How about a meandering midlife?
A change of energy can change everything
I’m just back from a short trip to Marrakech, meandering through the madness and mayhem of the frenetic goings on in the souks and narrow lanes of the medina. I don’t know whether its just the build up of constant low-level exhaustion, or a settling into a more mature confidence that knows that more doesn’t always mean better, or that fast just means furious, but meandering was my measure this trip.
I think back to how fast my 30’s and 40’s went… a blur of busyness and breathlessness, frantic and frenetic, always doing, always reaching, always pushing.
I want to meander through my 50’s a bit more. I want to slooooooooooow it all down. These last few months with my dad. These last few years with my kids at home.
Meandering is where I’m landing.
If I’d done this trip a few years ago (and even some months ago) I’d have leapt off that plane metaphorically waving my mental agenda, armed with an exhaustive (and exhausting) check-list, shopping list, and to-do list.
This time I arrived with no agenda. A few vague wishes, but nothing more than a chance to experience being here, and to rest. Yes, even in a place like Marrakech.
I’m feeling it more and more in my life - a settling. Not a settling of, or with, but a settling in - to myself. Deciding more what I want, rather than what I should.
I used the notion of meandering in my Monday Instagram prompt I do every week, where I suggest a way to think or a question to ask yourself to get you connecting to yourself more each week. I got lots of lovely messages on meandering, so here are a few meandering thoughts on how to change the pace of parts of your midlife for a while.
Meandering thought #1 - Get a cat.
Cat ladies aren’t crazy…they are calm. We are forced into a different pace. When one of mine sits on me, I stay still, don’t get up to do the endless to -do thoughts I have when I sit for a while. I am forced to sit for that while, look out the window. (It also really helps with snacking -I call it the Cat Diet…. you can’t keep getting snacks when you have a purring hot water bottle on your legs!)
Meandering thought #2 - Forget your phone
(or deliberately leave it behind) I am trying to do this more and more on purpose as the couple of times I’ve rushed out the house and forgotten it, once the initial panic attack subsides, I find the world actually does keep spinning, and all the ways I am distracted by my phone (teenage demands, calls, work emails, IG pings, news flashes) are removed for an unintended respite and NO-ONE DIES! I get home and pick up the messages and life carries on. In Marrakech I spent hours with my phone tucked away in my bag (instead of clutched in my hand as normal as if something extraordinary might happen while I ascend an escalator [it NEVER does]), and my mind was fully present on the sights and sounds around me. And yes, even my own thoughts.
Meandering thought #3 - Make a To-Do list on a Monday
And then spread it out over the week. You do too much. You do. I know you do because every woman does. We expect too much of ourselves. And others expect too much of us, and the only way it’ll change is if we change the ratio of output to input. Every time we add another thing to the To-Do list, we prop up the patriarchy a bit more. Stop. Meander through your list - there will always be more to do and the faster you do it all, the more you’ll have to do.
Meandering thought #4 - Add a Responsibility component to the chores list
As I wrote about here, women do the overwhelming (in every sense) amount of mental workload when it comes to home and family. In the latest report by the Fair Play Institute they found that women took on the mental load of 29 out of 30 chores. Never mind who executed the chores (still more women), they carried the mental responsibility too. So start sharing that out too so your brain has more meandering space.
Meandering thought #5 - Actively change your energy
You can get so swept up in the busyness of life, you forget to check in and review where, and who and how you are…. and importantly, as I see all the time in my coaching with women - how the pace of your life can change because the circumstances have and you can actively decide: am I still in the heightened ‘chase’ energy of my 20’s? can I be in a more ‘choosing’ energy? Am I coming out of stagnation and need a ‘creative’ energy? Or as in my case at the moment, I want a more meandering pace. That doesn’t mean I’m not ambitious and eager to make things happen; it means I’m really clear about them and I’m meandering in a more focussed way rather than screeching around my life like my arse is on fire, being pulled in every which way. I’m so startled that I’m getting good stuff done, because meandering more means my brain isn’t bursting with SOS’s.
Meandering thought #6 - Chose Sanity over Standards
I’ve written about this in detail here, but you have to match your standards to your capacity. And from that place of active choosing, prioritise your sanity. You cannot have the same standards of cleanliness / tidiness when you have 3 kids as you did when you lived alone. Meandering means choosing where to look. Don’t get distracted by the bullshit on social media, or a mother who perhaps didn’t work. I talk about it here in my recent interview on Sile Seoige’s Ready to be Real podcast.
Meandering thought #7 - Get sensual
Meandering means weirdly more focus on where you are, and less distraction in your head. So tuning in to your senses - what can you see, smell, hear, touch and taste - allows you to meander in a way that you are experiencing, rather that doing. That was easy in Marrakech - the souks are a sensory overload! But I try to do it on my (now dogless) walks in the forest, really listening and smelling and seeing the 28463258757 shades of green on one tree. Meandering means meaningful, not aimless.
Meandering thought #8 - Take a new pathway
Meandering with meaning means actively choosing. We spend so much of our life on autopilot…. running and reacting and reaching and refusing to rest. So meandering means taking your time to walk the path, observing what’s around you, who’s around you and maybe even trying a new pathway, just because. Taking a moment to really listen to a child, to catch an expression on a loved one’s face, get to the end of a thought, watch the sun catch light on tiles, reply in earnest to an email, not in haste. And to take the time to maybe do things a little different, or the same things differently In Marrakech I had my first ever Hammam. Man, that hammam was shocking. And fabulous. No modesty allowed, I was naked and being rubbed in aragan and olive oil before I knew it. This was no calming Swedish massage. This was a practical cleansing task as per the Turkish bath experience. It’s a group sport, the women gathering twice a week to share the only source of hot water and to wash away the dirt of life in water and words. Bowls of hot water were thrown over me (thrown is the only valid term…. I meant what I said in shocking). Then I was scrubbed. I mean my skin was scrubbed to within an inch of it’s life… and an inch of skin actually came off. I mean, layers of the stuff. More being sloshed with water, more scrubs, more sloshing, more oils and I walked out of there a new woman. Literally. Every inch of my skin had never seen the light of day before. My body was literally shed of its dead skin, and so much of meandering is shedding the dead thoughts and dead-pointless urgency we feel, when in fact the only emergency is forgetting to live properly.
So that’s my meandering manual. Do less, experience more. Think less, feel more. Rush less, seek more. Less rigidity and more curiosity.
Where can you meander more in a relationship?
Where can you meander more in your family life?
Where / how can you meander more in your sense of self and personal growth?
I absolutely love hearing from you, and I’d love to know how you might meandering a bit more, so please join me in the comments below (if you’re reading this in an email, please click on the link below to go through to the website to join the conversation.)
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