What do I want to do with the life that is finally mine?

For decades, life handed us the agenda. What happens when nobody else is writing it anymore?.

The Morning I Went Looking for a Fight and Couldn’t Find One

A while back, I caught myself sitting at my desk searching my own mind for something to be annoyed about.

I mean actually searching.

Surely somebody had irritated me. Surely there was an old slight lying around that could be dusted off and taken for another spin. A problem would have worked. An injustice. A crisis. Something that needed fixing immediately.

Anything to get the engine turning over.

Nothing.

The grievance shelf was bare.

And as ridiculous as that sounds, it made me wonder how many of us have spent so much of our adult lives being powered by necessity that we don’t quite know what to do with ourselves when necessity finally shuts up.

For decades, most women I know did not wake up in the morning wondering what they wanted to do with the day. The day had already made its demands.

Children needed breakfast. Somebody had to get to school. Somebody else needed clean clothes. There were jobs, deadlines, husbands, aging parents, groceries, bills, doctors, broken appliances, family crises and all the ordinary machinery of a life that depended upon us showing up whether we felt inspired or not.

Life handed us the clipboard.

And we got very good at carrying it.

Some of us became astonishingly competent under pressure. Give us a problem and we’d start solving it before everybody else had finished explaining it. Give us something to rebuild, protect, overcome or hold together and somehow the energy appeared.

Urgency was its own fuel.

I know it was for me.

For most of my life, my energy arrived like a fire truck, with sirens. I could claw my way back from damn near anything, and I did. Again and again.

What I was considerably less practiced at was standing in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday, when nobody needed saving and nothing was on fire, and asking myself, “What would I like to do?”

That is a very different question.

And I suspect this later season of life confronts many of us with it in ways we never anticipated.

The children are grown. The office isn’t calling. The deadlines have changed. Some of the people we spent years caring for are gone. The routines that organized whole decades of our lives loosen their grip.

The clipboard gets lighter.

Sometimes it disappears altogether.

You would think that would feel like freedom from the first glorious minute.

Instead, it can feel strangely uncomfortable.

There used to be a fire in the belly every day because there was something that required our attention. Now, even when life is good, there can be mornings when nothing is particularly urgent.

And nobody tells you that the absence of urgency can feel a little like the absence of yourself.

That is the part I have been noticing.

This morning, for instance, I made an executive decision.

I have promoted myself to Chief Executive Officer of My Own Damn Energy, and the first order of business was deciding what constituted a reasonable agenda for the day.

The answer was: unload the dishwasher.

Not unload the dishwasher, take a shower, change the sheets, sweep the floor, answer emails, write an article, paint for 2 hours and figure out what I’m doing with the rest of my life before lunch.

Just unload the dishwasher.

I might even load it again afterward if the spirit moves me, but I am making no promises.

There was a time when unloading the dishwasher would not have earned a place on the list. It was something I did on the way to doing 6 other things. Showering wasn’t an event. Changing the sheets wasn’t an event. Going downstairs wasn’t an event.

Now I notice those things.

My energy has changed. So has the way I want to spend it.

And I think many of us are learning an entirely different way of generating a life.

For decades, life told us what mattered next. We responded.

Now the question becomes less about what is required and more about what is desired.

And that is not necessarily easier.

What do I want to do today when nobody urgently needs me to do anything? What interests me when there is no gold star for finishing it? What feels meaningful when nobody is depending on the outcome? What kind of life do I build when I am no longer constructing it around obligation?

Those can be surprisingly difficult questions for women who have spent 40 or 50 years being useful.

We knew how to be needed.

Wanting takes different muscles.

Maybe that is why the quiet can feel so strange.

Silence can feel suspicious when you’ve spent decades listening for sirens.

At first, I kept expecting something to arrive and pull me forward the way life always had before. Some enormous project. Some ambition. Some righteous irritation. Something big enough to light the old fire again.

I thought perhaps I needed another reinvention.

Surely retirement was supposed to produce some fabulous new version of me. A woman with a mission statement, an exciting next chapter and possibly a notebook filled with goals.

Instead, some mornings the biggest thing on my agenda is groceries.

Today it’s the dishwasher.

And increasingly, I am beginning to think nothing has gone wrong.

What if we don’t need that frantic fire anymore?

What if the woman who knew how to function beautifully in a crisis has simply finished that assignment?

And what if she does not need to be replaced by another equally busy woman who immediately fills retirement with a new collection of obligations simply because an empty calendar makes her nervous?

The issue isn’t whether we volunteer, travel, work, garden, paint, walk 10,000 steps or spend the afternoon reading on the sofa.

The question is simpler than that.

Did we choose it?

Or did we simply replace one clipboard with another?

That distinction matters to me.

Because a woman can become so accustomed to proving she can survive that she doesn’t immediately recognize the moment when survival is no longer the assignment.

Then what?

Now that is an interesting question.

I don’t have a tidy answer, and I am increasingly suspicious of anyone who claims to have one for all of us.

I do know I am no longer interested in measuring today’s life against the woman I was 20 or 30 years ago.

She had different responsibilities, different energy and an entirely different set of reasons for getting out of bed every morning.

She did her job.

She did it damn well.

She can retire.

What interests me now is the woman who appears when nobody sounds the alarm.

Who is she when there is nothing left to prove? What does she enjoy when enjoyment itself is reason enough? What old obligations is she still carrying simply because nobody ever told her she could put them down? What might she choose if, for perhaps the first time in her adult life, the next part isn’t already assigned?

Those are the questions we keep circling around here at The Daily RE-Wire.

Not how to become younger. Not how to become busier. Not how to prove that we still matter.

I’m interested in something much more basic than that.

Once nobody else is writing the agenda, how do we figure out what actually belongs on it?

Today, for me, that begins with unloading the dishwasher.

Eventually.

And perhaps that is enough.

Because I no longer think the goal is to get the old engine roaring again.

I think some of us are finally quiet enough to notice that we get to decide where we want to go.

If you’re asking the same question

ReFoundation is the work I created for exactly this part of life: separating what you actually want now from everything you have spent a lifetime believing you should want.

It is included at no additional cost with an annual paid subscription to The Daily RE-Wire. A 20% discount on annual subscription is availbe through September 30.

After a lifetime of answering everybody else’s demands, perhaps the most interesting question left is the simplest one:

What do I want to do with the life that is finally mine?

Once you have become a member with your subscription you can mosey over to the PERKS page to download RE-FOUNDATION. Also you are included int the weekly Breakthrough zoom group, hosted by me. A weekly conversation for women over 60 who want more of themsevles at this stage of life.

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