Life and Midlife

Last week, a wonderful woman in my life, Susanna Liller, sent me a You Tube link of Suzanne Braun Levine, the first editor of Ms. Magazine speaking about our “Fertile Void and Second Adulthood” from a TED talk. She told me this was speaking precisely to me which prompted her to head it my way.

It was.

Susanna would get that; Susanna “gets” everything. She is someone who tunes in very deeply to others and can sometimes see fragments of them, they’ve not quite discovered yet. She was one of my inspiring hosts on my retreat to France in May.

This week, I come across this little pendant for sale on Patti Digh’s blog page. It is saying the same thing.

Will I need to hear the message every week to get it? And more importantly to act on it?

Midlife for me is my belly filled with jelly, squishing around, foreign, uncomfortable, unstable, wishy-washy. But I know it’s all good. I know I need to stretch my limbs and my mind and create some new neuro-pathways to shake off old ways of being to embrace the new ways that, like the alien, are trying to burst out.

I’m changing. If I stay stagnant, the jelly will remain forever; it will weigh me down and cause me to age and grow old. It will bend my back and cause me to lose the spring in my step.

I am standing at the cross roads. Which path will I (or you) choose?

Photo: Patti Digh's pendant from her site www.37days.com