The challenge of change
Do you want to age gracefully or powerfully?
Today I dropped my youngest daughter to secondary school for the first time. I can’t believe it’s been five years since I first dropped her eldest sister there, who in a couple of days will be walking into her last year of school. Ever. What am I saying? I still remember the first day I took her to primary school!
Time flies, and not only when you’re having fun. Our lives are constantly evolving, and yet we often feel surprised as if we’ve been so swamped by the overloading laundry basket we’ve forgotten to look up and see a decade has gone by.
Change.
It is constant. It is a constant.
In fact it is often the only constant, because, you know, change.
For women especially at midlife, change can come at us faster than I run to the wine fridge on an end-of-week Friday evening. Some of that change we try to engineer ourselves with new jobs, end of relationships and a FitBit on our wrist. Some of it flies at us while we try to swat it away like flies on a Donegal beach at sundown.
But we’ve always been changing, growing, evolving. It just somehow seems more urgent when we hit midlife.
Our bodies are changing, often without planning permission.
Our looks are changing, often against the advice of the anti-ageing propaganda.
Our very physiology is changing, often to the horror of our hormonal outbursts.
Our relationships change. The people who made us laugh once, now make us cringe. The friends who kept our deepest secrets can now keep their distance. The people who have become like wallpaper they’ve been around so long, can suddenly be refreshed when we look at them with wiser eyes. Every interaction changes your relationships in some way - to deepen it, explore it, damage it, grow it, shrink it.
Our families change. Last weekend I celebrated my dad’s 87th birthday with him. How he has changed. One change he made changed the course of his, and my, life. In his 40’s he went from being a 60 a day smoker to a marathon runner. He changed his mind, his behaviour, his health, his potential, his life with that one decision. He started his 87th birthday by going for a run. (So yes, I am going to haul my ass to the gym later because I want what he’s having). But my mum is gone. The family that I grew up with has been dismantled and we reformed in her absence, forever changed by her. The black and white beliefs I had about my family as a teenager have all coloured and changed as I grew into an adult.
My friendships have changed.
My goals have changed.
My ambitions have changed.
My priorities, my passions, my purpose. They’ve all changed.
And this is all good. Unless of course, you aren’t constantly and creatively checking in on those changes. If you haven’t updated the software to make sure you’re running on optimum data. If your reasoning hasn’t caught up with reality.
What does it mean for me for example that for the first time in 15 years, I no longer have a walk to primary school in the morning? That I have an extra ten hours a week where my kids aren’t home because of later school days? What does it mean for my children in their growing independence (and my growing responsibility to empower them more)? As a coach to women in midlife, these are questions I ask myself because it’s what I’m constantly asking my clients.
Where are you now?
How are you now?
Who are you now at this age, and at this stage of your life (whatever that is, be it your 30’s, 40’s, 50’s or 60’s)?
What change is happening and what does that mean? It’s easy to think of change as the big headliners… the good, the bad and the ugly events in our lives. Love. Death. Loss. Learning. Achievement.
But change is constant. And there is so much potential in it, if you stay aware enough to explore it. Yes, even the really shit stuff that we don’t want and never asked for. You may need to grieve. You may need to reassess. You may need to blub in the corner for a while and then get your big girl pants on and step into whatever new world your life has handed you.
But you are the constant along with change.
You get to choose, even when you didn’t choose everything that has happened.
As I say in the beginning of my latest book Midlife, redefined: Better, Bolder, Brighter - we spend the early part of our lives deciding what we want our lives to look like. Pinterest Board optional, we create the checklist from which the success of our lives will seamlessly hang, no ironing required. We then go into active pursuit of the ticks, checking each box as if that is when you’ll finally be happy and “arrive”, Welcome Cocktail in hand. But often we create that checklist from a prescribed off-the-rack definition of success - not based on who we truly are, or what we truly want. So we get to mid-life, the boxes checked or not, and wonder why the Welcome Cocktail hasn’t arrived. You did everything right, yet now just feel totally overwhelmed. Or underwhelmed. Maybe that checklist didn’t fully reflect who you were. Or now that you’ve lived, loved, lost and learned, you realise it needs revising.
Now is the time to ask a much better question: Not what do I want my life to look like. But what do I want my life to feel like?
Now you get to role up your sleeves properly and with a gleaming colour marker in your hand, start writing, not a checklist, but a map. A pathway.
We are living in a uniquely extended midlife. For the first time in history, women get to have several extra decades where they haven’t yet been fecked into the corner to knit, desexualised and devalued once their prime function of breeder is done. Now women get to live vibrant, valiant lives in their own right, not just in who they are in relation to others. Now there’s a change. A wonderful gift of a change.
In my recent guest appearance on the podcast Your Truth Shared, I explain the importance of ageing powerfully, taking charge of this virgin extended landscape and writing the new signposts. I talk about the importance of saying “What’s next” and why we have to dismantle the conditioning that came from a social narrative that told us to be one way, regardless of which way we were. I loved this discussion around the difference between ageing gracefully (as we were told to do) and ageing powerfully (as we are able to do now we can redefine every aspect of midlife). You can listen here.
Because yes, change is happening all around you, and even to you. But also very much within you.
Our minds are changing.
Our values are changing.
Our beliefs and interpretations and fucks are changing. The things we gave fucks about before we experienced grief or joy, are not the things we now give fucks about.
As I run now to collect my daughter from her first secondary school experience, her life so bursting with change neither of us can barely keep up, I smile at the photo medley on the kitchen wall that shows my three daughters heading to their first days of primary school, then secondary school, and I’ll add another one to that collage. That was such an adventurous and challenging time of my life. And I nod my respect to it. Mourn it even, of course.
I am in this stage now.
And this stage is constantly shifting. I have to remember to keep the spotlight on me, not the stage. Stay connected to me, not the checklist. Checked in with me, aware of the changes and therefore the choices that I have as I live and age and grow and evolve powerfully.
I’d love to know what you think about the podcast and any other burning midlife questions you might have.
Your Shared Truth podcast episode Ageing Powerfully - https://www.finolahoward.com/podcasts/your-truth-shared/episodes/2148072504
Midlife, redefined: Better, Bolder, Brighter - www.themidlifecoach.org/midliferedefined
https://www.themidlifecoach.org/
If you are interested in a Discovery Coaching Call, just get in touch or book here - https://www.themidlifecoach.org/coaching