I started weight training about 1.5 years ago. I started as I wanted to gain muscle and be stronger physically, which was not achievable by what I already enjoyed doing (e.g. swimming, yoga).

I had a strong start – training about 3 times per week, but predictably, like all my previous attempts to attend gyms, it soon cooled off (I blame menstruation for killing the momentum). Yet it didn’t die. My desire to become stronger always resurfaces, so I would restart training again. In total, I have attended about 35 sessions since I started.

I thought all I did was in vain as my weight hardly budged at all. That was until I bought a new body scale and discovered that my bone mass had improved from below average to above average. My body fat had also fallen by 4%, and I had gained muscle. Better still, my metabolic age had dropped by three years. I have to say, I hardly felt any different over that period, although the metrics seemed to tell another story.

It suddenly occurred to me that this was perhaps another example of compounding effects. By repeatedly making one small decision to train, I had achieved an effect beyond what I expected.

At my stage of life, perhaps this is one way, or even the only way, to make big changes in life. Why? Let me first define what I mean by a midlife crisis.

I define the midlife crisis as the unfulfilled state of living on by the force of inertia, after having made most of the big, largely irreversible decisions in one’s life – where to study, what subject to major, which career to choose, whom to marry, whether and when to have children, where to live, and when to buy a house.

I made most of the big bets of my life over the last 15 years, and they dramatically and permanently changed my life trajectory. It’s hard to imagine what my life would look like had I not decided to go to Barcelona to study public health, a very impulsive decision after reading Sanmao’s books. Or had I not decided to go back to the ivory tower for a PhD, again rather impulsively, quitting my job one day and starting to prepare the application documents the next. Or had I not messaged Xinxing after LinkedIn notified me about her new job, which led to a hiking meet-up at Box Hill, where I met Leyi, my future husband.

Now, the decisions I’m left with are mostly trivial and largely reversible. If I buy the wrong size or style of clothes, I can return them for free within 30 days. If I pick fruit that turns out to be less tasty than expected, I can simply buy something else next time. I can pause Spotify and switch tracks at any moment; I can pick up and put down books in a bookshop without committing to any of them. Even when I teach Daniel something wrong, I can overwrite the lesson within a few days.

But not all small decisions are equally small. Some disappear the moment they’re made. What I have for lunch today hardly matters tomorrow. Others accumulate. One weight-training session is trivial; thirty-five apparently aren’t.

Perhaps midlife crisis happens when we run out not only of major decisions, but of the sense that our decisions can still substantially change our future. When I was younger, life changed through a handful of big bets. Perhaps now it changes through making a few small decisions for hundreds of times.

Being stronger is just one of them. I have quite a few others. But before getting to them, let me book tomorrow’s training session first!