I grew up in Georgia, but all my relatives lived in rural Alabama.
On summer days when there was “nothing to do” in the country, and all the adults were in the garden or in the kitchen, we found ways to entertain ourselves that might seem strange to those growing up in the city.
My cousins and I would try to “slip off” unnoticed into the fields behind my grandparents’ house, armed with long sticks. What we were up to was obvious to our grandmother, of course, seeing sticks in our hands. She would then give us a warning -
“Don’t mess with those fire ants”, which my cousin and I took as the obvious invitation to do just that.
To mess with them.
If you have never seen a fire ant hill before that is allowed to grow to a foot or two or more into the air, you have not lived.
Fire ants are no joke. Their sting really hurts and feels like the namesake… fire.
When one attacks, they signal the others in the area to attack and do the same. They “swarm” in a sense to let you know you have ventured too close to their home or offended them in some way.
So my grandmother’s warning was accurate and protective, but we avoided it.
We were not much help in the garden, and besides, we could outrun those silly fire ants…
We felt fearless in our pre-adolescence, and we marched into the dry red clay fields to find the ant hills to “stir.”
And by “stir” I mean stir.
We literally poked a stick into the mound, withdrew it quickly, and waited for the chaos.
Sometimes the ant hills were as tall as our knees or higher, and with a quick poke we watched thousands of ants pour out, ready to attack. There were also small larvae, which looked like grains of white rice that toppled onto the surrounding red clay, that were immediately gathered up by other ants and relocated into an undisturbed part of the nest. Others came right at us like a well-trained ant army ready to defend their territory.
We watched in complete amazement at the orderly chaos. The entire ground moved with excitement.
After only a minute, maybe less, we ran off to find yet another unsuspecting ant hill to “mess with” as the army was about to surround us. We carefully made sure no stragglers were marching up the stick to bite our hands. We learned to check for the stick climbers the hard way.
It was hours of entertainment for my cousins and me. We would have otherwise been put to work shelling peas or beans if we’d stayed close to the house. We ventured off as soon as the gardening had started, so as not to be put to work.
We thought we were pretty smart, and for the most part, we entertained ourselves without getting stung.
For some reason, this memory popped into my head this week. Why, I thought?
So I kept writing, What was the message here? What rose to the top and spilled out (much like the ants in the hill itself) was the parallel of the stirring of the fire ants and what feels like a stirring in my life for the past two years. Different stirrings, but still something disturbed, followed by a somewhat orderly chaos of rebuilding and redesigning your life.
So of course, I put my therapist hat on and tried to find the connection between this memory and what was happening in my life right now.
And here’s what I think it is.
There’s a concept in psychology called a disorienting dilemma. It’s the mechanism behind what’s known as transformative learning. The idea, developed by the sociologist Jack Mezirow, is that people don’t usually grow into a new sense of self gradually, one small insight at a time; rather, they grow into it because something disrupts the old frame badly enough that the frame can’t hold anymore. The disruption isn’t the damage.
It’s the doorway.
That’s what an ant hill is, if you think about it. A stable structure, built slowly, holding thousands of lives in careful order until one small disturbance floods the whole system into visible chaos. And then something remarkable happens. The chaos isn’t random. It’s organized disruption. The larvae get gathered. The soldiers respond. The whole colony reorganizes itself around the exact place the ground gave way.
I didn’t know any of that at 9. I just knew it was the most entertaining thing available to a kid who didn’t want to shell peas. But I think some part of me has been quietly rehearsing this exact process for fifty years: disturb the structure, watch what rises to meet it, trust that the reorganizing is not the same as falling apart.
Here’s the detail I keep coming back to, though. My grandmother’s warning was never really about the ants. It was about disruption itself; to leave well enough alone, don’t go looking for trouble, let sleeping things sleep. And she wasn’t wrong. That’s wise, careful, protective advice.
I just didn’t take it. My cousin and I went looking for the mound on purpose, stick in hand, every single time.
Nassim Taleb has a word for this: antifragile. Resilience means surviving a shock and returning to what you were. Antifragility means becoming different—and perhaps stronger—because of it.
It reorganizes around the exact place the ground gave way. The break becomes the new architecture.
I think that’s the real thread between age 9 and wherever I am now, an ocean away from where fire ants live.
That might be the actual center of this memory. My cousin and I never waited for the ants to find us. We walked into the field, stick in hand, hunting the mound. At nine, I thought that made us brave, or just bored enough to court trouble. Now I think it was the first evidence that something has shaped nearly every reinvention in my life since.
Sometimes outside forces disrupted my life. Sometimes, I went looking for the version of my life that needs stirring, before it settles into something safe and small. Same mission. This time a metaphorical stick in hand.
Maybe you have a mound like that too.
A dream you keep telling yourself you’ll get to once things settle, once there’s more time, once it feels less risky. A career that no longer fits but remains familiar enough to keep. A version of yourself you used to be—or still might become—folded up and put away, waiting for a moment brave enough to take her back out.
Not every disruption is chosen. Sometimes life drives the stick into the center of what we thought was stable. A relationship ends. A child leaves home. A body changes. A career loses its meaning.
But sometimes we are the ones holding the stick.
Sometimes we recognize that a life can remain intact and still become too small for us. Nothing has collapsed, yet something inside us knows the old structure can no longer hold who we are becoming.
That is the strange invitation of this season, that stretch where we're not finished with life but may be finished with how we've been living it. We are old enough to understand what disruption can cost - and alive enough to know that staying unchanged has a cost too.
At nine, I thought the goal was to outrun the sting.
Now I think the goal is different: not to avoid the stirring, and not merely to survive it, but to trust the orderly chaos that follows. To notice what rushes forward to protect the old structure. To gather what still matters. To leave behind what no longer belongs. And then to rebuild differently, on purpose.
The break becomes the new architecture.
Perhaps reinvention doesn’t always begin when life falls apart.
Perhaps sometimes it begins when we become brave enough to give a settled life a little stir.
But an intentional stir is not the same as setting fire to your life.
It doesn’t require quitting your job, ending a relationship, moving across an ocean, or making a dramatic decision before you understand what is asking to change.
Sometimes the first stir is simply telling yourself the truth.
What matters most to me now?
Does the life I’m living reflect it?
Where have I remained loyal to a version of myself - or a definition of success - that no longer fits?
And what have I known for a while but avoided naming because naming it might require something of me?
Before we can redesign a life, we have to become honest about the one we are living.
That was the first step my husband and I took before we sold nearly everything and moved across an ocean.
The restlessness had begun almost as soon as the last nail went into the porch of the farmhouse we had renovated. The last child was in college. The others were building lives of their own. The house was finished. Life was settled.
And yet, something no longer fit.
One rainy Saturday afternoon, when I couldn’t work in the garden, we began talking about our values. My husband printed a values inventory he had seen in a retirement video. The host said that before deciding what retirement should look like, you first have to know what matters to you.
I don’t particularly identify with the word retirement anymore - but that is another essay.
What we discovered through that exercise changed the course of our lives.
Retirement experts call these the “go-go years”- the years when your body is still strong enough to carry you toward adventure. But I have come to think of them as something more: the Go-Go Bridge Years, the season between who we have been and who we are becoming.
That values exercise was our first intentional stir. It helped us see that the life we had built was no longer fully aligned with what mattered to us now.
It was the first tool we used to name what mattered—and to see where our lives had drifted away from it.
I’ve created a version for you.
I call it The Honest List. It will help you name what matters most now and notice whether the life you’re living still reflects it.
You don’t need a proper stick for this kind of stirring. Just a pen, a little quiet, and the willingness to tell yourself the truth.
It’s waiting inside The Practice Vault for paid subscribers.
It is not a list of everything you need to fix. It is a place to pause and notice:
what matters most to you now
what no longer feels aligned
what you may have outgrown
what you are protecting by staying the same
and what is quietly asking for more room in your life
You do not have to make any immediate decisions.
The first step is simply becoming honest enough to see where your inner life and your lived life have drifted apart.
🌿 Enter The Practice Vault and begin The Honest List
I always welcome your comments. Please share this with someone who might need a gentle nudge. It’s a bit more pleasant than a fire ant sting.
XO,
Jada
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.