Are your footprints fooling you?

Do you need to get your bearings and course correct?

Carrickfinn beach, Donegal

Shifting, deepening, washing away - our footprints leave a mark for a moment, or a morning, or a day but eventually our steps leaves no trace, except, if we’re lucky, in us. 

Our lives are in perpetual motion as we try to stay balanced - not too focussed on what’s behind you, you stay stuck the past, not so focused on what’s ahead you can’t see the current view, and not just concerned with where your foot is now, because you need perspective to balance on the tight rope of life. 

Sometimes you teeter, sometimes you glide, sometimes you hang on for dear life and sometimes you don’t feel the tight rope at all. 

When my mum had her stroke that in minutes rendered her from a lively, glamorous, loving woman to someone paralysed, brain damaged and needing 24 hour care, she lost her memory and cognitive function.  We hear so much today about living in the moment, but after caring for her for five years in that state, I can tell you the present is a very lonely place without the memories of the past and the hope for the future.  Now only makes sense when you know when you are.

As a quick aside, after her stroke my mum didn’t know my name; only that she loved me. Isn’t that amazing? That she didn’t know people’s names or who we necessarily where, but her face changed when someone she loved walked into the room. Names and memories had trickled away with the blood from her brain, yet her heart still pumped and the love remained. 

The past can break us and build us. Often both. But what I’ve learned from my own breaking down and building up, is that is always important. How we use it, how we move from it, how we integrate it into our lives; that’s where the power of the past lies.  

In my coaching of women in midlife, the three do a dance: 

the past - how it influences you, has shaped you, impacts you; 

the present - how can you make it more about you, not just the roles you might be playing as daughter, partner, parent, colleague, how to be less pulled by the external demands and expectations and driven more by internal needs and desires; 

and the future - building a life that nourishes and inspires you, writing the signposts on the landscape of this unique extended life, thriving not just surviving the mayhem of midlife.

Often with my clients, I have to pull back the lens so they can get that perspective, to see how far they have come, how far is still ahead, and how important today is and dance better in the balance.

I’m just back from Donegal, the sands of which have absorbed my footprints as I walked these beaches in every emotional state known to womankind. 

It was exactly 13 years since I climbed over a sandy slump of a hill, and saw this beach for the first time. I was pregnant with my third child although it wasn’t my third pregnancy. Far from it. I had thought the previous few years had been complicated;  having babies, losing babies, raising babies while stepping back from a career that had defined me. Life hadn’t gone quite the way I’d planned and this baby ripening in my belly was the end of that terrifying time, thank you very much. I was going to be back in charge. Yes, there would be three children under four, but I was going to colour code the fuck out of that challenge with the pressured perfectionism that had driven me forward for so many years. 

So coming over that hump (figuratively and literally), the beach had taken my breath away and I’d felt a sense of something akin to relief. Beholding beauty, the nurturing of nature, does that. I had breathed in the salty air and let the waves wash over my swollen feet and as I rubbed my bulging belly, my two little girls squealing in delight at the starfish they’d found beside me, I sighed out a breath of bold confidence that the hard times were over and life was back on track. 

Oh how life likes to laugh at us silly people who think it’s all in our hands. 

Six weeks later I would give birth to my last child, my mum at my side, still caring for her child as I learned how to care for mine.  Four days later she would read my other two girls a story and minutes after leaving their room, would have a catastrophic stroke. 

I was catapulted into a five year sandwich years struggle of caring for small children and my mum, during which time my marriage ended in spectacular fashion. My mum would die in my arms as I came to terms with single parenting. There were times I didn’t know how to keep going. 

But I would rebuild from the ruins. I would go back to college, learn to love and laugh again as if they were new skills, I would grow and groan and push myself and hold myself. I would start a new business and raise glorious girls and find a life I could never have imagined when I first came over that sandy slump of a hill 13 years ago.

And that beach marked every part. I have walked that beach so broken and grief-stricken, my cries flew into the wind with the screeching gulls. I have walked that beach so scared, yet scrambling for my next steps the waves waved me on. I have walked that beach so jubilant and joyous the sand danced between my dancing feet. I have walked that beach quiet and internal, loud and external and that sea air has carried me through it all.

This beach has helped me raise my kids.

This beach has helped me raise myself to new places.

This beach has helped me raise my eyes up from the pressure of perfection and take satisfaction in the wonderful imperfection of it all. 

It is 13 years since I first came over this sandy slump to see the sea and find my own glory in it. Next week that baby from my belly starts secondary school.  That eldest little girl squealing at delight to starfish turns 18 next month, her sister now also growing into a glorious young woman. 

I have left so many footprints in this sand, and every one matters to who I am now, and the footprints I want to keep leaving. 

The reason I now do what I do is because I know how hard it sometimes is to dance that balancing tightrope act, to use the power of pain, to turn the pull of the past to a push towards the future, to delight in the now, for all that my life is, the good, the bad and the ugly, and to look up at the sand ahead, being intentional which direction my footprints lead me.

Life is like the beach, constantly shifting and changing. It’s so important to check in and make sure if you need to course correct, to change direction, turn your back to the howling winds or turn your face up to the sun. 

Where are you now. Are your footprints fooling you into thinking you’re going where you actually want to go? Do your footprints need to shift direction ever so slightly? Course correct? Are they walking you into the sea or towards a sand dune instead of to the far horizon where the sun is shining? 

I’d love to know.

For my paid subscribers, there is a wonderful exercise below to help you figure out exactly where you are, and where you need your footprints to point.