The Quandry of a New Discovery
Have you experienced that there is a strange moment that can happen as we age? Nothing is necessarily wrong. The children are grown. The career that demanded so much of us over the years may be slowing down, shifting, or coming to an end – or perhaps it’s just become rote or simply not interesting or challenging anymore.
The bottom line is that we may have more freedom than we have had in decades. And yet, something feels different. For so many years, life told us what was needed and what was expected of us. Raise the children. Build the career. Pay the bills. Take care of the house. Care for aging parents. Build the business. Support the family. Meet the deadline. Be responsible. Then one day, many of those demands are gone. And beneath the freedom can be a surprisingly unsettling question:
Who am I when I am no longer needed in the same way? Retirement isn’t necessarily the first thing you think about, but you notice others speak frequently about the financial implications of retirement. Have they saved enough? Where will they live? When should they stop working?
But perhaps the deeper questions for each of us are emotional.
What do I need now?
Who do I want around me?
What relationships still nourish me?
What have I tolerated because I was too busy to question it?
What brings me alive now - not twenty years ago?
And perhaps most importantly: Do I even know who I am without all the roles I have played so well?
There can be grief in this stage of life. Even when we love our freedom, we can miss being the center of our children’s worlds. Surprisingly, even though we mourned our children growing up and leaving, we now realize their visits are joyful but exhausting. (Whoever could have anticipated that?)
We can miss the status or identity our careers provided. We can miss the person we once were. Yet there can also be extraordinary possibility. Because for perhaps the first time in decades, life is no longer asking only what you can do for everyone else.
It is asking something far more intimate. What do you want to do with the life that is still yours?
Not the life you had. Not the person you were. This life. This person.
Now. Maybe aging isn’t asking us to become less. Maybe it is finally giving us permission to discover how much more of ourselves there is to become.
