Fifty is the new fifteen, or how I am aging backwards by being more myself
Two days ago, I turned fifty. It seems absolutely impossible, but it’s true.
It’s completely liberating.
I’ve loved my life up until now— I’ve experienced and enjoyed so much. When I was 21, I was living in Kenya. When was 25, I met the man I’d marry. When I was 30 we bought a house. When I was 40 we paid off that house and I quit my teaching job that had served and inspired me for 16 years. At 41 I hiked the whole Appalachian Trail. At 45 I became a certified life coach. At 47 I joined my first dance troupe. In between all those milestones there have been so many little wonders. Tons of travel, exploring, camping, learning, reading, being, dancing, playing. Of course there’s also been grief, sadness, worry and anxiety, but there’s been far more joy.
The older I get the more I’m interested in simplicity— in less doing, more being. I'm learning to be fully present in any situation, rather than constantly surveying the horizon for the next opportunity or experience. I'm looking internally to decide what's important.
I'm writing this from the beach in Destin, Florida, here for our annual Thanksgiving trip. My friend Amy stayed with me last weekend - we have known each other for 28 years, more than half our lives. We reminisced and remembered younger, sillier and sometimes wilder days, and also allowed ourselves to feel young and silly and wild.
I baked homemade rainbow-colored cupcakes and Amy impulse-bought me a giant fuzzy caterpillar at the grocery store.
It was the perfect gift at the perfect time. Amy says I still look like I'm 12 and she can't understand how that's possible. A friend wrote on a photo I posted yesterday, wearing my new rainbow flowered swimsuit ideal for a teen, (see pic below) that I looked "15 and 90 - radiant and wise." What a compliment.
There might be many reasons for this. One, I've been very lucky to live a relatively easy life. I haven't been aged much by trauma and outside circumstances. And then there's something I can't quite describe or understand, but I feel young inside. I always have and maybe I always will. I'm not much for pretense or putting on airs. I'm pretty much a truth-teller. I used to worry that I needed to be more "grown up" to be seen as "legit" by colleagues and clients, but I'm no longer so sure.
Being myself seems most real and most genuine. And now that I'm 50, I'm excited to step into the power of being completely me, even more. I can't wait to see what that looks like.
What I learned From The Eclipse and A month off Social Media
I took the month of August off from social media. I tried for a break from all media, realizing how much I immerse myself in the printed word as a form of distraction, soothing, entertainment, ease of boredom, placeholder activity, mind quieting method, etc. In The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron recommends a week without reading because she notes that reading is a form of consumption that can get in the way of creation. She is sure correct.
What I found is that even if I take away the reading, I will find some other way to avoid what I don't want to do. It was truly fascinating to watch myself seeking, seeking seeking something for relief and distraction so I didn't have to focus on a big project. Taking away one's prime distraction only does so much. You also have to nurture the other side - the process of finding joy in doing the work. I'm still learning this.
My media-free month was not completely media-free. Around week three I fell into a tumbling vortex of Vanderpump Rules, the absolute and most ridiculous opposite of being media free. It's a long story. There were other transgressions too, but that one is the funniest to me. If you don't know the show, look it up and you will see what I mean. It's the danger of having downloaded Hulu to my computer a few months ago so I could watch The Handmaid's Tale. It was like candy sitting in front of me and I'm sorry to say I ate it. A lot of it. I guess I can call it "life coach research" - ha!
During that media-free month, I was also super-lucky enough to travel unexpectedly with dear friends to Tennessee to see the "total eclipse of the sun". And yes, we sang "You're so Vain" and "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and any other songs with sun or moon in them the whole way there.
By now you've read plenty about the eclipse, and how incredible it was. I told myself I wouldn't take a photo, that I would simply be present, but again, I couldn't help myself, so this is what my iPhone saw. It was quiet. It was awe-inspiring. The whole day and the days leading up to it felt like a remembrance of childhood when everything was new and carefree and each new season felt like a reason to celebrate. It felt like childhood summer. Cooking out, fresh cut grass, and happy people simply being.
The eclipse itself also had a quality of being something experienced before. A sense of time stopping and of deep yearning. It was special and other-worldly. I'm glad I shared the moment with my husband and with good friends.
Afterwards, I was the same person. The land around us, atop a wild mountain in the Appalachians with a very magical overgrown golf course, was the same. The animals went back to their regular lives. The sun looked exactly the same as it always does. The message I received from the whole experience was this:
"You do not need to wait for a celestial event. You do not need to wait for a message from the stars or planets. You do not need to wait for any sign, signal or permission. Everything around you is simply here to support you in connecting with your life and with the present moment. No special equipment, incantation, outside blessing, or initiation is needed. No certification, no training, no reading, no preparation. Simply be present and live."
The eclipse in all its glory had come and gone and here we were.
In that moment, I made a promise to keep doing the best I can to stop waiting for any special moment coming in the future, and to keep waking up, every moment possible, to the wonder of being alive, whether the feeling in the moment is happy or sad, frightening or amazing - to be alive and feel it.
Maybe you need some juice?
When I was a young girl, my mother told me a story from her childhood about becoming quite ill with dehydration one summer. Her caregivers gave her a tiny cup of juice every 30 minutes, and she described how torturous it felt. She was dangerously dehydrated, but the last thing she wanted was to drink. I remember being completely flummoxed by this story.
Why would this happen? Why didn’t she want to drink the juice? How could something so simple and curative feel so hard?
Last week I had a revelation about this dehydration and juice thing, in the middle of a session with a client, where this story of the cups of juice became a perfect metaphor for a universal struggle.
We resist our cure, not to be difficult, but because when we’re suffering, the antidote is often the most unappealing thing we can imagine.
photo credit Mark Adams
Cups of juice. We just need to get them and drink them. We don’t need to believe that we’ll feel better in the moment, or expect that we’ll actually want the juice even though every cell in our body is parched.
Maybe we could even have some juice on hand— at the ready—so we don’t have to work so hard when our circumstances get rough or our thoughts grow dark.
When we are struggling in small or big ways, we expect to be overjoyed to find a solution - like a drowning person would be about receiving a life ring. How freeing to realize that’s not necessarily the case. We have to hold our noses and drink the juice, not feeling saved at all, trusting that our relief may come later.
What area of your life is feeling like dehydration? It might be tricky - you won’t always feel the symptoms of dehydration coming on, so you need to get still and listen.
Are you missing time for you while you take care of everyone else? Are you putting off something important that feels too hard or too scary? Is your mind producing thoughts that are mean and judgmental? Are you avoiding exercise or bingeing on crappy food? Are you ignoring your clutter piles? Are you hesitating to address important issues in your relationship?
What cup of juice might help, even though it initially feels better to be distracted by your phone, extra activities, bingeing on Netflix or avoidance napping?
Is it a walk outside? Making the phone call? Sitting down to write? Going shopping for some fruits and veggies? Throwing out the junk mail? Doing the bookkeeping? Meeting someone for that hard conversation?
Maybe it’s time to let yourself have some juice.
Lessons from a spider
This is the actual spider spinning her web by moonlight.
Earlier this month while I was in Florida I watched a spider spin her web by moonlight. She is the type of spider who makes a fresh web each night and takes it down in the morning, and she was nearly done with her handiwork. I didn't see what happened, but a few minutes later the web was broken and completely down. It might have been a breeze that knocked it or one of the dogs catching the guy wire. I felt terrible once I noticed. She would have to start completely over!
The spider probably wasn't sighing. She wasn't worried. She simply began the task of rebuilding. And in an hour or so she was done. With plenty of time to catch her dinner.
Unlike the spider, I can be very whiny about building things. I get frustrated with formatting on my computer. I get annoyed resizing photos and taking all the little steps to move things around on a screen. I especially dislike having to re-do things that I've already done once before.
But rebuilding is part of what we do. And creating fresh. We can be like the spider and just do it, rather than whining about how hard it is or how it doesn't look right. The spider doesn't care if all her threads are completely evenly spaced, as long as they do the job. They are close enough.
How freeing to focus on the building and the creation. How lovely to approach my work this way - don't you agree?
Have you fed your snail lately?
My life is full of distractions- I'm wondering if you feel the same. My phone is never far from me and I’m semi-dangerously addicted to looking at everything from friends’ updates to kitty cat memes to fascinating lengthy articles in The Atlantic, all served up so easily and endlessly refreshed with new content every second.
Sometimes my body and mind, exhausted and overwhelmed, cry for a break.
So I go to the woods for a couple of nights. I unplug, sleep under the stars, and sit and watch the trees and sky.
As I sink back into my body, shoes off, toes digging into the sand at the creek’s edge, ears tuned in to the burbling of the water and the wind in the pines, time shifts and expands.
My eyes relax and I start to notice tiny details around me that I initially missed.
I indulged in one of my escapes to the woods this past weekend. On the first morning, after a starry night of firefly watching and owl listening, I took an early morning walk while the air was still cool and the sun was just beginning to warm the treetops. I sat down on a bluff overlooking the creek and listened to the water. As I focused on the fallen oak and holly leaves around me, I noticed a snailcrawling along in its slow but merry snail way.
How wonderful to have the time to watch a snail, I thought.
There was absolutely nothing else I needed to be doing in that moment. I watched the snailexploring the leaves around it, testing each new millimeter with its adorable snail antennae (or are they eye stalks? I am a science-y person but don’t want to stop this writing to look up mollusk anatomy. It is not important for now.)
I looked to my left and a bright green slightly-chewed fruit, smaller than a marble, caught my eye. What was this? I had no idea. Some type of tiny gooseberry? An unripe baby muscadine? I didn’t know but it looked like it might be a delicious treat for a snail. So I picked it up and dropped it just in front of the snail and waited patiently to see what would happen.
Hooray, the snail noticed it! And then began eating it! In my mind it wasn’t only eating, it was savoring, relishing.
How observing something so simple could feel so deeply exquisite continues to mystify me.
I wonder if you’ll feel the same way. I captured part of the moment on video. Turn up your sound and you can actually hear the snail chewing - or more scientifically scraping its radula - its sandpapery “teeth” - along the fruit. You’ll hear the distant birds and the creek too. Click the image below to watch.
When is the last time you “fed your snail?”
Are you giving yourself permission for tiny moments of wonder in nature? Do you long for something intangible that you might receive from an outdoor adventure that requires no special equipment or skills, only the willingness to sit and pay attention?
If you crave some “snail feeding” time - time to slow down to the pace of a languidly feasting invertebrate, I hope you will give it to yourself.
If you’d like a guide to point out the tiny magnificences and exclaim along with you, or someone to whisk you away to a magical overnight under the stars, I’m at your service. I have everything you need. All you have to do is make the time and show up. Spring is perfect for this.
Want to play? Contact me if you’d like to be part of some beta testing I’ll be doing in the upcoming weeks of woodland forest escapes, both day trips and overnights.
Nature-y coachy goodness. Lots of stillness. Deep immersion. Maybe it's time to feed your snail.
