You Don’t Need a Different Life. You Need New Eyes for This One

I’m loving this new season lately.

It feels almost rebellious to say that out loud.

Women aren’t exactly taught to look forward to middle age (I just turned 45 by the way, I still feel 22). We’re taught to brace for it, prepare for it, fight it. There are creams for the lines gathering around our eyes, supplements for the hormones shifting beneath our skin, diets for the waistlines softening despite eating the same things we’ve eaten for twenty years. Somewhere around forty, it feels as though an entire industry pulls up a chair, studies our faces and bodies, and whispers, You should probably do something about that.

As though aging is something happening to us instead of something we are privileged to live through.

But lately, I don’t feel like something is being taken from me. I feel like something is being handed back.

I couldn’t name it at first. I only knew there was a loosening happening inside me. I’m more at home in my own skin, even as that skin changes. I’m less apologetic. More curious. I have zero tolerance for baloney and, instead of sitting there with a pinched expression on my face, I’m finally willing to say so. I’m also more willing to be terrible at something long enough to discover whether I love it.

I want to write books and learn Hebrew words that send me digging through commentaries for hours. I want to smear watercolor across thick white paper and watch one color bleed unexpectedly into another. I want to get stronger, fill notebooks and wander library aisles with no particular book in mind. I pick up pennies because copper looks beautiful piled inside the teal bowl I found, and apparently finding a penny in a parking lot has become a tiny treasure hunt.

I want to stand beside oceans and notice what grows along Nebraska roadsides. I want to take the long way home when the western sky catches fire. I want to make things simply because something inside me wants to create them, without needing every action to accomplish something.

I don’t feel like I’m winding down.

I feel like I’m waking up.

A Name for What I Was Feeling

Then TikTok, because apparently it occasionally gives me something besides another water bottle I absolutely do not need, handed me two words: Second Spring.

I stopped scrolling.

The phrase is often used today in conversations about traditional Chinese medicine and menopause. Instead of viewing this transition solely through what a woman’s body loses, Second Spring offers another way to imagine it: a crossing into a season of renewed vitality, wisdom and possibility.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

We have so much language for what disappears from a woman as she ages. Fertility. Collagen. Hormones. Metabolism. Smooth skin. Youth. We have an entire vocabulary for loss and hardly any language for what arrives.

And something does arrive.

You reach an age when you’ve lived long enough to know which things deserve your worry and which absolutely do not. You’ve made enough mistakes to know another probably won’t kill you. You’ve survived enough opinions to realize they aren’t all worth carrying. After years spent becoming what everyone needed, you finally begin asking what God put inside you.

I don’t want to be twenty-five again. Dear Lord, absolutely not.

I don’t want the insecurity back or the frantic need to be liked. I don’t want to stare at a text message wondering whether a period instead of an exclamation point means someone is mad at me. I don’t want to lie awake replaying conversations or relearn lessons life has already taught me the expensive way.

I don’t want to relive every season simply because it was beautiful, either. There were years when motherhood required nearly every fiber of me. I poured myself into it. There was staggering beauty there, but there was exhaustion too. Both things can be true.

Now my youngest stands on the edge of high school graduation, and I find myself savoring these moments differently. I don’t have to claw backward toward the beginning to prove I loved it. I can love where we are. I can love where I am.

I don’t want to become the woman I used to be.

I’m curious about the woman I haven’t become yet.

What If Our Lives Are Supposed to Get Bigger?

Christian author and business coach Alli Worthington talks about one of the dangers of midlife being the temptation to let our worlds become smaller. We stop going, trying and risking. We decide we’re too old, too tired or too late, and stay safely inside the borders of what we already know.

Her challenge to women is simple: “Expand your territory.”

Somewhere along the way, many of us absorbed the idea that expansion belongs to the young. Twenty-five is for starting businesses. Thirty is for chasing dreams. Forty-five is for being responsible. Fifty-five is for settling down.

Who decided that?

What if forty-five is when you start the company because now you know how you want to run one? What if fifty is when you write the book because you’ve finally lived enough to know what you want to say? What if sixty is when you learn to paint and seventy is when you board the plane?

Perhaps the years we’ve been taught to view as evidence that we’re too old are precisely the years that equip us for what comes next.

Alli Worthigton describes women as builders (Definitely go listen to her podcast), and I love the idea that a builder expects to encounter things she doesn’t know yet. She assumes she can learn. She enters rooms before she feels completely ready. When she encounters something difficult, she doesn’t decide, Not me.

She thinks, Not yet.

Not me closes a door.

Not yet leaves your hand on the knob.

Maybe this is a season for opening doors again for you as much as it is for me.

When Familiar Starts Looking Ordinary

For much of adulthood, we build. Relationships, careers, homes, families, businesses, routines and retirement accounts. We make dinners and appointments and plans. We remember birthdays, passwords and where someone left the thing they swear they already looked for.

We become extraordinarily good at carrying a life. Somewhere in all that carrying, though, we can begin to believe the building is finished.

This is the house. The work. The body. The marriage. The town.

This is my life.

The danger isn’t the ordinary life. It’s that familiarity has a sneaky way of making abundance look ordinary. We stop seeing what is in front of us because we’ve seen it a thousand times before. Wonder begins to feel like something that happens somewhere else, to somebody else.

I know something about that.

I live in Nebraska and still manage to look for the ocean everywhere.

Give me a body of water and something inside me exhales. I love the sound of waves folding themselves onto shore and a horizon so wide my eyes cannot find its ending. There is a strange comfort in standing beside something enormous enough to remind me how small I am and, somehow, how alive.

I’ve looked at Nebraska plenty of times and wished for somewhere else. But Nebraska keeps teaching me to look again.

There is an hour in the evening when the light falls sideways across the fields and everything turns gold. Tall grasses catch it first. Cottonwood leaves flip their silver bellies toward an approaching storm. Dust rises behind a truck on a gravel road and hangs suspended in the light. Some nights the horizon burns orange, softens into pink and finally gives way to violet, and the ordinary field across the road becomes something almost too beautiful to explain.

It was there yesterday. And the day before that.

I simply wasn’t always looking.

Friend, you don’t need a different life. You need eyes to see the wonder and grace in this one.

The Roots We Couldn’t See Growing

For years, I thought a beautiful life was something you constructed correctly. Make good choices. Work hard. Love your people. Keep the plates spinning. Get through this hard season and eventually you’ll arrive at the good part.

But what if this is the good part?

Not because everything is good. It isn’t. By this age, most of us have lived enough life to stop pretending otherwise.

We’ve stood beneath fluorescent hospital lights waiting for someone to tell us what happens next. We’ve sat in funeral homes where the air smells faintly of flowers and coffee. We’ve watched relationships change shape. We’ve carried prayers answered beautifully and others that seemed to disappear into the ceiling. We’ve watched plans unravel. We’ve lived inside bodies that have surprised us, disappointed us, changed beneath us and carried us anyway.

We’ve survived some heat.

Jeremiah describes the one who trusts in God as a tree planted beside water, sending its roots toward the stream.

“But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord,
    whose confidence is in him.
 They will be like a tree planted by the water
    that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
    its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
    and never fails to bear fruit.” (Jeremiah 17:7-8).

Heat comes. Drought comes. But somewhere beneath the dirt, where nobody can see, its roots know where the water is. I understand that differently now.

When I was younger, I knew a lot of things about God. Now there are things I know because I’ve lived long enough to need Him to be who He says He is.

There are things you learn about God after the thing you were certain would never happen, happens. Things you learn in the silence after a prayer you begged Him to answer differently. Things you learn when your strength finally gives out and you discover something is still holding you.

Perhaps that’s what has been happening beneath us while we thought we were merely getting older.

Roots.

Invisible and uncelebrated, pushing through dark earth toward water.

The first spring is tender. The second has roots.

Carolyn Castleberry Hux points out that a woman arriving at this crossroads in her forties or fifties could still have decades ahead of her. But now she enters them carrying what her younger self couldn’t possibly possess: experience, perspective, scars, stories and proof that God has met her before.

Perhaps we haven’t missed our chance.

Perhaps we’ve been gathering what we’ll need for it.

Becoming a Beginner Again

Maybe that’s why I’m finding so much delight in being a beginner.

I bought watercolors, and I am absolutely terrible at them.

I love them anyway.

I love watching pigment bloom when it touches wet paper. I love discovering that something can turn out entirely different from what I intended and still be beautiful. I pull weeds from the tall grasses in front of the house with dirt beneath my fingernails and remember how good it feels to touch the earth. I wander the library as though someone has handed me a hundred doors and said I can open whichever one I want.

I buy Lisa Frank cards and stationery because apparently the little girl in me still believes rainbow-colored everything is magnificent. I pick up pennies because there is something ridiculous and wonderful about being delighted by one cent. I find the funniest post cards and get excited about sending them to friends and family. Who does that now days?

On quiet evenings, when the Nebraska wind finally stops trying to relocate everything we own to Kansas, I practice archery in the field and channel my inner Merida. Sometimes the Brave soundtrack follows me into the car afterward because being a grown woman means nobody gets to tell me I can’t.

These things aren’t important.

Except I think they are.

Delight is a form of paying attention.

I spent a lot of years paying attention to what everybody else needed. There is something holy about discovering God did not create us merely to be useful. We are allowed to be curious. To play. To make something that never becomes a product. To love something without being good at it.

And we’re still allowed to be ambitious.

Not the frantic ambition that needs everyone to notice. I mean the quieter kind that wakes you at three in the morning with an idea. The kind that makes you wonder whether you could actually write the book, start the business, launch the ministry, earn the degree or make the art you’ve been carrying around inside you.

Dawn Barton calls midlife a “pivot point.” I like that because a pivot isn’t an ending. One foot remains planted while you turn toward another direction.

You aren’t beginning from nothing. You’re beginning with everything you’ve gathered. At twenty-five, I had energy. Now I have evidence.

I know failure isn’t fatal. Embarrassment passes. Plans change. God redirects. There are worse things than looking foolish, and I’m beginning to believe one of them is reaching the end of my life with something still buried inside me because I decided I was too old to try.

So the question has changed.

I’m no longer asking, How do I hold on to who I was?

I’m asking, What has God placed in my hands now?

Spring Never Arrives All at Once

Maybe you don’t know the answer yet.

That’s okay. Spring doesn’t arrive all at once.

I know this because I live in Nebraska, where spring has the emotional stability of a toddler. One afternoon it’s seventy degrees and we’re dragging patio furniture outside. Forty-eight hours later we’re scraping ice from the windshield, personally offended by the betrayal.

But beneath all that weather, the earth knows what it’s doing.

The frost loosens its grip. Soil softens. Tiny green shoots shoulder their way through dirt that looked dead a week ago. Buds swell along branches that spent months looking like bones against a gray sky. The grasses return so quietly that one morning you look outside and realize the whole ditch has changed.

Nothing announces itself.

It simply begins.

I wonder how many seasons I called barren because I couldn’t see what was happening beneath the surface. Perhaps some of the years I thought were taking things from me were actually putting things into me: wisdom hard won, tenderness that survived disappointment, discernment born from getting things wrong, courage that didn’t arrive until after fear, a sense of humor I absolutely earned and a little holy stubbornness about how I want to spend the years ahead.

Scripture is full of women whose lives refuse to cooperate with the world’s preferred timeline. Sarah. Elizabeth. Anna.

God has never seemed particularly interested in our obsession with being early.

Why would I assume He is finished creating in me?

I Will Not Ask September to Become June

That is what I want from this Second Spring.

I don’t want to spend it preserving the first one. I don’t want to stand in September demanding June back.

Have you ever really looked at a Nebraska field near harvest?

By then, almost everything has changed. The soft green is gone. The stalks have toughened beneath months of sun and wind. The grasses have turned the color of honey. Seed heads bow toward the earth, heavy with what they’ve carried into being. The fields rustle differently now, dry and papery, whispering against one another when the wind moves through.

The landscape looks older because it is older.

And it is breathtaking.

The field doesn’t apologize for becoming September. It doesn’t look back toward June and wonder where its green went. It doesn’t mistake ripening for ruin.

It stands beneath that enormous Nebraska sky, golden and weathered, carrying seed.

I keep coming back to that image.

Carrying seed.

Everything changes. Our faces, bodies, dreams and the lives surrounding us will keep changing no matter how tightly we try to hold them still.

But changing is not disappearing.

Aging is not becoming empty.

Some things grow only after we’ve lived long enough to carry them.

So I want books stacked beside my bed and dirt beneath my fingernails. I want watercolor stains and copper pennies and notebooks filled with words I almost didn’t write. I want oceans whenever I can reach them and Nebraska sunsets when I cannot. I want to laugh loudly, keep asking questions about God and remain willing to be terrible at new things.

I want to build things too. Another book. Another business. Maybe something I haven’t imagined yet.

I want to enter rooms where I don’t know everything. Learn technology that makes me mutter under my breath. Meet women who know things I don’t. Ask questions. Take chances. Fail at something and discover the earth still turns the next morning.

I want my territory to expand, not shrink.

Because perhaps a Second Spring isn’t another chance to be young.

Perhaps it is something far better.

It is the chance to be fully here, with enough years behind us to know what matters and enough life ahead of us to do something about it.

Friend, you don’t need a different life.

Look again.

The ground beneath your feet isn’t empty. The years behind you weren’t wasted. Your roots have been growing in places nobody could see, and there are still seeds in your hands.

So let June be June.

Let September turn gold.

Let the lines around your eyes deepen from all the years you were here to witness.

And when the world tells you your spring has passed, don’t waste your breath arguing.

Start the business. Write the book. Take the class. Buy the paints. Board the plane. Open the door.

Plant something.

There is still time for an entire field to grow.

Still Becoming: 30 Journal Prompts for an Honest Life.

If this one hit home, my free devotional Still Becoming: 30 Journal Prompts for an Honest Life was made for seasons exactly like this — honest questions for women learning to unbecome. Grab it here: https://mailchi.mp/1c3cbd7a2313/pgbjupvnpd

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