Boundlessness

Redefining restrictions and figuring out who I am

I have lived a life of service. I was raised with a strong work ethic and in a time when a person is largely defined by labels, mostly related to what they do with the hours in their days. I was raised with the idea that if you did not do anything productive or nurturing (to others, certainly not nurturing yourself) during those hours, you were a failure.

After more than six decades, this programming has become mostly hard-wired and it is challenging to overcome it on the rare occasion where you might need to do so… you know… to have a somewhat enjoyable life.

I started raising kids when I was 10 in 1971, beginning with my mother’s family and then transitioning to my own family at 16. My last child left home in 2021. If you want to math that out, I spent fifty years trying to nurture people — sometimes succeeding and often falling short.

Of course, my adult children still need support. At least, I presume they do and I give it to them whether they want it or not, whether they need it or not.

That being said, I am not one of those middle-aged parents who lives through my kids or envelopes my life around them and their relationships. Since I have six kids and I am well-connected with four of them, a decent part of my day goes into reinforcing and honoring those relationships.

But then there is all that other time…

Eric and I retired from full-time, sixty hours a week, retail sales in 2022 and now all work is online and remote, which is quite manageable. My work as an editor with Green Egg Magazine is volunteer and does not now take up much of my time.

After the jarring adjustment to not working and at the same time having no kids to take care of in person, the question came as to what I would do with my days. For the first year or so, I slept excessively, usually 10-12 hours a night. I made up for every hour of sleep deprivation I experienced as a mother. I slept in late every single morning in abject defiance of all the times I had to hear an alarm waking me up before the sun was yet on the horizon. I also sometimes napped in the day.

In my bedroom, I have two digital alarm clocks, one on each side of the bed. Why are there two? Because when I wake up in the night, I want to see what time it is without having to go to the trouble of rolling over.

I have those two digital alarm clocks but I have no idea how to set the alarm on either of them because I just do not do that. I am sure I could figure it out, having set plenty of alarm clocks in my life and alarm clocks mostly not being entirely complex pieces of machinery. I have just not had a need to do that.

Boundlessness. I’m tellin’ ya.

I am wholly tuned into the profound privilege it is for me to have the luxury of retiring and gratitude doesn’t even cover it. In fact, I am so grateful that I have this true fear of taking it for granted. The opportunity to engage the concept of boundlessness is testimony to some degree to the carefully planning of my economist husband but also just to dumb luck. And yes, gloriously, here I be. Thank you, Jesus and Eric.

If I don’t work at a traditional job and I don’t spend my days mothering and I no longer need to hibernate like a giant bear to feel rejuvenated, what then do I do?

Who am I if I don’t have those labels on me?

I spent a good bit of the intervening three years between retirement and now overcomplicating those questions by creating an unnecessary (and utterly annoying) flurry of drama around my time. “Am I doing enough?” “Am I being enough?” “Am I worthy enough without productivity?” “… and what do I do if I’m not?” More terrifying, “What if I am?”

I finished writing and then published the final three books in the Seven Sisters of Avalon series. I contrived and entirely new book called Warm Hands about the system of healing I used to spiritually cleanse others. I intentionally created work for myself to feel necessary and significant.

Eric identified what I was doing before I did and encouraged me to just relax, assuring me he did not need me to be more than I am and the world didn’t need for me to be more than I am. He told me I’d more than earned my way and should do things I enjoyed doing.

I side-eyed him, wondering if this could be a trap. “Well!!!” I said defiantly, thrusting my chin out into the world. “I am going to spend this entire day painting my picture and watching my TV shows, so there!”

“Um… OK?” He gave me the side-eye back, struggling with what the appropriate response would be to this declaration.

And I did. And nothing happened. I don’t mean “nothing happened” in the “well, nothing got done.” I mean it in the sense that the sun set, the sun came up, nothing came unhinged, nobody I knew died, and I had a nice day.

Slowly, the idea of, “What if…?” began to take hold.

Somewhere along the way, society whispered a script into our ears. It told us how to behave, how to dress, how to love, and even how to age. For many, that script becomes a cage—especially after sixty—filled with phrases like “act your age,” “slow down,” and “you’ve had your time.”

My training was the opposite. If I am able-bodied and ambulatory, I should contribute. I eventually — in all transparency, “eventually” is “earlier this afternoon” — gave myself permission to explore, to grow, to dream, or to reinvent myself outside of those tight little cubbies. Boundlessness is the radical act of reclaiming your freedom, specifically the freedom to live as expansively, creatively, and unapologetically as you wish. That is my ambition… to live as if…

By the time people are my age, most of us have built lives around “shoulds.” We’ve been the caregivers, the workers, the organizers, the fixers, and the peacekeepers. But is that a life sentence? Is that all there is? The truth is, those “shoulds” are not divine law. They are habits, expectations, and old frameworks that might no longer fit who we are becoming.

Boundlessness begins when you start asking like, “What do I actually want now?” “Who do I want to be now that I am grown up - not when I grow up.”

After sixty, we have already lived many lives: maybe as someone’s parent, someone’s partner, a professional, or a student. That doesn’t mean we are finished becoming and continuing the process of becoming doesn’t negate the joy of just being. Instead, I think that boundlessness means we can shed the identities that no longer serve us and step into some uncharted territory… maybe of being who we truly are rather than who society expects us to be.

We think of age as bringing limitation, but in many ways, what it brings is liberation — freedom from the pressure to prove anything to anyone. Freedom to live according to our own inner compass rather than society’s stopwatch or time clock. What if those restrictions we applied to ourselves in our forties and fifties are meaningless in our sixties? What if we continue to wear them like a yoke around our neck because it is what we are used to doing?

Living without imposed boundaries doesn’t mean chaos; it means wholeness. It means recognizing that neither your soul nor your value has an expiration date. Although some won’t admit it, after a certain age, we wake up in the morning and think, “Wow! I’m still here! Right on!” Each sunrise (although I certainly will not see that sunrise because I will still be sleeping) becomes an invitation to experiment, to play, to expand, and to throw off more shackles that society and our indoctrination locked onto us.

We can now lovingly release the boundaries that kept us safe and on track for success as younger people. We get to redefine what success, beauty, and vitality means for us. Boundlessness becomes a sort of personal spiritual rebellion, of saying yes to life in all its wild possibilities.

It took me a long time to get here but I am ready to the disengage from the personal agreements that no longer serve me and who I am today. The world might tell us to shrink or insist that we continue giving to it but our soul knows better—it knows how to expand and grow in the best way yet.