“The inspiration you seek, is already in you.
Be silent and listen.”
— Rumi
I spent most of January battling a virus and then struggling with our healthcare system. For this first month of a new year, the dogs and I were getting sick, being sick, seeking care, making a trip to the emergency room with a short hospital stay followed up by many appointments, tests, and medications. I emerge tired, feeling behind, and grateful.
I am almost ‘fit as a fiddle’ mentally and physically now.
It takes time to regain your full energy. Each day I am given a finite amount of energy…when it is gone, I nap.
This slow-moving self and the gray days of winter make the right environment for reflection and rumination. So does a long soak in the bathtub.
I entered the new year having turned 65 in December. With that age comes all sorts of labels and societal expectations. None of them seem to fit me.
I love my work life and want to continue to evolve my consulting, teaching, writing, speaking, and coaching life. Maybe even a full-time commitment to a single organization could be the new path I choose.
A new children’s book is in production. The last in the series about rescuing Big Boy.
This single commitment I made to a feral dog on Labor Day 2013 has influenced my life trajectory in unplanned ways.
Dogs have been a major storyline in my life since 2010 when I brought a brindle boxer puppy into my life. He was named Bear until he asked to be Buddha Bear and make being a service dog his mission.
Buddha Bear became my working partner – going most places with me. He widened my life, causing me to meet people I otherwise would not have met. This led us to help a friend with her runaway dog causing us to find Big Boy hiding on an industrial property. With Buddha Bear’s help and two months of patient intent together we earned his trust and became a family.
High-rise living was not going to work so I decamped to a 900-square-foot cottage I owned on a private lane leading to Lake Erie. For the first months, we were quiet, without a TV or the hustle of a tall condo building. We adopted a routine of walking on the shores of the lake every morning. It was a very good time for the three of us.
And then we became four. My mother’s health had been declining and took a steep fall early in 2014. After months of trying different solutions, my mother came to live with me and the two dogs in the tiny cottage for what became the last year of her life.
I couldn’t have planned it any better or worked it any harder. Together we explored living and dying daily, became friends, and learned the lessons of unconditional love.
As soon as the final children’s book is launched, writing about becoming a caregiver will be my next project.
These two big events that changed my life — Buddha Bear, Big Boy, and my mother Betsi — all happened ten years ago. And yet I feel the impact of them freshly each day and the memories are front and center in my ruminations.
The third book in the children’s series is about loving and then losing those you love and how to embrace the grief. It was a hard book to write as it meant saying goodbye over and over and over again. Yet, it was an important book to write as there are few children’s books that address death, dying, and grief. I can’t wait to share ‘You Left Your Footprints on My Heart’ with you. My mother prepared me, and I have been holding the grief of their influence on my life for the last decade. It has opened my heart further and caused me to feel more deeply. Somehow, I think this is part of the growing older process.
I still have dogs. Not big ones like Buddha Bear and Big Boy but a whole passel of little ones (French Bulldogs 4, and English Bulldog 5, and my neighbor’s hound dog) making my life full, chaotic, challenging, and bright.
The years pass so quickly!! I am conscious that I need to spend the next ten years thoughtfully and intentionally. Friends tell me that once again I am in transition and a reinvention of my life. Does the change ever stop?
I have learned in the last few months you have to sit with and listen to the invitations to both ‘Let Go’ and ‘Let Come’. If I am too busy, the busyness doesn’t allow for the exploration and discovery of myself and the opportunities around me.
Maybe there was a role for the virus to play in my life bringing me to a quick stop and slow recovery. What do you think?
• Are you feeling any of the shifts in your life?
• Are you entering a transition point in your career? Life?
• Do you find yourself going on mental trips backward and forward?
I observe my friend’s lives. Not in comparison but as a choice point and as a role model to what I aspire.
At 65 years old I present myself as a single woman who didn’t have children or a marriage. My Great Aunt Helen was also unmarried without children and was called an ‘Old Maid’. She was far from being anything resembling an ‘Old Maid’. Why do we label things so harshly?
But when I review my years of life, there was always a romance, brewing, committed to and ending. I never married but boy have I danced with being in partnership.
I have traveled the world, embraced opportunities for adventure, expanded my learning and abilities, gathered friendships everywhere I went that enrich my life today.
I have been involved in the lives of my family, my nieces, great nieces and nephews and have found relatives near and far.
I have been adopted into other families and am always finding ‘brothers’ to add to my life just as my mother always was looking for ‘sons’.
I birthed a company that still is active 36 years later. And 6 business books, 3 children’s books, with more to come.
In my own way I married, birthed, and mothered throughout all these years. I am learning that there is no one way to follow your bliss and that the definition of society may not fit your approach. Me, I have always taken the road less traveled.
Thank you for enduring the sharing of my virus-addled daydreams.
• Do you spend anytime exploring the meaning and measure of your life — and what do you want to make of the precious year ahead?
Leslie
“Make that phone call.
Send that text.
Forgive that person.
Tell them you love them.
Or that you’ve missed them.
Let go of that grudge.
Show more kindness.
Don’t take any of it for granted.
Because tomorrow isn’t promised.”
― Anthony Youn
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