Spring is springing, people!
Now, minus that day-snow storm we had the other day, the one right after the back-to-back 80+ degree days, yeah that one. But old man winter is being given his eviction notice, after the audacity he had to just bum-rush his way in mid-week like that.
Spring, you delicious Babe you, stand the hell up, show up, and stay up! Pretty please.
And I don’t know how many times I have to say it but I’m not reinventing anything about me. Growing? Yes. Exploring, being more daring, stepping into things my former self would have thought I didn’t have the whatever to do it, yes. But reinvention, no.
In my Big Age it will never be about reinventing, as I don’t need to be a whole new anything. I’m going from where I am, improving on the good, and as best as I can, and as often as I can, ditching the bad and the ugly.
Labels have an unfunny way of sticking
And that includes accepting all those past labels. The ones we know about and pretend to dismiss, but are realistically more dug in than we think.
Can we leave them back in winter 2025/2026, working towards forever? Yes. But we need to do more than just try. Is it gonna be easy? Fuck no, but nothing worth it ever is. This is a one foot in front of the other type of change for many of us. The marathon over the sprint? More like two steps forward, 10 steps back, 25 sideways, 60 rounds in a dizzy circle, and then back to step one.
But quit we won’t.
And what are some of these disrespectful labels we can reflect on in our Big Age?
Remember when we were convinced, we were too young to know what we were doing.
Now somehow, we’re too old to start something new.
That we were too quiet to lead.
To now being too opinionated to collaborate… read: play nice.
How are we always too early, too late, too little, or too much?
How is it we all seemed to miss the point, age, or season, were we Goldilocks and just right?
We didn’t.
Speaking of which, when you think about it, Goldilocks herself was a literal criminal — the whole story is a lie. Breaking into someone else’s home, eating their food, sitting in their chairs, and then having the old-man-winter audacity to nap in their beds too. Yet somehow the bears were framed like the problem for coming back at the wrong time… to their own house.
Point being, maybe the whole idea of everything needing to be “just right” was nonsense from the very beginning. These labels need to be locked up, just like Goldilocks.
Hell, “lock” is literally in her name. Why didn’t we catch this before? SMH.
Aside from there being a time when we’re all too young to drive a car. That’s facts. Or sip on the alcohol left over from your parents’ parties, as your Mum takes 50 years to say goodbye to them at the door, so you and your sister, sneak sips and decide if at age 11 and 9, you prefer gin or whisky or sherry. What? Just us… oh ok then. #LyingLikeARug.
Point is, we never missed anything. We just got stuck believing and adopting other people’s norms as our own. And we didn’t just keep missing the moments, we weren’t even looking out for them.
Some of these get handed to us early in life. Some show up later, wrapped in other people’s expectations or assumptions about how things “should” look by now.
The quiet rebellion
I’m a thinker, maybe too much, and with spring taking her rightful spotlight, my mind races even more. I’ve been thinking lately about disruption, in a good way of course.
The trees in my front yard have those pretty, tiny red bud things already. Why I don’t know the name of them is beyond me and quite pathetic, really.
But as cute as they are, quiet, and demure even, underground it’s gnarly and crawling. Thick root systems have been storing energy all winter, and are getting ready to push off a billion leaves. Nothing stopped, nothing reinvented, simply Spring revealing what was already in progress. What it already was.
Honestly, how does this not feel like the best and healthiest model for all life, instead of the constant pressure to become a completely new human every few months, or at least January 1st.
Utter foolishness.
The myth of the “Best Years”
More utter foolishness we buy into, which logically most of us never really look into up until we’re in our Big Age and can actually look backward.
Even when we were young, we were told that youth is where all the opportunity lives, and all the good things happen. Now when I think about the zero bills I had, and how all my money went to clothes, shoes, travel, and eating out, I wholeheartedly agree. Or being more carefree because… umm, no bills, kids, 9-5 job, Uni classes here and there that still left ample room for clubbing and other frivolous decadences. So then it’s easy to see how we can mistake the early chapters are the true exciting ones and in comparison, everything after that is a slow slide into the background of boring responsibilities.
But those of us now lucky enough to have made it to Big Age know that story doesn’t quite hold up. Because something interesting happens with time and all the time, we just need to see it as that.
The bills are still slapping us daily, they probably always will, but we can still choose to indulge in our version of frivolous decadences. We get to make those up, live them, label-free, and with only the ones we want to do it with.
The advantage nobody mentions (or told us)
In your twenties, thirties, or whatever you still deem as ‘young‘, we’re still mapping out the world. Figuring out how to move on from zero. But it’s only once we get comfy in our Big Age do we realize we’d always be figuring something out and starting from zero on something. Learning never stops it just changes form, makes us richer, think the human form of compound interest.
So those labels can’t work or fit everything, but we couldn’t see it way back then when people were throwing them around.
Time (age) can make things better, fuller, and richer — and I’m not talking about money. But if we keep boxing ourselves into other people’s expectations, we’ll never meet our real-deal, criminal-free Goldilocks moment. It’s just not possible.
So label be damned… or sod off, as we’d say in the UK.
Wear the thing.
Try the thing.
Live the thing.
Be the thing… right now!
When you want to and can. Someone is going to love it (and comment) and someone hate it (and comment). And?
Continuing the work
Continuing the things that are working for you. Keep building your tribe and communities that support and make you richer. But also drop the stank-arse heffers that don’t. Both need to work in tandem.
No reinventing nothing. You’re growing. Growth is a verb… remember… ‘doing words.’ So heavy on the doing. This is about action.
Every time we challenge those bullshit labels and assumptions about who we’re supposed to be and when – we win.
And well, that sounds good to me, and like a bloody good season I want to be in.
