Mind, Meaning + Matter: Winter Edition
Midlife Awakening, AI and Outgrowing Your Life
Please pull up a hot strong cup of coffee or a big warm mug of tea, grab a journal too. This was invites you watch, wander and dive in yourself.
Our MIND’s View of Our Self
This fall I’ve written about letting go and learning to listen to the voice inside your heart when it’s time to leave relationships, businesses, or places you live. I’ve also written about how leaving is about self-evolution through the dissolution of identity. When you write about something you can’t seem to find, you create it — and then discover other women were writing the same things all along.
In the last few months, I’ve been reading Substack and watching YouTube, finding so many stories being shared about midlife. On Substack, Lisa-Marie caught my attention when she wrote about changes in work identity in the age of AI. She explored how we navigate who we are in the workplace as technology continues to fragment our professional lives.
Finding MEANING in New Lives We Have Yet to Live
On YouTube, there are new voices of women I’ve been binge watching as they talk about what life at 50, 60, and even 80, looks like after they walked away from what the world was telling them to be.
Wendy, the creator of The Unexpected Gypsy, has become one of my favorite channels. She charts her story of packing up an entire life in London and relearning to become an artist. Her willingness to show the mess of it, not just the transformation, is what keeps me watching. Her video, The Strange Grief of Outgrowing Your Life, is about learning to sit with yourself when nothing fits anymore.
If you’re thinking of leaving, are in the process of self evolution, or letting something go, please know that there are women around the world in the thick of it. What’s beautiful is that those who have done it before you are sharing what it was like, showing you that you’ll come out of it.
Focusing on Three Things that MATTER Most
This year, I’ve been working on the concept of three. What if as women, we choose only three things to focus on in our lives? They can be whatever we want, but that’s all we get. I started with my own life, and you’ve been the readers of a lot of that learning — the unpacking, the identification, the unlearning and relearning. I’m ending the year with a commitment that from now on, I will have three focuses, no more.
As I’ve slowly worked my way into this, what I’m finding is hard to describe. In my mind, there’s clarity, deep focus and a natural state of presence that I’ve never experienced. In the body, that’s led to what feels like a natural reset — I sleep better and my health seems to level out with the intervention needed to manage it. As part of one of my three focuses, I promised myself to start writing from my experience, whatever way that writing may serve.
Three emerged after whittling down what mattered and then translating that into how I make a living and build a life. If anything comes my way that falls outside of my three, then the answer is no. The three focus areas I hold may change over time, that’s to be expected as I age. The power of three seems to bring a natural balance and state of being that the mind and body find a fluid coherence in.
I could have kept more things, stayed in more places, honored more commitments. But at what cost? I don’t know yet what I’m learning to live without or whether this clarity will hold when life rebuilds itself around me. What I do know is that right now, in the aftermath of dissolution, three feels like the only honest number I can hold.
What I’m Reading (You Can Listen to Them Too)
How to Let Things Go - Shunmyo Masuno (Listen on Spotify)
Don’t Believe Everything You Think - Joseph Nguyen (Listen on Spotify)
When the Buddha Needs Therapy - Keith Martin Smith (Buy and Read It // Old School)
What I’m Obsessively Watching
New Too Small on YouTube: A channel dedicated to homes from around the world under 900 square feet. I’m obsessed with small spaces. I have lived so long I can’t imagine another way of being. I think you can build tiny worlds within the limitations of 1000 square feet or less. I’m currently working with 400!
What’s Coming Next
I’m also packing up my Washington home, moving hundreds of miles and embracing a life I never saw coming — but know that if I turn it down, I’ll regret it til the day I die. More details in the new year, but for now, I’m in the sitting-with-it phase she describes so well.