midlife Archives - Kate Hilton

Posts Tagged ‘midlife’

What Matters?

March 26, 2017

Dear Reva,

I went to a friend’s funeral today. An older friend, but not much older. Young enough, let’s say, for his death to come as a major shock.

This particular friend lived well, in every sense of the word. He travelled the world, had a huge circle of friends, loved his family, and did incredibly important work that changed lives. He burned brilliantly, if for far too short a time. He left behind him a legacy of activism, fellowship, and love.

The older I get, the more I appreciate how little we control in this life, including when we leave it. That realization has made me more mindful about my priorities. In fact, I’ve begun to think about my life in much the same way that I think about the programs of the various boards I sit on. What’s the overall mission? What are the strategic priorities? And how does any given activity align with them?

If this sounds hilariously corporate, I won’t disagree, even though my professional life has moved into a non-, even anti-corporate, phase. But successful boards, and businesses, are focused on where they want to invest their time, and they reject any project that falls outside their priorities. And I want to do the same, because that’s how you create a meaningful life and, dare I say it, legacy.

A dear friend of mine says that he no longer reads books to the end if he isn’t enjoying them. Why? Because he’s past middle age and he knows that he has a finite number of books left to read. And he won’t waste a minute on one that doesn’t excite him.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that my priorities right now are, broadly speaking, my children, my family (including my beautiful new dog), my friends, my own health and wellness, and my writing. And anything that falls outside of those priorities has to be extremely compelling to get my attention these days.

In that vein, it feels great to say that my novel – the product of two years of work – is coming out on May 30. It wasn’t easy to write, but it was worth the struggle. Writers I respect are saying very generous things about it, my publisher is thrilled, and perhaps most importantly, I’m really, really proud of it.

Lots of love,

Kate

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Next step

January 8, 2017

Dear Reva,

What a year 2016 was. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

I started writing to you several times, most recently the day after the US election. Like so many women I know, I sat glued to the television, elation fading to faint hope fading to despair. Where women are concerned, it turns out, it’s not enough to be smarter, more prepared, more principled, or – let’s just say it – better in every conceivable way. But I guess we knew that already. We were hoping it wasn’t true, but we knew.

And so many people died! So many touchstones of our generation lost. It made me feel old. But then, so did the plantar fasciitis and the adhesive capsulitis, and the other itises that denote a body in middle-aged decline.

I wanted to write about all kinds of things that were happening this year – relationships and divorce and parenting teenagers in particular – but all of the issues I wanted to tell you about were private, not just to me, but to other people, and that’s one of the lines I try not to cross. And so I thought about you, but I didn’t write.

I measure out my life in to-do lists, which I keep. They end up providing an extremely granular picture of my life, from the small (‘pick up prescription’) to the large (‘finish book edits’). I leafed through my 2016 daybook this morning. And I could see that even when I was in survival mode, putting one foot in front of the other day after day after day, I was still making progress. I didn’t finish where I began. I grew.

Someone said to me recently, “You’re lucky to be such a kind person. That’s a nice way to be in the world.” And I said, “I work at it. It’s a choice.”

We don’t get to choose everything. But we choose more than we think. We choose our intentions. We choose our behaviour. We choose our priorities. And with these choices, we guide the direction of our incremental, daily steps, however heavy they may be at any given time. There is freedom in that.

Happy New Year, darling.

Love,

Kate

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A Dream Worth Failing For

January 17, 2016

Dear Reva,

I loved your letter last week about your intention to make 2016 a Year of Deliberate Living. In fact, re-reading it made me smile a second time, because (obviously) my response is late. At some point last week, I realized that I simply wouldn’t get it done on time. I rarely miss deadlines, and never without a good reason.

But I didn’t have a good reason. So much for Deliberate Living! Sure, my book had just launched in the US, and I was fielding a lot of unexpected email traffic (I’m talking hours of email). A volunteer project got out of hand. My ex was away, and I was doing a huge amount of driving (we normally split the school drop off and pick up, an hour each way). My mom was also away, and she usually fills in for me if life gets particularly chaotic.

But really, I got overwhelmed. And eventually, I surrendered. And I’ve decided that I’m going to forgive myself for missing a deadline, because life is short, and my failure to meet a Pen Pal Project deadline isn’t the end of the world.

And life is so short! Two hugely influential artists (David Bowie and Alan Rickman) died last week, both of cancer, and both at the shockingly young age of 69. My friends were all talking about it. They were all doing the math: sixty-nine minus forty-something equals…way too soon. And these were men who, by anyone’s estimation, achieved great things with the time they had on this Earth. What about the rest of us?

Well, the rest of us need to learn how to take a few risks, and I’m not talking about the occasional missed deadline. We need to be willing to put ourselves out there, to step into the arena, and to court non-catastrophic failure. We need to do it in art, in work, in parenting, in friendship, and in love.

Yes, you heard me correctly. There is such a thing as non-catastrophic failure. In fact, most failure is not catastrophic. Most failure will neither ruin our lives nor kill us with shame. It won’t feel nice, but it will teach us things that success can’t. Believe me.

One of the lovely parts of my new career as a writer is that it connects me with all kinds of people I wouldn’t otherwise meet. Many of them want to ask me a question, and it is almost always the same one: What’s your secret?

I’m fortunate enough to have the kind of career that many people dream about. I feel grateful every day to be able to do the work I do. And I’m happy to share my secret, such as it is. Are you ready? Because this is going to come in handy as you rocket towards that big birthday in a few months.

I’M PREPARED TO GO ALL IN, KNOWING THAT I COULD FAIL.

That’s it, really. I want to be a writer so much that I’m willing to fail at it.

When people ask me this question, I can see how reluctant they are to step into the void. There must be a safer path, they think. After all, what dream could be worth the risk of total, abject, humiliating failure?

And I would answer: Any dream worth having.

Yours,

Kate

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Repeat after me: Change is not a crisis

December 15, 2015

My desk, 7 a.m.

Dear Reva,

I’m getting an early start this morning, and because it is so dark outside, and because I’m tired, I am completely disoriented. I have to keep reminding myself that I have already slept, had breakfast, packed one child (the one who isn’t sick) off to school and settled into my work day. The fact that I have to do this – remind myself of something so simple and obvious – is one of many examples in everyday life of how much of our behaviour is patterned and based on familiar external cues.

And this, in turn, is one of the answers to your question last week about why midlife changes are perceived as a crisis. I like this question, and have thought about it a lot in my own context. I used to describe my shift into a writing career as the result of a midlife crisis, partly because it got a laugh from the audience, and partly because I thought of it that way myself. But I’ve stopped doing that. I’ve decided that it is too reductive, dismissive, and even pejorative a phrase to describe what has been, in fact, a period of transformative growth and creative flourishing.

Having said all of that, change scares us at a fundamental level. We don’t think that we are good at it. We cling to the (misguided) idea that people don’t really change, and it comforts us, giving us a sense of control and stability. And, of course, change invites failure, which we fear most of all.

Small changes can throw us off for months or even years. Think about how long it takes to settle into a new house, for example, or a new route to work. Long after we should have rewired our brains, we still find ourselves looking for the forks in the wrong drawer, or getting off at the wrong subway stop. And it makes us tired, because every time we have to substitute a real decision, one that requires our attention and consideration instead of allowing us to operate on autopilot, it takes energy.

But here’s the good news. According to Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, “Routine basically gives us the mental freedom to think about what’s actually important…Almost every single species that has survived has the ability to take routines and make them automatic. That way you have cognitive power to invent spears and fire and video games.”

In other words, all of those routines are liberating space in our brains that could and should be used to contemplate change.

My own view is that we are far too wedded to the notion that change is threatening, and that it prevents many of us from reaching our full potential. There is no question that change is difficult (we will all spend a lot of time looking for forks and getting off at the wrong stop, no matter how adaptive we are), but it is also extraordinarily energizing.

This is not to say that I wake up every day and think, “Excellent! Another day of adapting to unfamiliar experiences!” I find change tiring too, even though I have come to appreciate and even seek it. But the rewards of change are as large as your own imagination.

This week, the first copy of the US edition of The Hole in the Middle rolled off the presses and arrived in the mail. Here is a picture of me, right after I opened the envelope. Do you see the same thing that I see? Wonder, astonishment, joy, and more than a little disbelief?

That’s what change looks like.

Love,

Kate

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Second Novel Syndrome

December 1, 2015

My office

Dear Reva,

This is an important date for me. December 1^st was the deadline for my second novel, a project that caused me untold angst. And I’m happy to report that I made it! I handed in my first draft to my agent on Friday.

Here is something you will rarely hear me say, and which I should say (which we should all say) far more often: I’m really, really proud of myself.

Second novels, as you may know, are notoriously challenging. Writers who have been fortunate enough to experience a success with their first book often struggle with their second, so much so that the phenomenon has nicknames, including The Sophomore Slump and Second Novel Syndrome. In the writer Anne Lamott’s words, “The beginnings of a second and third book are full of spirit and confidence because you have been published, and false starts and terror because you now have to prove yourself again.”

And that’s without getting divorced and moving in the middle of the book.

Now I will wait to hear from my agent, who will tell me honestly what she thinks. And I will either rewrite at that point, or we will submit the manuscript to my Canadian and American editors. And pretty soon, I’ll have to start thinking about my next novel (although I have some ideas taking shape already).

I love that you passed me a note in class for your last letter. I should say that I make a point of promising the men I date not to write about them here (although the person I’m currently seeing says, “Why not?”). But let me offer some observations in the abstract.

Dating at midlife is simultaneously easier and more complicated that it was in our twenties. It is easier because we know ourselves better and because we are looking, for the most part, for simple companionship. It is more complicated because we all have baggage. It is easier because people are comfortable in their bodies and know what to do with them. It is more complicated because people have significant responsibilities, and need to shoehorn dating into an otherwise full life.

But overall? It’s pretty fun.

Love,

Kate

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Brave New World

November 17, 2015

Dear Reva,

You’ve been on my mind all week, since I learned of your arthritis diagnosis. In the same week, a dear friend lost her sister to cancer.

A couple of letters ago, I talked about the shiny upside of midlife, the ushering-in of a life stage rich in professional opportunity and success. Here, though, we have the dark side of the midlife coin, where things start to go wrong with kids, marriages, aging parents, and our own surprisingly fragile health.

You will, of course, address this challenge with your characteristic grit. But I so wish that you didn’t have to. I know you will tell me if there is anything I can do, at any time, to help you.

I have news of my own. I’ve started…dating.

I was never very adept at dating, truthfully. In fact, I managed to avoid dating entirely in high school, then Macgyvered a few university hook-ups into relationships, and then went to law school and married a classmate. And now I’m going out for coffee with strangers, and remembering why it was easier to do this in university, surrounded by packs of friends and fortified with bad beer.

It is also, I have to say, a total paradigm shift to date without any objective other than companionship. I’m not looking for a father for my children (they have one, and I’m done birthing babies). I don’t need a financial partner. And I’m not trying to assess potential, as we all had to do back in our twenties. We’re fully formed adults now, most of us having been through at least one brutal life experience. We know who we are.

And we’re online.

My god, Reva, the brave not-so-new world of online dating, that has such people in it! I am learning so much, about myself most of all. Because I am an extremely nice person, I will say no more than this: it is a whole book of its own.

And it would be a shame to waste good material.

With lots of love,

Kate

Pen Pal Project

Election Day

October 19, 2015

Dear Reva,

The fall is racing by in a blur of turkey dinners and Halloween decorations and soccer games and homework and karate lessons and puberty and literary events. And political chatter, of course, because today is the Canadian election. Have you voted yet?

On the subject of the election, I’ve obviously aged into a new demographic in the past four years: I know a statistically significant number of people running for office. As I commute across the city every day, I see people on lawn signs that I knew in law school, or in university, or in a previous career. Other friends are holding fundraisers or running campaigns.

We’ve arrived. We are officially entering our professional power years. So, what are we going to do with them?

This was, I recall, one of the reasons we started The Pen Pal Project. I haven’t spent much time talking about my career in these pages, not because I haven’t been focused on it, but because I’m superstitious about work-in-progress, and because other life events seemed more letter-worthy. But you asked in your last letter about how I write, how I keep the threads of the story from unraveling in my head when real life is grabbing at the ends and pulling.

So it seems like the right time to mention that my second novel is due at the beginning of December, and it appears that I will hit my deadline. This means two things. First, that I am writing furiously and am displaying frequent hermit-like behavior, with an occasional exception made for the aforementioned literary events (I still feel like a fan-girl, but not like an imposter, which is progress). And second, that amid all of the personal chaos of the past year, I have managed (almost) to write a book.

It occurred to me recently that the crux of identity is in the doing. That is to say, we are what we do. I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit over the course of my life asking the question Who am I and what is my purpose? Lately I’ve had very little time for that kind of reflection, and have been fixed on present-tense questions, such as How am I going to get through this? Different.

The interesting thing that happens when things fall apart is that your life boils down to certain essentials. You see a much smaller circle of people, you participate in a much smaller range of activities, and you engage in a narrower set of intellectual pursuits. You do not have the energy to perform. You are doing only what is essential for your survival, and it reveals an incredible amount about your identity without any effort on your part.

I’m a writer. I discovered this because even in the worst moments of my life, I kept writing. Characters pushed themselves into my imagination, and even when I was too tired to write their stories, I could still find the energy to write my own, here in these letters to you. So I’m electing to spend my power years writing. What are you going to do?

Love,

Kate

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I Can See The Moon

October 6, 2015, my office

Dear Reva,

I passed a big milestone this weekend.

It’s been a year since my husband told me he was leaving. At the time, it came as an extremely unpleasant surprise, and today it still remains something of a mystery.

I’m not going to say that my house burned down and now I can see the moon (as the saying goes). No one wants her house to burn down, and you can see the moon just fine by stepping outside once in a while (except when there is a rare and beautiful eclipse, in which case you can’t see it at all). I don’t think that change, even necessary change, requires a catastrophe to bring it about, nor do I believe that every catastrophe is for the best, necessarily.

But if your house/life burns down, the process of rebuilding is intensely conscious. The life you had before the disaster took shape organically, over many years, and it reflected both the compromises of partnership, and the preferences of your younger self. The life you now contemplate will express your present identity. So what should it look like?

Adversity isn’t identity, and no one would want it to be. We are infinitely greater than the sum of our negative experiences. But it is human nature to reject the idea of pain without purpose. I think that our sense of a true self, of an identity, often comes into focus through our attempts to understand painful events. (On this topic, I was very moved by Andrew Solomon’s thoughts on how the worst moments in our lives make us who we are.)

When you emerge from the shell of your former life, you feel as you imagine a newborn must feel: dependent, disoriented, frightened, and battered by overwhelming emotions and sensations. But then, as your agency returns, you begin to observe your own actions with interest. Freed of patterns and routines, how do you choose to spend your time? With whom? Which activities do you anticipate with pleasure, and which ones with dread? And from these basic cues, you can begin to build a life around your identity, instead of crafting an identity to fit your life.

I wouldn’t have chosen the fire, but it has generated a new life that is wholly mine. Because if your house burns down, why content yourself with simply looking at the moon? Why not shoot for it?

Yours,

Kate

P.S. God, yes, it’s messy.

P.P.S. Really looking forward to seeing you in person (!) at the International Festival of Authors party. Both of us in the same room at the same time: an event almost as rare as a lunar eclipse. We will need photographic evidence.

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Read Reva’s last letter here.

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My Midlife Reading List

July 14, 2015

My office

Dear Reva,

You made my week by asking me for a midlife crisis reading list. It has been a pure pleasure to spend time thinking about the books that have helped me navigate this life stage.

As an aside, I would add that part of the challenge of these years seems to be the struggle to chart your course while being battered by external storms that rise unexpectedly. Take my tennis group, for example. I play tennis with a small, much-loved group of friends every week. All of us, of course, are grappling in various ways with professional ambitions, and often we talk about our work and the manifold frustrations inherent in it. But over the past six months, personal events have overshadowed professional concerns: my husband left me, R’s mother had a stroke, M’s sister fell into a coma from a brain tumour, and K had to stop playing for a few months to do intensive physio on her shoulder.

All of that to say that while planning is essential for all kinds of professional and personal achievement, my own midlife experience has forced me to grapple with the problem of how to carry on when life refuses to conform to any plan you’ve ever made. At this stage, my midlife journey is primarily an interior one, about letting go of perfectionism, and accepting impermanence, and being in the here and now, and looking within for support and validation, and knowing that the only thing I actually control is my own behaviour. All of which is, for me, really, really hard.

There are a few approaches to reading as a cure, or bibliotherapy as some call it. One approach is to read fiction about people going through their own midlife crises, which will either cause you to nod in recognition, or feel better about your life in comparison to the lives on the page. Some books in this vein that I deeply love include Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad, Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You.

Another approach is to read memoirs by people who have soldiered through midlife and emerged as stronger, wiser and more authentic humans. I spend an entire week on vacation last year reading nothing but memoirs by funny women. It did more good than the sun and margaritas. Here I recommend Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck (and also Heartburn, which is supposed to be fiction but isn’t), Tina Fey’s Bossypants, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, and Amy Poehler’s Yes, Please.

And lastly, there is the nakedly self-help category. I was never a big fan of self-help books, but have read more of them in the past year than ever before. I still wouldn’t describe myself as a self-help convert, but I have huge admiration for Pema Chodron and Brené Brown. In particular, Chodron’s The Places That Scare You and When Things Fall Apart, and Brown’s Daring Greatly have prompted me to have some useful and enlightening conversations with myself. And I love Brown’s famous TED talk, which describes her own midlife crisis.

While you are loading up on reading material, don’t forget that every midlife crisis needs a playlist. I – surprise! – favour power songs by women. Try Sara Bareilles’ Brave, Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten, Alanis Morissette’s You Learn, Katy Perry’s Roar and Rachel Platten’s Fight Song for starters. With the right soundtrack, anything is possible.

Yours,

Kate

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Read Reva’s last letter here.

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Turning The Page

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

My office

Dear Reva,

Moving day is on Thursday, and I am sitting in a half-empty house. I’m moving to a lovely but much smaller house, and I’ve given away a lot of furniture, all of which was picked up over the weekend. New, appropriately sized couches and chairs and tables will start arriving once we move, but for now, we are rattling around in mostly vacant rooms. We are all adapting surprisingly well to this physical evidence of a turning of a page in our family’s story.

I am thinking, of course, of the events of the past eight months that have brought me to this moment. I remember the shock, bewilderment and searing grief of a husband’s unexpected departure. I remember the blur of months spent putting one foot in front of the other, of just surviving to do it again the next day. I remember the agonizing conversion of a longstanding partnership into a set of legal obligations. I remember my children’s pain and my own. I remember the friends who drifted away, compounding the loss.

But I remember, too, everyone who swarmed around, who called, who let me cry on the phone and in restaurants and in the car and on the tennis court – everywhere, basically – and who acted like it was no big deal that I was leaking constantly, and who fed me dinner and wrote me notes, and who told me that I was fabulous and that I would heal, over and over again. I remember who picked me up when I couldn’t get off the floor on Boxing Day. I remember who took me to the park and found a patch of sunlight to warm me in the dying days of autumn. I remember who left a week of dinners on my doorstep. I remember who took me out for my birthday, and made sure I had a lovely present. I remember each and every act of kindness and love, and I am so grateful. I can’t tell you.

Which brings me to a subject I’ve thought quite a bit about over the past year: the difference between joy and happiness. No one, least of all me, would say that this has been a happy year. But it has been full of moments of unadulterated joy.

I am a big proponent of the cultivation of joy. It seems to me that joy is the great casualty of working motherhood, and of modern life more generally. We treat joy as a frivolity, a distraction from the real work of securing solid, foundational happiness. And that is a great pity, because, as the late, great Maya Angelou observed: “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.”

I’ve come to appreciate the value of joy this year, so much so that I made a video about it.

I am, by nature, quite a joyful person. And this means that even if my life turns to absolute shit in an objective sense, I can still manage to find pleasure in small things. Joy doesn’t require big plans or radical changes. Joy isn’t ambitious. And that means – listen carefully – it isn’t something we can fail at.

Isn’t that a project we should all get behind?

Yours,

Kate

Read Reva’s last letter here.

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