Jane 
Midlife Monday thought:
Feeling lost doesn’t always mean you’ve lost your way. Sometimes it means you’re standing somewhere you’ve never been before.
There is something rather annoying about being in my midlife and wondering what I want to be now that I have retired.
Surely, by now, I should have it all worked out. I should know exactly what I am doing, where I am going and what the next ten years will look like.
Except I don’t.
Leaving work didn’t give me a beautifully organised blank canvas on which I immediately painted my second act. It gave me a blank canvas. And some days, I stare at it.
I have ideas. Lots of them. I want to write. Speak. Build businesses. Create communities. Work between Britain and Malaysia. Try things I’ve never tried before. And occasionally, all those possibilities are exhilarating. Occasionally, they’re exhausting.
But I’m beginning to realise that feeling lost doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ve taken a wrong turn. Sometimes it simply means I haven’t travelled this road before.
We talk a great deal about reinvention in midlife, as though one morning we throw away the old version of ourselves and emerge by lunchtime with a new career, fabulous hair and a fully functioning business plan. Real life isn’t quite so tidy. Transformation can be slow.
It can involve false starts, ridiculous ideas, brilliant ideas, abandoned ideas and days when your greatest achievement is answering three emails and putting the washing away.
Perhaps we need to stop treating uncertainty as failure. At 63, I am still learning, still changing and still curious.
So if you’re in midlife and wondering why you haven’t got everything figured out yet, perhaps you don’t need to. You are not a finished product. Neither am I.
And I’m beginning to think that’s one of the most exciting things about getting older.
