Most mornings lately, I sit on the balcony of our furnished apartment overlooking the Atlantic with a bowl of Greek yogurt, sprinkled with mixed seeds and nuts, and a sliced kiwi. Breakfast of champions, I’d say. I often pair this with a cup of tea and my dime-store notebook to write.
In the U.S., I couldn’t eat yogurt; here it is not an issue, but that’s a post for another day.
Below me, in the distance, swimmers make their way through the ocean. I look for them most mornings. They are easy to spot.
I wish I could tell you this is a sacred morning practice I have maintained faithfully for years. It isn’t.
I have started and drifted away from morning rituals more times than I can count. Writing. Meditating. Sitting still long enough to hear myself think, or better yet, to hear my heart.
But whenever I return, it feels something like diving into the ocean on an August morning.
Refreshing. A little startling. And impossible to do without waking up.
The swimmers below wear bright orange, air-filled buoys attached to their waists. They trail behind them in the water, little flashes of color rising and falling with each stroke.
They are there so the swimmers can be seen.
And avoided.
I understand that combination more than I would like to admit.
I want to be seen.
I also, in some ways, want to be avoided.
Writing has a funny way of exposing that contradiction.
You put words out into the world because you hope someone will notice. You hope someone will recognize something familiar in what you have lived through or the questions you are still trying to answer.
And then, when people actually begin to notice, you have a moment of wondering whether you might prefer to slip quietly beneath the surface.
Sometimes I dream about what I am going to write. Sometimes I wonder if anyone will care.
Lately, many of you have shown up and answered that question.
Which is both wonderful and, if I am being completely honest, a little terrifying.
Because I am not interested in writing about a life that looks polished from a distance.
I want to write about the human experience from inside it.
About what happens when the life you spent years building no longer fits the person you are becoming.
About stepping away from full-time work without knowing exactly what will replace it.
About letting go of most of your worldly possessions, moving to a foreign country, and discovering that you still have to bring yourself along.
About marriage, healing, curiosity, courage, and the strange experience of standing in midlife with both a history behind you and a life still waiting to be imagined.
I want to tell stories.
But more than that, I want to document what transformation actually feels like while it is happening.
Not after everything has been figured out.
Not once there is a tidy lesson or a clear destination.
Now.
While the water is still moving.
Living near the ocean is new for me. Like the deep blue sea I look at daily and swim in regularly, I have always been drawn to the deep waters of life.
Deep conversations. Deep introspection. The kind of honesty that leaves the vulnerable underbelly visible.
No pretense. No performance.
Just the raw, complicated experience of being human.
Maybe that is why I find myself watching the swimmers every morning, wanting, in some ways, to be out there and feeling in some ways I already am while sitting still on a balcony above them.
In open water, it is easy to lose sight of the shore. But the same can be true of life in general, and midlife specifically, and at any age when you are making big changes in your life. When you are reclaiming a part of yourself, you momentarily lose sight of who you were.
You lift your head, try to find your bearings, and sometimes realize you are not exactly where you thought you were.
I know this because I am, by nature, a zigzaggy swimmer.
During my Ironman races, I always believed I was swimming in a reasonably straight line.
Then I would look at the swim section on my training watch afterward. The map told a very different story.
I had gone too far in one direction. Corrected too aggressively in the other. Drifted, adjusted, drifted again.
Apparently, my body has never received the memo that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
Life has not gotten that memo either.
We tend to believe that if we are doing things “correctly”, the route should make sense while we are traveling it, and it should be relatively straight.
We should know the destination.
We should move toward it efficiently.
We should recognize the right decisions when we see them and avoid wasting time on detours, wrong turns, or false starts.
But pull the lens back far enough, and most of our lives look more like the swim map on my watch.
Starts and stops.
Unexpected turns.
Long stretches when we were certain we were headed one way, only to discover we needed to adjust course.
And still, somehow, we keep moving.
This is what I have come to think of as the Go-Go Bridge Years: the space between who we were and who we are becoming.
Not a straight crossing.
Not a perfectly engineered plan.
Just a season of experimenting, noticing, adjusting, and learning to trust that movement still counts even when the route is messy.
Today, I turn 56.
And I have some big dreams.
Things I want to create. Places I want to experience. Work I want to grow into. Parts of myself I am still discovering.
I do not have a precise map for any of it.
Some days, I feel clear and energized.
Other days, I look up and wonder how I ended up so far from the shore.
It would be easier, perhaps, to keep those uncertain parts private.
To share only the moments when I feel confident and capable. To wait until I have reached the next destination before telling anyone how lost I felt sometimes getting there.
But that would not be the truth.
And I suspect the truth is the reason many of you are here.
Maybe those swimmers have no idea that I look for them each morning.
They do not know that while they are pulling themselves through the ocean, I am sitting above them with my tea, trying to put words around what it means to keep moving toward a life we cannot yet fully see.
They do not know that their small orange buoys have reminded me that being visible does not mean having everything figured out.
It just means letting someone else know you are out there.
Maybe that is what connects my story to yours.
We are all trying to find our bearings.
We are all drifting occasionally.
We are all learning when to correct course and when to trust ourselves enough to keep swimming.
At 56, I am still dreaming. Still experimenting. Still reaching for a life that feels more like my own.
The route may not be straight.
But the zigzag is still forward.
So consider this my bright orange buoy.
This is where I am.
This is what I am building.
And I am glad you found me out here.
Sometimes we need more than a story. We need tools to help us practice trusting and reclaiming parts of our lives as we sit with what comes next. We need a place to pause, listen inward, and begin discovering what the next stretch of water is asking of us.
If you are somewhere between the life you built and the life now calling you forward, you are in the right place.
The Midlife Nomad is for those of us navigating the Bridge Years - reclaiming who we are, redesigning what comes next, and learning to trust the crossing, even when the shore is out of sight.
If you are ready to move beyond reflection and begin exploring your own crossing, The Practice Vault offers guided tools to help you find your bearings and begin building what comes next.
The Practice Vault is where we go deeper. It holds a growing collection of reflections, guides, and practices designed to help you explore what matters now and take one small step toward the life you are building. New tools will be added regularly.
You do not need to see the whole shore to begin. For $6 a month, The Practice Vault offers the tools to help you find your bearings and start designing your Bridge Years.
Paid subscribers can enter the Practice Vault here.
xx,
Jada
Coming next Sunday: The Shaky Planks Are the Story
Sometimes building your Bridge Years means letting people watch while the planks are still shaking.
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