When I was a child, I adored my grandmother. She could do almost anything from baking a birthday cake to serving holiday meals for the family (immediate family consisted of 13 children of her own, various in-laws and their grandchildren) and friends. She had the most remarkable silver hair, the patience of a saint and love for all who entered her heart. I remember thinking how much I wanted to be 50 so that I might be just like my grandmother. So when that fateful day came (turning 50 that is), I was not upset at all.
I was not unlike many women who suffered with low self-esteem, but somehow I felt that when I turned fifty that everything would change. So my motto a year before the special event was “Baggage Free In 03”. Of course I had been working on this theme for quite sometime and getting close to the finish line I might add. A month before the day of my birthday, my husband died and this changed not only my life, but it changed me forever.
Now I can’t say if I would have made it to my goal by my birthday. I’m sure one is always working on oneself, to learn more, be better at… I have read more “self-help” books than any of my girlfriends and they are always coming to me for guidance from menopause to how to make tea in a “Zen” manner, but that whole experience of death catapulted me to another level of existence. It was as if I had caught the “express train” to a better understanding of who I was and where I stood in the world. Things seemed much clearer to me. The purpose in life I had been laboriously searching for, now seemed insignificant. Just getting from moment to moment was all that I seemed to accomplish. A gift actually, for I had always pondered, how one might get to a state of living in the moment, and now I was actualizing it.
I began to realize how important every moment is and that lead me to realizing how selective I wanted to be with whom I spent those moments with. We all want to be loved and accepted and in so, sometimes lose who we are. We compromise our true being in order to be liked by our peers. At least I did. Now, being 50 and only having 50+ years to go (give or take a few), I figured I had better live the last 50+ the way I had dreamed I wanted to live it. I started to do things out of character, well it seemed out of character to my friends, but it was really me taking control of being me! I travelled to different places by myself, met people, did adventurous things. I stepped out of the box I had built for myself and started to fly.
Some friends embraced this, others did not and as a result I made new friends and said goodbye to old ones. My perspective on how I wanted to live my life had changed. It has been a gradual process, but for me the experience must be what it is like to be living in a cocoon and suddenly stretching out your beautiful, colourful wings. I am sad to leave some friends behind but I cannot deny their importance in my life and how they helped me to become the person I am now.
I am still testing out my wings. I will take a course in May on “Finding Your Hearts Desire” with Sonia Choquette, in Chicago, in May and in September I have decided to fly to Italy by myself and rent a small apartment and travel for six weeks. The thought of this scares the hell out of me but it also fills me with excitement.
For me it’s all perspective. How do you look at your life, through the glass half empty… or the glass half full? I choose the latter.
On my 51st birthday I celebrated my long-term friends, by holding a DIVA party for them. They left their husbands behind for the evening and we drank wine, ate a delectable meal, shared secrets and dreams and celebrated our friendships. Now, we don’t see each other as often as we like, some of us have even gone our own way and seldom speak, a change in perspective for them and for me.
Celebrate your life whether you are 50 or 150, but also celebrate those who accept you for who you are and encourage you to be all that you can be. And when you change your life’s perspective, remember that all who come to you are there for a reason… to help you change your perspective!
The Diva Seven 2004
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