• Sageing - 2024,  Second Half of Life,  Word of the Year

    Tackling the second half of life — Sageing is my word for 2024 

    Each year I select a word or phrase to guide me through the year and provide a focus for growth. This year’s word is SAGEING. I first read this term in a comment on Elizabeth Gilbert’s newsletter where the commenter described it as the act of growing older and wiser, i.e. becoming sage-like. I hadn’t heard the word before, but it would not let me go, so I have known since the middle of last year what this year’s word would be!   I did a little digging and found a couple of organisations with this exact focus to help me understand a little more. According to Sage-ing International, sageing is…

  • Second Half of Life,  Slow - 2023,  Word of the Year

    6 things I learned about going slower 

    When I slow down, I can dive deeper—and that’s how I prefer to live. — Cait Flanders  In 2023 my word for the year was SLOW. If you’re new to my blog, you can catch up with the posts throughout the year about my journey here.  To summarise what I learned before I share a few of my favourite quotes collected throughout the year, here are a few takeaways that have found permanent homes in my mind:  Slow living is, above all, an act of self-preservation and self-compassion.  If you wish to slow down and are looking for some more practical suggestions, Courtney Carver provides a fantastic list to kick-start…

  • Second Half of Life,  Slow - 2023

    Does Slow equal Lazy?

    I have been trying to write this article for several weeks now, which in and of itself is not really a problem. What has been tying me in guilty knots is that I had set myself a publishing schedule and was not sticking to it. I kept putting it off because I was too tired or more interested in painting or whatever. I have procrastifaffed left, right and centre. I called myself lazy.  This guilt is silly because I am not being paid for these posts, and nothing happens if I don’t post on schedule. And yet, I have been berating myself for not publishing when I told myself I…

  • Second Half of Life

    Caught in the hallway

    I mentioned in my empty nesters post that I felt like I was starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel between the phases of life … just a crack of light. That space in the middle there is the liminal space. A place of transition where you don’t sit comfortably in either the young or the old categories.   The word liminal means threshold, it comes from the Latin word limen. The idea is that you are standing on the threshold of something new and waiting to be let in. Waiting for beginnings and endings — it’s a weird place to be.  Sometimes it feels chaotic and uncomfortable like…

  • Second Half of Life

    We’re empty nesters!

    “Mum!” “Yeah mate?” “My offer was accepted on the apartment!”  Those were the words that signalled the imminent and gentle flight of my oldest chick from the proverbial nest towards the end of 2022. The youngest chick had flown a couple of months earlier with little warning. Don’t get me wrong, I knew it was a possibility at some point, but one afternoon he announced that he was going to be living in his father’s granny flat from here out, and I was happy for him! You see both lads had been shuttling between our place and their father’s place ever since we separated, spending alternate weeks with each. But…