“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.” - Bill Gates
Big-event anniversaries are weird. On one hand, they’re arbitrary and ultimately meaningless — a handpicked number of squares on a calendar grid. On the other hand, they’re useful mile markers that help us to look back on how far we’ve come over a particular span of time.
I’ve had a string of them recently.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about reaching 1,000 days alcohol-free. There’s something about that big round number with all of those zeroes that feels worth celebrating, although the real accomplishment, the real work, happened in the days, months and years leading up to my last drink. It kind of doesn’t matter exactly how far behind me it is now.
Milestone number two: One year ago on September 15 a surgeon removed my left breast, and with it a cancerous tumor that would otherwise have ended me. Recovery was painful, and painfully slow. I thought I might never be able to lift my arm above my shoulder, and now here I am able to dance, do yoga, lift my own luggage, and wave to a friend, way over there. You could say I’m back to my old self, except of course I’m not at all who I was before cancer happened. There was more slowness and stillness in this past year than I’ve been used to, and paradoxically it feels like it sailed by.
And the biggie: in a couple of weeks I’ll hit the ten-year anniversary of launching my publishing company. That one really does feel like a big deal. I can’t say we’re where I hoped we would be by now. I do wish I was more prosperous, closer to my big-picture vision for Wonderwell, but on October 3, I’ll join the ranks of entrepreneurs who survived their first decade in business, and that is no small feat.
Ten years. I’m turning that number over in my mind like a smooth, heavy river stone. It represents one-fifth of my life.
So this is what ten years feel like.
Ten years ago, I was forty-two. My daughter was still at home and in high school. We were both launching ourselves into new beginnings: her on the precipice of university and adulthood, me embarking on a journey of entrepreneurship and life as an empty-nester. In the intervening years I’ve had a brief, ill-fated marriage. I moved from Vancouver to Los Angeles. Rebranded my business, lived through a pandemic, got sober, survived breast cancer, created a podcast, and started sharing my writing here. Bill Gates’ aphorism was right in my case; I underestimated all that I could and would do in that decade, even if a lot of it was unplanned.
But maybe these backward-gazing commemorations are more about looking forward.
Where will I be ten years from now? Who will I be?
Ten years from now, I’ll be sixty-two, which sounds very old to me. Certainly old enough to have all my shit together in ways I don’t now. Sometimes I get nervous about the years that lie ahead. How will I get it all done? Where will I be? How will I feel about myself, about life? There are only ten summers, ten New Years, ten birthdays between now and then. Only ten years to achieve the creative goals I hope to have reached by sixty-two. Ten years to find a person who wants to do relationship with me in a way that feels nourishing and secure. Ten years to get financially ready for retirement. It doesn’t feel like nearly enough time for all of that. Ten years from now is already breathing down my neck.
Time is a trickster. I often feel like I’m progressing too slowly, but when things start changing fast I want to slam on the brakes. It’s too much, too soon.
Looking back, what I see now is that although my company's growth — and my own growth as a human — has been slow, too slow for my liking, I myself was moving fast, too fast for my liking. Always manic. Always rushing. Never caught up enough to savor the moment or take a restorative break.
I’ve just returned from my hometown Vancouver, where I was visiting friends and my mother, and catching the tail end of summer with a day at the beach. Standing on the shoreline of the next ten years, the best word to describe the way I feel is oceanic. The ocean is in constant motion, yet also immovable. You’ll find it in the same place it was last year and a hundred years ago. I feel that way too. I am changing so much right now, with new ideas in my head and new feelings in my heart. My face is changing, my body is changing. Yet here I am, immovable in my center and looking out at the world from this same essential place.
There is still anxiety in me, but nothing like I once experienced. It’s more of a phantom limb feeling now. An old neighborhood I no longer live in.
The Maggie I was ten or thirty years ago is loud in my heart, constantly trying to warn me of this or that potential peril. She means well, but she gives poor advice. She’s nervous about every little thing. Money. Health. Love. And she’s ignorant of what comes next. Of course she is. She’s never been to the future, so she interprets the world in front of me through the lens of what no longer is.
As I walked back from my friend Karen’s the other night under an inky sky, through a neighborhood very much like the one I grew up in, I reached for the hand of my sixty-two year old self. She already lives in the future. She knows how it all turns out and what moves were necessary to get there. She is wiser than I am today. She cares for me in a maternal, big sisterly kind of way. I can lean on her. I’m taking my cues from her now, following her gentle directives. Fly to Vancouver, she says. Ask that person for support. Read this. Eat that.
She tells me: Maggie, be new to this day. Be new to each moment. Slow down to go fast.
Where are you feeling like life is moving too fast? That it’s too noisy, too crowded, too demanding, too costly? That there’s too much to process, and you can’t keep up with the changes?
And where are you feeling impatient, like you’re falling behind? Can you permit yourself the luxury of reveling in this moment, in the pockets of stillness in your days, in inner reflection? In the small, mundane moments with your mother, your friends, your children? Do you believe you have time for a nap when you need one?
What if life is never actually too slow, and never too fast?
Dylan Thomas urges us to “rage against the dying of the light”, but I say, fuck that. Not only am I going gentle into this good night, but also going gentle into this good day.
I am heeding Annie Dillard, who said: “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives.” The way I want to spend the days of my life is to be at peace. I’m integrating my yesterday self, letting her dissolve into the ether if what was, which is the same as the ether of what will be. My body and mind know how to do this instinctively; I can stop my frantic paddling and just float. Take it in smooth, easy strokes, let this vessel carry me where I need to go. There is delight in surrender, in being carried by the tides.
xo
This card from the Starseed Oracle deck captures today’s mood perfectly. I offer it to you as permission to trust the flow of life. Words below are by Rebecca Campbell, who created the deck with Danielle Noel.
Trust the Timing
Trust the wave you came in on. Time is not running out.
So often, those who feel like they’re here for a reason sense that time is running out, and they spend their life worrying that they might miss their moment. But the only way to miss your life or your moment is to spend your time worrying about missing it. It’s never too late to answer a calling, and you’re never too old.
The tides of your life are orchestrated to come in and out in perfect unison. Don’t race ahead and ride a wave that was never meant for you. You’ll waste your precious time and energy when instead you could be enjoying your life. Everything has a season and you’re being called to trust the one you’re in. Don’t let impatience, comparison, competition or paranoia disturb the seeds.
It seems that everyone has anxiety these days, constantly scanning for something they might have missed or a possible threat. Keeping our mind and body pointed in the same direction as our soul is near impossible at such reactive speeds. Right now, you’re being reminded to take a breath and trust the wave you came in on. To trust the season you’re in. Time isn’t running out. There’s plenty of time. There’s no rush and it’s never too late.