When you identify your orbits, you may become happier, rather than sadder, about the way you are living right now, Winston says. If you do decide to change, she suggests making just one change a year. (Don't change jobs and design a new home, for example.)

And she honors small changes as being good enough. If you want to lose weight, lose one pound a month. If you want to rise earlier, she says, get up 15 minutes earlier.

Ann and Daryl Hobson knew the excitement of change when they went on a mission for the LDS Church to the Cape Verde Islands in West Africa. They came home in 2004. They came home wanting to go again.

But these days Ann also needs to go to Boise regularly to help her siblings take care of their parents. She couldn't really spend two years in Africa, as she did the first time.

So when a chance came to spend three months in Portuguese-speaking Mozambique, the Hobsons took it. "We've felt for many years that we had time and abilities to offer and much to learn from other cultures and peoples," Ann writes in an e-mail.

The Hobsons are supervisors in the church's Care for Life program, in which volunteers and paid Mozambique staff help surviving members of poor families care for children orphaned by AIDS.

Ann says they miss their family, especially the hugs from grandkids, and they miss the cultural activities they enjoyed in Utah. But they love the rhythm of their days in Africa, love rising early to go to meetings that start with African singing and clapping. She finds it odd that they don't miss the material things — the pretty home, the comfortable car.

She writes that Mozambicans live quite humbly, and because homes don't have electricity, they spend from dawn to dark outdoors — cooking, washing, walking, planting or sewing on a treadle machine. "TVs, computers and stereos are a rarity, as are books," she writes. "Children play with the simplest of creations, in which tin cans, soda pop cans, wire and sticks play a big part."

Susan Crandell would agree with Barusch that there is no such thing as a midlife crisis. "Midlife opportunity" is what she called it when, at 52, she quit her job as editor-in-chief of "More" magazine to interview baby boomers for a book she titled "Thinking About Tomorrow" (Warner Wellness, $24.99).

People in their 50s are almost chronically overworked, she found. "It is a brave new idea that work should be fun," she writes. She interviewed a banker who quit his job to buy a small zoo, and a woman who spent her 50th birthday climbing Kilimanjaro.