Do you know what’s coming?

(And why you need your midlife superpowers if you don't)

Blondie playing at Malahide, Dublin, June 2023

You don’t know what’s coming.

You can plan until the cows come home. You can create all the checklists in the world and tick as many boxes as you can. You can colour-code, section with post-its and excel sheet your life, and still. Still there is so much to come you don’t know is coming. 

None of us ever knows what’s coming. And while that’s a good thing, some simple superpowers can help make it more manageable.

It’s a good thing certainly for the bad stuff that’s coming: the tragedies and the loss, the disappointments and the betrayal.  And even the mundane boredom and repetitive nature of midlife (the endless chores and admin of life). I look at my teen girls sprawling into life, fully focussed on events solely relating to their own existence, blissfully unaware of the amounts of cleaning, laundry and food production ahead of them. And life admin: I’ve just spent four hours sorting out this year’s car insurance. Four hours! And they still need documents that I don’t seem to be able to email.

Because if we did know those, that “bad” stuff, it would be hard to take any joy in life. 

But conversely we also also don’t know about the wonderful things that are coming.  The things we haven’t, or cannot, imagine.

Twenty years ago, I grew into my teens and young adulthood listening to the likes of Sting and Blondie.  They represented the time of my life when I still thought I knew how my life would go, because I had that youthful belief that, you know, I could control everything (cue all midlifers sniggering at the memory).  

As I smooched boys to Every Breath You Take and danced with my gal pals to Call Me, I had no idea what was coming down the road for me: the good, the bad, and the ugly tears. 

Yet in some lovely full circle (but please, not fully closed as I’ve many more dancing and singing to do, thank you) last week, I swayed, sang, screamed and danced at the youthful age of 53 as Blondie still rocked the stage at the vibrant age of 77, and Sting sang with arms made of pilates muscles I didn’t know existed at the saucy age of 71, his voice as fluent and beautiful as it was 30 years ago. I could never have imagined it. 

A few days before that, I was watching Blur on the same summer music festival stage. 

I fancied Damon Albarn and all of his quirkiness in my student days. I loved the music and loved him more. I could never have known that nearly 30 years later, I would be watching him on stage and singing to The Universal with my 17-year-old daughter, with her as mesmerised by his voice and his music as I was back then. In our day (yes midlifers, I mean our ‘youth’), our parents hated our music. It was a rite of passage in fact. The louder we played it, the more they hated it. 

Now, it is one of the greatest gifts I share with my daughters. She teaches me about her music loves (Lana del Rey) and I share mine with her.  I could never have known or imagined this child that held my hand in the air as we sang to the songs of my youth with the same connection to it. I could never have imagined any of my children, so real and solid I can barely remember what it felt like not to know them, and yet, for most of my life I didn’t. 

Yet, when I was a teenager, and in my career-building, travelling 20’s with all the plans in the world who I wanted to be, it wasn’t the mundane little moments that I dreamt of. It was a big, headliner stuff. 

Some of that came true, and some of it didn’t. 

Some of it came true in ways I could never have imagined. I’d always dreamed of being a writer, but I knew that job was for “other people”. I wrote all my life, journals for me, articles for media, and through my job in Communications, but it was only because of the challenges in my life, I became a published author. 

And all of the tragedies that did come my way, the challenges and the hardships, they taught me something, and they made me where I am. Often when I’m coaching with women in midlife , we go through the checklist of their disappointments. We run through the challenges that they’ve had to overcome. And they realise that much of what they have in their life right now is a result of what has happened, the stuff they never knew was coming.

Which is why I talk about the three superpowers of midlife: curiosity, intention and an attitude of gratitude.  We can’t control everything, but we can be really intentional about how we deal with the planned and the unplanned.

Constant Curiosity - about you: your beliefs, your behaviours, your needs, your passions, your priorities. About what makes you tick, what triggers you, constantly checking in with who you are now, at this age, and stage of life. 

Living with Intention - around making your life work for you, thriving instead of just surviving, and being driven by your internal energy and needs, not constantly pulled by external demands. Knowing that you don’t know what’s coming, but that you do know how to live with what’s happening now.

An attitude of gratitude for all that you are, all that you have, all that you've achieved, all that you've come through, and for the fact that we have this unprecedented midlife and you’re still standing. 

So here I stand at 53, entering a new phase of life as all my children either enter or prepare to leave secondary school. The next five years will be at a very different pace than the last five, and the five after that completely different again.

And while I have plans and ambitions, I know I don’t know what is coming down the line. I am the author of the chapters of my life. You are the author of yours. But sometimes, sometimes other characters come in that you do not write. Events emerge that you have to write into or around. There will be things not of your making, but staying curious, being intentional and feeling grateful for it all, will make your story richer for all of that.  

If you’d like to explore these themes further, my latest book, Midlife, redefined: Better, Bolder, Brighter is a self-guided process so you end up with your own bespoke midlife manual. If you’d like to see how coaching might help, you can sign up for a one hour Discovery Coaching Session. (Paid subscribers get a 10% discount on this and the book so just email me at alana@alanakirk.com and I’ll send you the discounted link).