Guest Post

Packing for a 5 day retreat at the Modern Elder Academy, I have a good idea on how to get started.

The still, quiet place where peace and insight reside is always available to us, like the sun that continually shines whether or not it is covered by clouds.

It is difficult to describe how it felt last month when Ketanji Jackson Brown was sworn in as an Associate Justice to the highest court in the land. As a Black woman living in the U.S. for my entire life (interrupted with consistent forays to other countries).

From my late 30’s to around age 50 I was very focused on having “success”. What I did not see was that this script was not really my own but one I inherited along with a few sharp edges.

In 2018, I received a text message from a trusted friend that went something like, “Would you be interested in attending an academy for midlifers…in Baja?”

After growing up watching both of my parents get pushed out of their corporate jobs at 50, I realized there was a larger trend where offices were becoming younger and younger while workers 50+ were moving into self-employment and often working from home in silos. The world as I knew it was becoming increasingly age segregated.

I waved goodbye to my friends and headed off, in search of the villa. After only 5 minutes of navigating the medieval streets of Orvieto (Italy), things weren't going well. I stopped, took a deep breath, stared at my map, then turned both it and myself to face a new direction.

I’m 49 years old and my life pretty much sucks. Or at least it should, according to a study in the National Bureau of Economic Research (Blanchflower and Oswald, 2020) that found that our well-being and happiness generally follows a U-shaped trajectory over the course of our lives.

Women and midlife is often a lot more complicated than engaging a therapist, buying a sports car, and popping out the other side as a new person. There are a myriad of complex issues for women, and often multiple events that seem to have a compounding effect. The whole thing can be quite dramatic and go on for years.

I remember thinking that changing jobs would make me happy. Then once I changed jobs, I thought changing relationships would do the trick. Then it was moving to a new city.