milkweed
“We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up...discovering we have the strength to stare it down.
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Midlife has its difficulties, most particularly the realization that some doors have closed, if not certainly, then realistically. David will never be a fighter pilot, I'll never wear a bikini again. But it has also become a time, for me and many of my friends, of incredible self-awareness and actualization. A time of becoming who we were meant to be and being comfortable with and nurturing that person. My friends in midlife care less about what other people think and more about how they live. Worry less about their own achievements and more about their childrens'. Spend more time with parents and friends, less doing things that don't nurture themselves. We have become both more and less tolerant. More accepting and forgiving of the faults of good friends and family, reluctant to waste time on activities and individuals that are no longer positive. We choose to outgrow things and to grow into experiences. When we try new things, we know ourselves well enough to say "yes" or "no" or "maybe." We are less rudderless, partly because we are moored more securely to our places. And we have become more appreciative and accepting of ourselves—we are finding our path the best way we know how.
I recently spoke with a friend about the importance of putting ourselves first—be sure to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. It's often hard to do—we have many demands on our time and there's always another crisis around the corner, but there is the benefit of the growing wisdom that we seem to know when enough is enough. The things we do for ourselves are some of the best things we do for the people in our lives because they allow us to step up when it's needed. To be heroic.
I look around me and I see people whose everyday lives are simple and ordinary, but happy. People whose momentary actions raise the spirits of friends and family. I've been fortunate in the last year to be the recipient of those actions—meals and care from my mother, support and love from my father, phone calls and texts from my siblings, kindness and thoughtfulness from friends and strangers—a new colleague at work, Ally's school counselor, a college classmate reaching out. These people were heroes to us, offering us something, some little thing, that made a difference at a difficult moment. The power of those deeds was immeasurable, yet most of them did it by course, by rote, by habit. The thoughtfulness came naturally. As I look back on those gifts, I continue to be overwhelmed with gratitude.
In an age where so many of the individuals we might look up to have feet of clay, I've been fortunate to discover that the real heroes in my life are the one who show up and offer kindness and comfort in a crisis, or who offer words and actions of support, or who believed in me, even when my own self-confidence wavered. They are my heroes. They have inspired me to reciprocate and pay it forward—we are all struggling with something, so being kind to yourself and then others is another act of tenacity against the everyday forces that conspire to diminish our spirits. They have inspired me to work harder to be the hero of my own story, no matter how ordinary it may seem. It is extraordinary because it is mine.