Are you coming or going?

And why you're never standing still.

Gazing through the railings into Christ Church Cathedral this week

We’re told constantly to live in the moment, but often we can feel very stuck in the moment and that’s not a great place to be. 

Last night I walked past the park that skirts a green frill around Dublin’s Christchurch Cathedral.  I was on my way to a Women in Business network and my mind was on work. (As a writer and coach, it’s not lost on me that most of my writing is To-Do lists.)

But as I glanced through the railings of the park, I spotted a young woman lying on a blanket reading her book in the diminishing afternoon sun. 

I smiled at the sight of her lost in the words she was reading. She could have been me.

It was that patch of green where I would sit on a spring day in my late 20’s. I’d left my post-uni London days to search adventure overseas, volunteering as a communications officer for a charity in Borneo and then backpacked round SE Asia. With sand still in my shoes, I was settling in Dublin to start my career proper. 

Growing up, when someone asked me what I want to be, I would say Kate Adie, the BBC war correspondent.  It wasn’t the fame or the khaki shorts, but the adventure and the telling of people’s stories I aspired to. I didn’t get a job at BBC, but I did get a job with UNICEF Ireland and in a career that defined who I was back then, I got to travel to amazing places like Iraq and Sierra Leone and tell people’s stories. My life was a constant state of heightened adventure. 

I lived in a nearby apartment without a balcony or garden. So I’d escape to these gardens to read in the sun, and take my adventurous foot off the pedal for a while with satisfaction. I was now in my Kate Adie inspired career proper, and my whole life lay ahead like a long meandering river. I thought I knew at all. I thought I was in charge of it all. 

Last night, as I smiled at my pseudo-self in the park, I realised I was now 25 years older, and what I know now, that I didn’t know then when I thought I knew it all, is how much I don’t know, and how little I can control. That knowledge would have terrified my former self, but now I find it strangely comforting. Liberating. Motivating. 

As a midlife coach, many women come to me because they feel stuck. Or a bit lost. Or facing a crossroads and are paralysed with indecision. Or don’t know if they’re coming or going. And what I often have to show them, is that they are not in fact stuck. Or stagnating, or paralysed.

They, and me, and you, are always evolving, moving, growing, changing. The issue is whether we’re doing it with intention or not. 

Back then, I thought my life was all about reaching where I was in that moment. I had dreams and ambitions but they didn’t form a “future”, only a checklist that would mark my standards of success. I was playing the field and working hard in a fantastic career. I had it all. I was winning at this thing called life. I thought 40 was old.

Over the years I would become Deputy Director of UNICEF Ireland, a Director of a children’s charity. I would become a wife. I would become a mother. I would become a house-owner. I would become 40 (and not feel old).

And I would lose. I would lose babies. I would lose my mum in a long, draining death. I would lose my marriage. I would step away from a career that had defined me, and lose all sense of who I was. I would become so many other things so quickly, I never knew where to hang the multiple hats I wore. I grew apart from myself as other versions of me nudged and elbowed me out of the way. And for a while, I felt stuck, neither coming or going, but stranded in midlife where none of my cares were free. Or so I thought. Life got messy and hard, and when that happens, it feels like you can’t grow out of the groove.

As I walked past the park last night, I looked at the trajectory of my life, including so much that I had planned as that know-it-all-in-charge-of-it-all girl, but so so so much more of it that I’d no idea was coming. As I walked past the woman who was me from another time, I saw myself as someone who had faced things she’d never imagined, but also now as a qualified coach, business owner, published author, mum to fantastic girls, someone who is regularly on TV (so maybe my Kate Adie aspirations came true after all). 

I looked at former me, flicking an ant off her arm on the sunny Spring grass. 

I could not have imagined the loss. I could not have imagined the grief. I could not have imagined the upset. The turbulence. I could also not have imagined the love of my three children, the challenges, the struggles, the glory, the sense of achievement, the surprises, the growth, the learning. I could not have imagined the adventures I would go on in my 30’s and 40’s and now in my 50’s. Not just the backpacking ones, but the adventures of learning, exploring myself, pushing myself out of the 20’s know-it-all comfort zone to the realising-I-know nothing-and-letting-go-and-adapting zone that has made me the woman I am. Even when it was so hard I couldn’t breathe I was in motion. Becoming. Always becoming.

I stopped and stared at the young woman lying in the park, her whole life still ahead, and smiled as I knew I have a huge life ahead of me still. When my mum was 53, she had a sense of loss. She lived in a time when so much felt over at that age.  At 53, I’m beginning a whole new chapter of my life. I know at 55, at 58, at 60 new chapters will be being written. At 65. At 70 who knows where I’ll be sitting on the grass reading a book in the sun (I hope it’s Bali, and I’m in khaki shorts). What I tell my clients is that every day we write a new page, and those pages always accumulate into chapters.

We are constantly changing and evolving, even when we aren’t aware of it.

A big part of my work is encouraging women to be aware of it.

Every decision you make.  Every decision you don’t make. Every interpretation of yourself, every belief you form about your capability, potential, value is part of your evolution. Every new experience, every repeated experience is moving you on in some way.  You are always coming and going, evolving and revolving.   The key is to know it and move it in a direction of your choosing, regardless of what happens out of your control.

As I walked past that park, I see my young self reading in the carefree sun and she looks up. She sees a woman twice her age smiling at her, and she smiles back. I nod at her and walk on. She cannot imagine who I am, but I hope that in some seismic sliding doors moment of time simulations, I hope it’s younger me glancing up and we smile at each other in recognition because we are the same, and we have so much to give each other.