saturn, symbolically, as it reaches for Uranus.)

When May looks for the source of creative courage he revisits the myth of Chiron for illumination. He then examines the centaur’s role in freeing Prometheus from his bondage. "…This tells us," writes May, "that the riddle…is connected with the problem of death."

It is our very struggle to resist death that defines our creative struggle. Our creative seed sprouts on the vine of a desperately sought immortality.

In fact, this theme is central to the world’s oldest recorded myth, The Epic of Gilgamesh, dating back to the time of King Gilgamesh of Uruk (c. 2,700 BC). Horrified by his best friend’s death and the prospect of his own demise, Gilgamesh undertakes a quest for immortality which brings him to the abode of Utnapishtim, a virtuous man who obeys the gods and was saved by them from the Great Flood. Utnapishtim puts Gilgamesh to various tests which he fails and eventually sends him away, assuring him that he cannot escape death. A humbled Gilgamesh returns to Uruk and orders his story to be inscribed in stone.

As age 50 comes along, what story will we inscribe on our own personal stone? What narrative are we ready to share, what legacy are we ready to give form? At this age, this kind of creativity is birthed meaningfully from old wounds that no longer serve a purpose in our life, other than to hold us back. Some of us find a deeper spiritual expression, like poet Leonard Cohen did, releasing a book of 50 poems that read more like psalms. Some of us reconcile with estranged family members or simply begin to journal our thoughts to make sense of our life story.

Overall, the Chiron Return is an impressive time frame of self-expression, to bring closure to chapters of our lives that no longer need to be read, save in a reflective mode that serves to instruct the future. "The problem of death," as May writes, is partially not enough concern and focus on life…to experience the liberation of self (Uranus).

We do not need to be best-selling writers to share our narrative but we do need to be plugged into life, actively engaged and willing to be authentic along this deeply personal journey.