Aging with Awesomeness!
I’m celebrating my birthday in a week, and I am excited to turn 40. Excitement doesn’t just come from nowhere, so I’ve been intentionally slowing my body down to dig into my heart & head to see where this excitement is coming from. There’s a few places, wanna know where?
One is my Soul Sisters Circle. I’ve been living & growing in a circle of women for 8 ish years and these gals make aging look fun. I’ve been the youngest in this circle by a decade or two for 90% of its existence. This group of women is led by a life coach extraordinaire, and she invited me to join after a couple of years of exploring with her in 1:1 sessions. When I first met her the gigantic life question that was plaguing me was ‘What do I want to be when I grow up’ for context I was also 30 when I met her…pretty much a grown up already, no? At that time I was really great at the job I was doing and I was climbing through the organization fast. I had a new relationship that seemed different then all those before it. I was pretty freakin’ happy but everywhere I looked were tired adults, doing things that they didn’t seem to love to make money to live lives that they didn’t seem to love and I wondered what things I needed to collect to be a able to make sure I stayed in love with my life.
Maybe you’ve beaten me to the knowing, but it took me a little exploration before it became pretty clear that collecting the outside stuff, the job, a marriage, kids, a house, vacations…blah, blah, blah…wasn’t gonna’ cut it. I need to collect the inside stuff. So off I went! And here I am!
And now I am living in two other awesome circles of women and these ones have grown out of a desire to create space for other women who want to live life differently. In these spaces I get to show up as myself and help shine light into the space that becomes more magical when you stand up and say you want this journey to be really yours. And once again I am being rewarded with the clear knowing that when you get brave, others get brave with you. You may feel like you are stepping out on your own, but you sure don’t stay lonely long.
There isn’t a life hack big enough to replace the magic of knowing yourself. And magic is what it has been for the past decade. There is a quote that reads ‘Do not complain about growing old. It is a privilege denied to many’ And aging into a knowing of your awesomeness is wild ride that needs to be celebrated! That’s why I can say that next weekend, on October 22nd I will celebrate another year of aging into my awesomeness and will be claiming to start to my year where I turn 40 & Fuck it With Kindness!
That’s right, my year has a theme…should yours?
What does it mean to f**k something with kindness? It means that I acknowledge that I am lightening the load I am carrying and only taking the stuff that matters, that helps me. There are things out there, life hacks, beliefs, practices that work for some people or that worked for me at one point in my life but they ain’t coming with me this year!
Here's how the f**k it part of this works. I am releasing all those expectations of how a 40 year old, married mother of 2, who stays home to raise her family, while trying to build a business, and was raised in a small, rural town is supposed to be. How she is supposed to vote, where she is supposed to speak up, what she is supposed to be satisfied with, how she is supposed to parent. Then the kindness part comes in when I start to move heart first. I send love back to 20 year old me who was doing the best she could with what she had. I send love to the woman who appears to be in the same spot as me but is doing things seemingly completely opposite. The love shows up when I stumble on this journey, because this bag of knowing is heavy and sometimes I need to put it down and I forget all the great stuff I packed in there and I stumble on a response or action in a triggering situation and I pause, back up and apologize.
Sometimes it’s harder to feel what needs to be put down, what things aren’t serving us on our journey to awesomeness because they’ve been in our lives so long we barely notice their effect anymore. That’s where silence comes in. You’ve got to allow, and sometimes create, the slow and quiet space to be able to hear yourself. But you don’t need to do it alone, find a friend who wants to unpack some stuff for her next year as well.
I have realized how many women I have around me that are aging into their greatness and not away from it. Women that are not trying to hide their years but rather are walking up with their magic bag of experience and life and tossing it on the table saying ‘Look at all this greatness I collected along the way, I will be living here!’
Most of the help we women receive for growing older is to hide the fact that any changes are happening. Our bodies change, and shouldn’t they? I feel like for the first 40 years my body easily carried me through situations, in fact if I’m totally honest it likely opened some doors for me all on it’s on and that led to some pretty crazy girlfriend time only stories! My relationship with my body is changing. It’s time for me to step up to the plate and give my body the things it needs, to be grateful for where we are now. It’s not time to hide anything. It’s time to toss this glorious grey hair into a ponytail, embrace the elastic waist bands and move at my own pace somewhere filled with delicious fresh air.
In my quest for why I am so excited to transition into this next year I realize what I have packed for my journey can be categorized into two main areas, my knowledge and my knowing. My knowledge is all the things I think about my outside world, the community and systems we live in. My knowing is the things I know about me. The magic happens when I can share my knowledge using all the power of being committed to my knowing.
In this bag are also the harder truths about me, the ones that are a struggle to be proud of. Things like on this journey to know my truth I can get judgey of others, I seem to get excited about starting things but the follow through is hard sometimes, that I go/move/fix until I crash and can do nothing, that when I am passionate about something my voices starts to shake and sometimes I see it as fear when really it’s energy. These things are me, and they deserve to be packed for the trip too.
The thing is that I am turning 40 this year and I am doing it my way. I am loving the changes I see in the mirror and in my heart. I am embracing the grey hair, the wrinkles, my mindset and my heart led way of life. I don’t expect anyone to do it the same. How could we, we are all beautifully different, but I would love if after reading this you embrace a little piece of your journey. Make it matter to you!
So here’s to being a happy adult and standing up to turn 40 & Fuck It with Kindness! A year of celebration, of being more than doing, and of digging into that bag of knowing to live simply, parent slowly and make meaningful connections.