Have You Outgrown Your Life?

By Lesley Cordero

It’s my 50th birthday and I am sitting in the living room of my dear friend who has lovingly gathered several of my friends together to celebrate. I am looking out the window somewhere else altogether. I am not interested in anything that my friends are saying, and I am yearning for someone to say something that has some meaning for me. A friend later said that she had never seen anyone so disengaged. I feel totally alienated and adrift from my own life and the people in it. What is wrong with me? I am usually the life of the party, is this just turning 50 angst?

Looking back at this memory, I realize that I simply had outgrown my life. Let’s look at the evidence:

1. My friends were boring me and I had started distancing myself from them by not accepting social invitations.

2. I had been cycling through a continuous string of new interests much to my family’s amusement.

3. I had gone prematurely grey and was overweight and didn’t look at all in the mirror how I looked in my mind.

4. I had been downsized once more from a leadership position and was feeling underutilized at work.

5. I was a few years from retirement and was looking to do something else.

I remember sitting in a dark movie theatre watching the remake of the Thomas Crown Affair and there is a scene where the lead characters take off in a glider and soar over the valley below. A voice pops in my head at that moment and says, “I want a bigger life”. All right I’ve outgrown the life I have been living which includes being a wife, mother, full time teacher, daughter, sister and friend. I’m ready for a transformation but into what?

So the process of transformation begins. Perhaps, like me, you are just unsatisfied with a number of things in your life or perhaps you’ve experienced a major jarring event such as a death, divorce or firing. Change is in the wind and there is nothing you can do about it. Sure you can try and fight it or ignore it causing you to stay in this holding pattern of angst longer then necessary, but you can’t stop it. Change will occur and rather then just let it happen to you, wouldn’t you like to be at the helm?

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