Looking for life in all the wrong places
We think of hiking Machu Picchu as a transformational journey. But sometimes it’s an overnight in London that awakens our lives.
It’s the first day of a Conference in London for navigating mid-life and as I listen to inspiring talks around anti-inflammatory foods and HRT, scribbling down inspirations and expertise, I also find myself checking out the other women.
Am I aging as well? Does my skin/hair/body check out? Am I dressing appropriately?
I have the same set of questions I had as a teenager on my first overnight, all comparison and vulnerability. I’m still figuring out where I fit. I imagined this moment in life (if I imagined it at all), as being about arrival but now I’m realizing that the destination was ever unclear and I might just have lost my way.
I find not myself but my wanting. To be in my 20s, meandering and expectant. To be in the flow and not the push. To feel the confidence of before and not the doubt of what’s next.
Maybe the timing of this trip is off. The COVID years made life small but add in work from home, young kids, and a move to the countryside, and the world shrank even more. I have yet to reclaim it. I falter through the schedule; unsure of myself as I hear about transformation and wonder what exactly the material is that I’m working to shape.
Before Day 2 starts, I walk to a bakery in a neighborhood once dodgy and now hip, and I catch myself thinking “This is hard”. Though there’s the promise of a key lime croissant and a decent flat white, I’m ill at ease, not myself. I dialogue with the past every step of the way. The girl of before haunts me.
Arriving at Bethnal Green tube in my mid-twenties with one suitcase and the prospect of a rented flat shared with two people I knew and two that I didn’t, I felt charged, excited. I don’t remember the weight of my bag that contained everything I needed for this new life, but I remember how people moved through space (fast and with purpose) and the buzz of the unknown streets before me.
I glimpse her while I have my coffee and two roller skaters holding hands pass by, laughing as they fall forwards together. I notice her in the woman sitting smoking on the stoop, looking at her phone, unhurried, the sun and blue light shimmering together on her face. And she’s there again in a couple on the verge of skipping, a first night of summer in the city starting earlier than either planned.
Insistent through these days, a single question “Can I have it back?” with its echo of grief.
By the end of the Conference I find an answer. “For what purpose?”
The lure of pushing against aging is that we get to run away from ourselves. But what I came here, to this Conference, to do is to get back into this body, and this life. In the company of hundreds of women, equally as expectant and curious, I catch myself: “But this is good too. Isn’t it?”
As I board the train home, I realize that we’ve mislabeled midlife, because it’s more of a pivot point than a center. This moment could represent, or even lead to, withdrawal and disappearance, and a desperate need to return to something once known, to get back to who we once were. All backward glances and a suffocating nostalgia.
Or it could mean that though we no longer take the same steps, we can move forwards in all manner of precious directions. The world we now know comes with a filter and it’s one colored by a knowing keenly earned and experiences felt but not yet spent.
In this beloved grey city the streets were never paved with gold, but neither did they run on a timer that ticked its monotone till forty and then turned ashen. The only age these buildings know is the history they hold, an endless story of others who moved through them, timeless and resolute.
Beyond the retinol regimes and supplements, inspirational quotes and stirring speakers, there’s something here still to be grasped, something equally as unfolding as those days I once knew. And as my car arrives in the driveway in my sleepy village, I choose to shift: to participate and not just observe. I open the door to a life that got slightly bigger while I was away.