I'll be honest with you about something. A lot of people plan their newsletters a month out. A calendar, a schedule, the whole thing mapped. I have tried. I just don't work that way. I'll put a plan together on a Monday and by Thursday half of it has nothing to do with what is actually in my heart that morning. It might not be the most efficient way to run a life. It is the way I run mine.
Last week I asked you what you might have stopped doing. The thing that used to make your soul sing. The replies that came back were full of quiet wisdom, and I want to share a few.
One of you bought yourself new hiking boots, on purpose, to walk yourself back out the door toward the walking you'd let go of. I loved that.
Another beautiful crone treats the things that give her joy the way she'd treat the commitment of a job. Not the title, just the commitment. Because you show up for a job. You don't cancel on it when you're tired or the day got long. We'll show up for a tired friend or a child without a second thought. We rarely hand ourselves that same commitment.
I had a few ideas to build on all of that this week. And then something happened in my own house that tipped the whole letter sideways. So I am following it instead. Which, it turns out, is exactly what this letter is about.
My daughter Madison was about to move across the country to do her masters in conducting. Accepted, packed in her mind, excited. Or so it looked. She and I were sitting together one evening, a few drinks in. Big things, little things, plans, the conversation going everywhere. And somewhere in there I asked her one simple question. Is this what you actually want?
The tears came. Right away. I don't think so, she said. I don't think I want to go.
Now, I am not the person you bring a loose thread to if you want it left alone. Getting above a situation and brainstorming my way through it are the two things I am best at in this world. Although if someone isn't ready for it, brainstorming is probably my most annoying quality too, because nothing stops me once I'm going. So the moment she said it, we were off. What do you actually want. You have never had a gap. You have been in school since preschool, never once not a student. You miss something, what is it. And underneath Edmonton was Halifax. Not being a student again. The music, the people, the feel of a place that already knows her.
In the span of twenty four hours she declined her acceptance, messaged her aunt about a place to live, and applied for four music jobs. I watched a visceral weight lift off her body. It was spectacular. There has been a new girl in town ever since.
Quietly, almost like it was being pulled out of her, she said it. I don't want to feel like a cop out.
That's an interesting word choice. Cop out is not an inside word. You cannot actually cop out on yourself. If your own heart is lit up, if you have found the joy and you are walking toward it, your body does not call that a cop out. Cop out is a word about other people. The ones who wrote the glowing reference letters. The ones who have pictured you a certain way for years. Cop out is the fear of what the room will think when you change your mind.
She hasn't lost the desire to conduct. She has lost the desire to get her masters right now. Those are not the same thing, and only she can tell the difference.
My sister texted her the thing a lot of people would say. She's still young, it won't affect her too much. And then she caught herself, right there in the thread, and corrected her own words. Because why on earth does age matter when it comes to changing your mind. We all have the ability to change. At twenty, at sixty, at any age in between.
Why is it that we so easily hand a twenty year old full permission to flip the switch. Change the major, change the city, change her whole mind overnight, and we call it finding herself. Somehow that permission expires. At fifty, sixty, seventy, the same turn gets questions. Why would she do it that way. I once listened to my nephew tell my sister she couldn't wear a mini skirt because it wasn't motherly. I have watched grown children tell their mother she's too old for the tattoo she has wanted her whole life. As if the switch only works in one direction, and only when you're young.
It doesn't. I have spent my life watching women make one decision that gave them joy, sometimes a small one, a slight turn, and then watching the joy come flooding in behind it. That is a good part of why I made The Crone Stories. A whole life of front row seats to women who pivoted.
So here is your invitation for the week, and it is a gentle one. I am not asking you to blow your life up. That's no fun. I am asking you to look for one pivot. One small turn that would give you more joy.
Maybe it's saying no to babysitting this weekend. Maybe it's leaving the book club you joined twenty years ago, the women you love and have quietly grown away from, and finding one that fits who you are now. Maybe it's the hairdresser you have sat with for fifteen years and never liked, and you're afraid to say you want to go elsewhere. Maybe it's the solo road trip your husband or your adult kids keep calling unsafe. Or maybe it's the simplest thing of all, like buying yourself the boots, the thing that walks you back toward what you love.
Whatever it is. How could you pivot this week, in one small way, and give yourself more joy. That's what I'll be carrying. Tell me what you find.
And if you want more of this, women turning toward their own joy and telling the truth about it, that is the whole of The Crone Stories. This Friday, July 3rd, a new episode lands. It's Wendy's story.
I'll give you one line from it and trust it to do the rest.
If this was a penis, there would be a cow on the front of it.
Wendy is forty one, one of our younger crones. A hairstylist. She figured out, sitting at her own kitchen table reading an ingredients label, that one of the medications her doctors had given her for years contained something she was severely allergic to. Years. Her story is what happens when a woman stops waiting for the system to catch up to her.
Friday. Bring a cup of something warm. And if it moves you, send it to a woman who might relate.
The life we don't examine stays the life we didn't choose.
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In love, light and laughter, Karen
Check out The Crone Stories
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The life we don't examine stays the life we didn't choose.
In love, light and laughter, Karen