51 and counting!

Yesterday was my birthday - you may have gathered by now, I get insanely excited about my birthdays and don't worry too much about the actual 'getting older' part. I had a lovely day, although it was a little poignant because it's the first time my younger daughter hasn't been able to spend the day with me. She rang in tears at one point, so my other daughter and I did silly voices and made her laugh till she felt better.

That sort of brings me to the point of this post; I told her that we can't be everywhere in life. We have to make choices, and of necessity, eventually we will have to choose between two places we want to be at once. It's unavoidable. She loves her job and where she lives near Paris, and she needed to be there. End of, as far as I was concerned. I shall see her soon I'm sure. Our love for each other is far too strong to be weakened by the matter of a few hundred miles' distance in any case.

I always ponder even more deeply than usual as I come to a birthday. Perhaps it's because my birth wasn't easy and I was brought up with the story (true or not) of how I never nearly made it at all, and so I treasure life as the most precious possession I have. I actually do love being alive. That's not to say there aren't days where it's all difficult and grey; that's how we get the depth to our experience. Shadows throw life into sharp relief. I was born with a pessimistic, phobic nature (which still rears its head) but it occurred to me somewhere along the line that I had a choice to be positive, and so I've faked it until I've [almost] made it. Whatever situation I'm in and whatever fears I have, I choose to look at the positives, to reframe until I have some kind of peace around it all. As a younger woman I believed in the Christian God and one of the perks (as an Evangelical) was that the Creator of the Universe was somehow on my side. I guess I still feel that deep down.

I make New Year resolutions on my birthday. This year as I looked back over '50' I realised just how much of a transition year it's been. I changed job, we sold the family home, I've travelled, I've planned, and I've moved on out of my forties with - if not panache - a certainty that I'm getting back on track.

Back on track? Well - I realised a while ago that I had stopped allowing myself to dream. I was always someone with vision for my future, until one day I realised I wasn't any more. It came as a shock. So... I pushed myself to go for what I could remember of what I wanted. And being a slave to a high salary in a job which was wearing me down wasn't it. Eventually, after gathering my courage for a few years, I left.

So far, so good. I then realised that even without my former Christian beliefs, I do really know in my heart that All Shall Be Well, and I've allowed myself to return to my former belief in provision. I'm just no longer quite sure what to label the Provider.

Living my life is like being in a small boat on a fairly choppy sea. The way to avoid seasickness is to move with the boat. I've decided I can either brace myself against each wave and end up rather the worse for wear, or just enjoy the feeling of being carried along, whooping excitedly when the boat goes up and relaxing as it bumps back down again.

My 52nd year is going to be my 'Why Not?' year. I've done the hard part, made the transition, and now I need to enjoy the fruits of that. It's going to be the year when I tackle things - my house, my weight, my fitness, my career... funnily enough, I hesitate to write 'my love life'. I find that whenever I do a life-laundry, love comes low on the list. I don't know whether that is because it's genuinely a low priority or whether I'm afraid of failure - or even, as a counsellor once suggested, afraid of success. I'm not going to focus desperately on Finding Someone because I have plenty to keep me busy just finding myself! And if he's out there, he will be someone with the guts to take on life (and therefore me) - so win-win!

I've come so very far in a few short years. I know my fifties are going to be another exciting chapter in my life. Bring it on! :)

The meaning of life...

You may realise from my previous writings that I am running at Midlife head-on to find some answers. Technically I may be past midlife, I don't know, but then I've known people who have died in their teens so I don't let those labels worry me any more.

This morning I was watching a spider swaying outside my window, web invisible, and it struck me as a powerful metaphor for my past couple of years. As my belief in Synchronicity has grown, so has my need to Stop and Be. A spider does what it can to create the circumstances for provision, and then just sits and waits. I could unpack this more, but I suspect it may apply differently to everyone so I'm leaving it there.

And then I read a little of Shirley Maclaine's book 'Sage-ing with Age-ing'. I love this sentence from near the beginning: "I realize that ageing well isn't about the search for happiness, but more about quietly feeling content with what I've experienced." This is so true for me that I felt like applauding. I've just had a week away with my elder daughter, and one of the recurring themes of our conversations was about how I feel the need to differentiate between things I could revisit (eg Education) and things I'd love to do again but which aren't 'Life stage appropriate' - meaning, I'm no longer a teenager! I still yearn to do lots of things in life, but I recognise that some of them would be simply about pretending I'm not an older person. (Some are still eminently doable, however, and I intend to do them until I'm 90+ such
as the terrifying speedboat ride we went on!)

So Maclaine's words chimed with me. I seek the contentment of which St Paul spoke, I suppose. And increasingly I feel it. This doesn't mean, though, that I don't still crave adventure, because I do, and I intend to have it!

This morning my daughter and I were talking about life purpose. I increasingly suspect that we have got this all wrong. When I was a practising Christian there was a lot of talk around about 'our Extravagant God'. Well I do still believe in that God. (Not perhaps in the Church's version.) And I am therefore led to the logical (to me) conclusion that my life might just as well be about the minutiae as the Grand Scheme. Perhaps my life's purpose was fulfilled the day I spent with an elderly woman grieving her husband's death? Perhaps everything else has been incidental? Or has my life been about the biscuits I baked for the School Summer Fair... or the heart-shaped pancakes I made for a Valentine's Disco... or the woman I smiled at on the bus, or the child whose eye I caught as she was being told off... I'm sure you get my point.

We assume that our whole life has to have meaning, but if it's true that there is an inherent extravagance to Creation, then perhaps this 'making peace' with one's life, the Being Content, is about recognising that Being is more than enough. Everything else is a bonus. What do you think?