Encouraging and equipping women over 60 to live their best life!
It is wise for us to retreat into our own wilderness—whether it be on a mountaintop, the desert, or a park a couple of miles away from home. This has been most profitable for me. I have found that it allows clarity of thinking and the ability to focus better on the more important matters in life.
The time for forgiveness is always right now. Delayed forgiveness compresses anger, and anger breeds bitterness, which changes the way a person thinks, talks, and acts. Unforgiveness negatively transforms and causes separation. To maintain healthy relationships, and avoid the fallout from holding on to hurt, forgiveness is necessary.
Why is it that sometimes as women, we need permission to do what we want or need to do for ourselves? Somewhere down the line we’ve picked up the notion that if we do so, we are being selfish! It is not selfish to put yourself up at the top of your priority list.
During the height of the global pandemic, I celebrated my 60th birthday. This was indeed a major milestone. In New Mexico, Salons were shut down, then reopened, then shut down again, and later reopened. All around me I saw women panicking about their beauty. How would they handle the grow out of gray hair, lack of perms and haircuts, and, worse, they so desperately needed their nails done. It was a crazy time for everyone. As I blew out my birthday candles, I realized that I had been coloring my hair for 32 years!!! OMG! For more than half my life, I had been applying toxic hair dye to my scalp every three weeks.
Emptying the house of its contents involved going through countless papers, knickknacks, boxes, closets, cabinets, and cubbyholes. Some decisions were easy; many others were not. How do you dispose of years of living, the lives of loved ones, and the mementos thereof?
I’m a grief counselor. I work in hospice care, reaching out to the loved ones after the patient dies. I call them a couple of weeks after the death and ask them how they’re doing. Then I listen. Like many of us, one woman had just lost her elderly mother. “I’m better than I was,”…
Life pivots produce personal growth and spur forward motion. When hardship, grief, difficult decisions, and other life events require a significant pivot, faith is the guiding light in the darkness.
Life is filled with transitions. If you lean into them, your life will be enriched if you embrace the adventure and move through the transitions. On the other hand, if you fail to embrace the changes and transitions, you might become bitter and feel useless.
Hopefully, as the years go by, our experiences teach us that life’s greatest rewards come from serving others. Whether we are of modest means or can set a private cruise in motion with a phone call, we have gifts to share. These are not all material. In fact, the best gifts come in sharing ourselves authentically with another.
Life can be messy, and fear or worry can quickly destroy even the strongest of resolves, leaving us shaking at all the unknowns. It’s been said, “that which terrifies you controls you.” And it certainly can.
