#38: On Wake-Up Calls and Attunement

This past week revealed to me just how much of a wake-up call our 40s can be. While one friend’s mom died after being hospitalized for weeks following a stroke, another acquaintance of mine who’s the mother of an 11-year-old died by suicide.

Yeah, it’s been a confronting, heavy time to be sure.

Our bubble gum days of back-to-school preparations look more like COVID bubble days of back-to school precautions.
Add domestic duty disputes...workplace basket upset...and, well, I wouldn’t blame you if you thought we’re in crisis.

More often than not, though, these so-called crises are actually callings. Especially in our 40s.

Our 40s are often a call for us to make new choices, to do work we really care about, to create the loving relationships we deserve, to live the purpose we yearn for.

For women with kids, especially, this is a time when many are chomping at the bit, impatient with what they often experience as having gotten knocked off track from their imagined careers and dreams as they made caregiver compromises. After a certain amount of time, they’re ready to hit their stride once again. Sure, the kids still need a lot of attention. But so do our aspirations, right?

Wondering, “Is this all there is to life? What happened to all my ambitions? All my drive?” We’re ready to start answering it. In our own way. Not some version foisted upon us by a corporate ladder or fashion rules based on age.

This is our era of becoming. Our wake-up call. So let’s explore it further.

The Happiness U-Curve research shows us that age 46 or 47 tends to be our lowest point in life...our nadir.

But I like to think of it as our wake-up call, even if most of us are too tired to be awake.

The wake-up call is not about figuring out how we could have done this or that, but about the fact that we can do everything “right” and still not always control outcomes. That’s life. It’s fragile and impermanent...and liminal. The wake-up call is also about actually pursuing the outcomes we wish to create.

If we want to live with greater meaning, purpose, and joy, then we must be as present as we can for ourselves and one another. To break a well-worn pattern, to wake up to the messages life is sending us, we have to be tuned in to what’s happening right in front of us and not numb out. That said, sometimes just sitting with our stuck feelings is what we need to do—but to observe them without getting too entangled with them...without letting them take over our lives or making them mean something about us. We can also learn to bring compassion to ourselves when we realize we may be suffering with very difficult emotions.

Waking up takes practice. It involves the body, the mind, and the spirit. It involves paying attention to ourselves and what makes us come alive, attending to each other with care and focus, and reaching outside ourselves to connect with and contribute to the wider world...while simultaneously shifting our attention away from our own suffering.

So many of us feel as though we’re going through the motions in life. We feel stuck and unexcited or anxious and depressed. We’re cemented in routines. Or, conversely, floundering in a dizzying array of changes thanks to the COVID pandemic.

Some of us have become ill and only realized after the fact that our bodyminds had been giving us clues that something was wrong, but we ignored the warnings. It’s easy to do that. Life puts so many demands on us that we can become masterful at pushing aside our own needs and rationalizing why we’re doing so. But who wants to sleepwalk through life like this?

Not every missed hunch or ignored intuitive nudge is going to send us spiraling. We have hunches about people, politics, real estate, news, and sporting events all the time, and no real harm comes from overlooking them. And that’s part of why we tend to get lazy about answering the call. It’s hard to sort out the important messages from the everyday ones. Sometimes our hunches are off the mark.

Waking up is not about acting every time a lightbulb turns on. It’s about developing our capacity for discernment. It’s about attuning to our thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations and the messages they’re sending us.

We all have a default operating system--where we either attune or we attain. When we’re focused on attuning, we’re focused on adjusting our lives to be more harmonious with what matters most. When we’re focused on attaining, we’re focused on achieving through effort.

Spending most of the pandemic living on a lake an hour outside of Minneapolis has given me time to calculate my emotional balance sheet for the state of affairs brewing in my body, mind, and spirit. The uncrowded environs of life on one of Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes offers wide margins in which to make notes about how I’ve been spending this “one wild and precious life.”

And wide open views of the water often reveal what’s lurking behind the mask. The water reflected back to me in unexpected ways. For many of us, these realizations can accelerate a relationship break-up or a new romance. They can reveal an old emotional pain that you thought had healed. They can illuminate ways of being that don’t often come to the surface when we’re in more contained, manicured and predictable metro livelihoods. Minnesota lakes constitute a more revelatory, untamed ‘hood.

One of the fascinating observations that has surfaced for me is how this experience reveals one’s default operating system. Do you “attain” or do you “attune”? One litmus test is how your body acclimates to time in nature. Are you attaining by mountain biking? Sport fishing? Water skiing? Or are you attuning with yoga, kayaking, or bird watching? Attainers tend to “achieve through effort” or tame nature. Attuners “adjust to be harmonious” or be in relationship with nature.

Now...I’ve seen enough CorePower Yoga on the ‘Gram to know that someone can practice yoga using an “attainer” way of being or they can mountain bike in a fully “attuner” flow. I saw this in my own life when I was rowing with the Minneapolis Rowing Club. When I’d hop into a single shell, I’d enjoy a beautifully harmonious row. But when I joined an 8-person shell, I strived to no end. Meghan, the Achiever, was on full display complete with my epically-tight hip flexors and trapezius muscles. Suffice it to say, I pushed myself so hard I developed chronic fatigue syndrome. Sure, there were other factors but my 6-day a week, 90 minutes of intense rowing routine didn’t help.

While I long to row again, I can say that I feel most at peace when I make myself more harmonious with the water. The more I attune, the more at one I feel. Strangely, when I’m in my attain mode, I often feel I have to atone afterwards because of my "take no prisoners" competitive spirit...which is an attitude that tends to loom large at row houses. So, while I once enjoyed rowing in the Head of the Charles Regatta, I’m not attempting to become an elite rower. But, I’m learning to attune myself to the flow of life and enjoy my unset boat as much as my epic rows.

When it comes to work, I’m not saying you should stop trying to attain or achieve in your workplace. But I am saying that it may be time for you to imagine a way of being in your life where being in harmony with your surroundings pays great dividends in your experience and fulfillment. This won’t necessarily solve you meeting a crazy deadline for next week, but it will likely give you a new rhythm and ability to row the rough waters that constantly emerge in all areas of your life.

Because, as the last year has so clearly shown, companies are still largely unaware and ill-adapted to women’s career needs and phases. The systems still rely on (increasingly obsolete) the norms of men: linear, unbroken careers that accelerate in the thirties. The misunderstanding of the 30s ‘culture shock’ phase causes many managers to misinterpret parents’ efforts at conciliation as a lack of ambition. When these women (and a growing number of men) ‘re-appear’ and suddenly push for more in their forties, they’re off-grid. They may have fallen from the high potential lists, been tagged as ‘mommy track,’ or slipped into relative invisibility.

On the bright side, many women have given up on companies to create their own. The average age of a female entrepreneur in the US today is 42. Women-owned businesses represent 42% of American businesses, employ 9.4 million people, and generate revenues of $1.9 trillion.

But careers aren’t the only stretch goal life has in store for us women in our forties. Almost every dimension of life reaches peak pressure. Jobs and children and challenges all get bigger in parallel. Bodies, marriages, and/or friendships may have gotten a bit flabby and require time and attention to muscle up to sustain the second half of life. Parents start aging and may need care. After all, the average caregiver in the U.S. is 49 and a woman.

The takeaway message here? Your wake-up call is to enjoy building, adjusting, and fine-tuning your relationships, knowledge, experience, and networks as you create new possibilities for yourself.

No one else has your unique combination of personal, life, working, business, and professional experience – you have a unique value. Many of us don’t see it, don’t recognize it, or don’t believe it. But you have it. You just need to make time to understand your unique value and take that forward into the world.

Do not inherit labels others place upon you. It’s time to answer your call in a way that’s distinctly you. That works with your values, lifestyle, standards of integrity, and more.

If you’d like help with this, let’s connect for a 1:1 session or join the Purpose Camp at meghankrause.com.