I went to the classic car show yesterday at the NEC. Eight sprawling halls where you can peruse, buy and sell anything associated with a classic car. The friend I went with remarked, you could purchase every nut and bolt, panel and paint needed to renovate a car to pristine condition.
And as I was wandering around looking at all these beautiful cars with their pristine paintwork and gleaming engines, they looked better than when they left the factory almost 50 years ago!
And there lies the dilemma for me. They were too perfect, not a blemish, dent or scratch insight? I wanted to see a vehicle that had lived, had blemishes to prove a life driven on the open road with all the twists and turns, the roadblocks and dead ends that life can throw up?
So now, after 50 years of leaving the factory to start your life. What blemishes, dents, and scratches have you picked up on the way? Maybe you have parked your yourself in the Bodyshop to have them removed with some specialist fillers and Botox? Or you decided to drive on by and wear them with passion and pride, a sign of a road more – travelled with experiences learnt along the way.
Ultimately, we are all on our own life’s journey, and it’s not a straight road. It never is. How boring would that be? We never know what’s around the next bend, and life has a habit creeping up upon us step by step. Suddenly five, ten years have raced by, and you are staring in the rear-view mirror and don’t recognise that person anymore. You’re no wiser, no happier or fulfilled.
As Gail Sheehy said in her book ‘Passages.’
Passionate, liberated women – married and single – who are unwilling to settle for stereotypical roles of middle age and who are now realising they don’t have to. Once free of the exhausting demands of young children, needy husbands, and building early careers, they embrace what I call their Second Adulthood as a period of reawakening.
The great transition in the passage to the Second Adulthood, for women, is a move from pleasing to mastery. In our First Adulthood, we survive by figuring out how to please and perform for the powerful people who protect and reward us. It is in her fifties that a woman is finally unafraid to speak with her own voice.
So what about your voice? Where is your road leading? What are you planning on doing with the Second Adulthood of your life?
Maybe it’s time to get the road map out and plan your journey.
Grab yourself a coffee and let’s have a chat. No obligation. If all this call did was to inspire you into action would it be worth it?
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