Casabo Community is about helping you find your direction when life changes, feels uncertain or calls you towards something new. Through The Compass by Casabo, facilitated circles and a supportive community, we create space to pause, reflect, connect and take your next steps with greater clarity and intention. Stay in touch.
🌅 When did life become such hard work?
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If you are not interested in our 🌅 Sunday Reflection but would like to keep receiving the emails you initially signed up for, Hi Reader Someone said something to me this week that gave me a bit of a shock. We were chatting in one of the community groups we lead when one person said to me, "I remember you saying that when I first knew you 30 years ago." My immediate thought was: "You didn't know me when I was a little girl!" And then I did the maths..... Thirty years ago I was 31. Definitely not a little girl! I genuinely laughed when I realised what my brain had done, but it got me thinking about age and how strangely we experience it. I'm 61 now, but I don't walk around feeling 61. In fact, my friend Suzi and I sometimes find ourselves sitting in a café here in Portugal referring to "those older people over there" before realising they're probably about the same age as us. And yet, when I think about the woman I was at 31, I wouldn't actually want to go back and be her again. I feel more comfortable in my own skin now. I understand myself better. I've made mistakes, changed my mind, learned some lessons the hard way and discovered what matters to me. Sometimes we look back and think, "If only I'd known then what I know now." But of course, I couldn't have known then what I know now. I hadn't lived it yet. Even relationships are like that. I've sometimes wondered what would have happened if Phil and I had met much earlier in life. The truth is, I don't think we'd have ended up together. We were different people then. We both needed the lives we lived before we were ready to meet each other as the people we'd become. I've been thinking about this for another reason too. Phil and I are working on something new at the moment that we're incredibly excited about, and occasionally a thought pops into my head: wouldn't it have been wonderful if I'd started doing this in my thirties? I'd have had another 30 years! But then I realise I couldn't have started it at 31 because I wasn't this version of me at 31. What I'm excited about now has grown out of all those intervening years - the jobs I've done, the people I've met, the difficult chapters, the unexpected ones and all the learning along the way. At an age when we're traditionally supposed to be thinking about winding down towards retirement, I don't feel as though I'm winding down at all. Quite the opposite. I feel as though I'm beginning another chapter. And I rather like thinking about life that way. Not as a straight road with education at one end, retirement at the other and a predetermined timetable of what we're supposed to do in between, but as a succession of chapters in which we keep learning, changing and beginning again. Who knows what can happen in the next ten years? Or twenty? Perhaps there are things I will do at 71 that I couldn't possibly do at 61 because I haven't become that woman yet. I rather hope so. So perhaps the gentle thought for this week is simply this: What if your age isn't a reason why it's too late to begin... but part of what makes you ready to begin now? Live as you dream ❤️ Kimberley and Phil |
Kimberley and Phil Cooklin
Casabo Community is about helping you find your direction when life changes, feels uncertain or calls you towards something new. Through The Compass by Casabo, facilitated circles and a supportive community, we create space to pause, reflect, connect and take your next steps with greater clarity and intention. Stay in touch.
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