“For a proactive woman, the response to (middle age) is to expend more energy, make more lists, go to more seminars, try to muster more will power, make more decisions. But the result, she often finds, is just spinning her wheels.” Suzanne Braun Levine, in her book Inventing the Rest of Our Lives, nails it, in my opinion. She continues:
“Even if our present circumstances require that we keep up the pace, most of us have begun to feel uncomfortable in overdrive; simple burnout can make us want to slow to a walk. And the mellowness – the decreasing willingness to sweat the small stuff – that our changing brains lead us toward can make the flowers alongside the path smell very sweet…(this time of life) is where we make the transition from that driven, overcommitted superwoman to someone whose priorities and passions are less rigidly managed and perhaps more deeply felt.”
For me, although I feel a bit smug about all the things I have learned to this point in my life, middle age is accompanied by a lack of clarity about whether I should be slowing down or, in the face of mortality, speeding up! There is a cost to either choice. What are you doing, slowing down or speeding up, and are you paying a price or are you exuberant about your choice? Let me know so we can learn from you, sistah!
“If only we’d stop trying to be happy, we’d have a pretty good time.” – Edith Wharton
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