Starting Over

It's never too late to question the assumptions that shape your life

 

A friend once told me a story about a mother who always cut the end off a roast before putting it into the oven every Sunday.

One day her daughter asked why.

"I don't know," she replied. "Because my mother always did it."

Curious, the daughter asked her grand-mother.

The answer was simple.

"We had a very small oven."

What had begun as a practical solution had quietly become a family tradition. Three generations were cutting perfectly good meat from their roast for a reason that no longer existed.

We smile at stories like that, but many of us do exactly the same thing with our lives.

We follow rules that nobody consciously chose. We accept limitations that may once have been true but no longer are. We inherit assumptions about what people like us can do, where people like us belong, and what is possible at our age, income level or stage of life.

Sometimes the most important question we can ask is:

Who told me that?

After our second child was born, people told my wife and me that we could not possibly afford to have any more children on a teacher's salary. Yet somehow we ended up with four wonderful children. There was never an abundance of money, but there was always enough.

At fifty-two, people told me I was too old to move country and start again. Nevertheless, we sold our house, sold our car, packed up our lives and moved to Berlin with four children and no job and no friends waiting for us when we arrived.

Now, at sixty-five, I hear different versions of the same story. I'm told I'm getting too old for sport. Too old for travel. Too old for major change. Too old to start something new.

Yet I still alternate between jogging and the gym most days. This autumn I will visit Thailand for the first time. And after decades working as a teacher, trainer and pastor, I have started writing novels. An each change, whilst never easy, has massively enriched my life.

This is not because I am unusually brave. Nor because I have some secret source of energy. It is because I have gradually learned to be suspicious of other people's limitations when they are projected on to me, presented as my own.

Many of us spend years living according to expectations we never consciously chose. Parents have expectations. Teachers have expectations. Employers have expectations. Friends have expectations. Society certainly has expectations.

After a while, those voices become so familiar that we mistake them for our own.

The problem is not that other people sometimes give bad advice. It is that we stop asking ourselves what we actually want.

That question requires silence: a long walk without headphones. Time alone with a notebook. Reading books that expand rather than shrink your horizons. Meditation, prayer, reflection or simply sitting quietly long enough to hear your own thoughts beneath the noise of everyday life.

The answers rarely arrive all at once. But they do arrive.

And when they do, they often reveal a simple truth:

You do not have to keep living the life that somebody else designed for you.

Life is astonishingly short. We get one chance. One brief appearance on this extraordinary planet. That does not mean making reckless decisions or chasing every impulse. It does mean having the courage to examine the assumptions that govern your life and asking whether they still deserve to be there.

So, let me encourage you. If you are contemplating a daunting change in your life, even if you are over 60, let me encourage you to go for it. You probably have so much to gain, and little to lose. 

In the next few blog posts, I will be exploring some practical ways of making significant life changes, including moving abroad, starting again in a new place, and building a life that feels more intentionally chosen.

Because sometimes the biggest change begins with a very simple question:

Who told me that?

SIMPLY. BETTER. LIVING.

The psychiatrist Carl Jung put it this way:

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."  –  Carl Jung