Achieving the milestone of 50 years is something to be celebrated. Changing lifestyles that come with the passage of time can cause you to completely re-think your life and may even inspire you to change directions. It’s important to celebrate life’s rites of passage–to be grateful for all that you have learned and gained and been given in your first fifty years and to look forward with great anticipation to the next fifty years of life.
Mindfulness Triumphs
Mark Twain wisely said, “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” Women over 50 are poised to take on the second stage of life with a lot of aplomb and passion. They have survived the passage from girlhood to adulthood. They lived and worked their way through their 20’s, 30’s and 40’s often getting married, raising children, getting divorced, becoming widows and dealing with health and financial challenges along the way.
When a woman finally achieves a ‘certain age’ she has learned for herself not to sweat the small stuff of life–and she has learned that it’s almost all small stuff. Another wonderful thing happens when a woman has reached the golden age. She can become amazingly self-assured. There’s a sexy confidence that comes from not really caring anymore what “they” will say about whatever she does. She is learning to put herself first for a change, and she is reveling in all of the new opportunities available to her at this stage of her evolution.
Celebrate your Transition
Before you launch headlong into the second stage of your life, you should take a moment and find a way to commemorate the passage of time and all that you have accomplished until now. This will also serve to inspire you to move ahead and fulfill the goals that you have set for the future.
In the book, Women’s Rites of Passage: How to Embrace Change and Celebrate Life, Abigail Brenner, MD writes, “As microcosms that mirror life itself, rites of passage are intimately tied to cycles, or stages, of life.” As you move from one stage to another, an observation of that passage serves as a bridge to carry you from the woman you have been to the woman who is still in the process of becoming.
Turning 50 can bring a woman’s focus to her mission. She may begin to hear the whispers of mortality and begin to grow concerned about her legacy and what she can do to contribute something of herself to the world. If she has raised children, they are indeed a contribution, but after they are grown and out of the house a woman may still need to find an outlet for sharing and passing on her talents, skills and passions to those coming up who are eager to learn what she learned over a lifetime.
Eileen Williams, on her blog, ‘The Fiesty Side of Fifty,’ writes, “. . . there are twenty-nine million of us boomer gals who have already celebrated our half-century birthdays. Better yet, the hormonal changes of menopause make us saucier and more outspoken than ever before.”
