Hello friends. I’m sorry that I haven’t been writing much. Crunch time is upon our family with my youngest’s graduation from college and my eldest’s wedding, both in a few weeks from now. However, I came across this quote the other day and I knew that I wanted it as a new exhibit here at our thought museum, Adulting – Second Half. It is attributed to Ziad K. Abdelnour. See below:
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
“Shared values are far more important than shared interests.” – Nancy Caciola
The above quote is true of any relationship, romantic or platonic. You trust and respect people who share your same values and you get inspired by, or at the very least, curious about the many varied interests and passions and hobbies that different people have, which occupy their time and minds. Having different interests keeps things intriguing and vital, but having different values, keeps things guarded and suspicious and often disappointing. You usually can tell people who share your same values because people put most of their time and energy and resources into what matters to them most. You usually just feel intuitively more natural and comfortable when in the company of people who share your same values. You typically feel drained or on edge or even defensive, with people who don’t share the same values as you. However, the worst you ever feel with someone who has different interests than you, is perhaps nothing more than a little bored.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Jay McInerney has a new book out. People of my generation will probably remember his breakout novel, Bright Lights, Big City, a book about being young and wild and full of grief in New York City. Jay McInerney is currently 71 years old. I was reading an interview which the New York Times had with him and this quote stuck out to me:
“There is consolation in old age in sensing that you may have experienced some of the best.”
He said this in the context of imagining the idea of being able to be young again in New York City, but realizing that it would never be the same as he remembers it when he first experienced it in the 1970s, when he was in his twenties.
I do believe that one of the best gifts of aging is believing and knowing that you have experienced things and events that will never be able to be replicated in the exact same way again. And these experiences are sacred, for that very reason. And age has a way of softening memory and focusing on the positive and putting a warm, fuzzy frame around it all. We all believe that our own favorite experiences were better than any youngster could ever imagine or experience themselves. And those youngsters will grow up to be oldsters who believe the very same thing. Each generation feels sorry for what the generation below them “missed out on.” Perhaps there really is a slow degeneration of all things bright and beautiful, but more likely, as Jay McInerney says, the belief that “you may have experienced some of the best” is just a lovely “consolation” prize that comes with the territory of growing old.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Like so much of the rest of the world, I’m in total awe of our amazing Artemis II astronauts. They are everything you like to see in human beings. I adored watching footage of Victor Glover’s hero’s welcome to his neighborhood. I so admire his unapologetic professions of his Christian faith. I loved seeing the excitement Christina Koch’s pup showed when being reunited with her. And today, I watched the speeches that the Artemis II crew made in Houston. I soaked up everything which they had to say, so full of gratitude and love for their families, for each other, and for everyone at NASA who supported their mission. The words that struck me the most though came from Jeremy Hansen and I had to transcribe them and add them to this thought lab which we have going on here at Adulting – Second Half. Here is some of what astronaut, Jeremy Hansen said:
“Joy . . . . I think you saw a lot of joy up there and there was a lot of joy up there . . .We have a term in our crew that we coined a long time ago, “the joy train.” We’re not always on the joy train, this crew, but we are committed to getting back on the joy train as soon as we can and that is a useful life skill for any team trying to get something done.”
And this:
“Love . . . what you saw was group of people who loved contributing, having meaningful contribution and extracting joy out of that . . . And what we’ve been hearing is that this was something special for you to witness. . . .I would suggest to you, we are a mirror reflecting you and if you like what you see, just look a little deeper. This is you.”
The reason why anything resonates in our deepest selves is because we intuitively know that it is a part of us. These astronauts showed bravery, resiliency, sacrifice, contribution, joy, teamwork, gratitude, awe, faith, hope and love and we all reverberated with it. And this is because, as Jeremy Hansen said, the astronauts mirrored the best parts of our own shared humanity. These astronauts mirrored the best parts of ourselves. They’re not in space anymore, but I imagine the Artemis II crew is definitely on the joy train. Let’s join them and let’s stay there as long as we possibly can.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Last night my husband and I attended a Billy Strings concert. (these are the beautiful things you get to do as an empty nester – attend a concert in the middle of the week, sitting in decent seats that you can better afford, without having to find a babysitter) Billy is an incredible bluegrass guitarist whose music my husband discovered when we were watching Willie Nelson’s birthday special a few years back. He got hooked on Billy’s incredible skills, and now he plays his songs all of the time. I don’t complain. It’s great music. We purchased our concert tickets back in January. And I’m so glad that we did. The concert was sold out.
The Billy Strings concert was a crazy experience. Billy has a loyal following that quickly put me in mind of the Deadheads whom I knew back in high school, who spent their summers gleefully following the Grateful Dead around the country. People whom we talked to, while standing in line for our merch, were in awe that this was our first Billy Strings concert. One woman said that she was getting goosebumps hearing that fact. Another said that she was incredibly jealous that we got to have our “maiden voyage” because hers was just that good. They regaled tales of their many Billy Strings concert experiences and assured us that it was okay to wait in the long line for merch because he always starts at 8:05 on the dot, and he did.
The interesting thing about all of this is that Billy is only 33 years old. As one fan told me, “Yeah, he’s just a baby. He’s our modern day Hendrix.” The concert did not disappoint. I spent most of it on my feet. Billy and his band only took one break and many of their songs go on as long as 15 minutes. Billy Strings has won numerous awards, including a grammy. He’s honestly a musical phenom.
What really got me to thinking though (instead of just singing and dancing), was what the woman sitting next to me said. “Do you know why Billy’s so good at what he does? It’s because he had a sh#tty childhood. We coddle our kids too much these days and they don’t reach their potentials,” she said to me with conviction. I knew about Billy Strings’ tough history. His father died of a heroin addiction when Billy was just two. His mother remarried (Billy attributes his stepfather as the man who gave him his bluegrass start), but his parents soon got addicted to meth. Billy ran away from home at the age of 13, and for a period, he, too, was addicted to hard drugs. When he went back home, his family achieved sobriety for a period, but sadly, in 2025, Billy Strings’ mother died of an overdose in her sleep.
So anyway, this statement about Billy’s childhood has been in the back of my mind since my fellow Strings fan said it to me. Is this statement true? No one has a perfect childhood. So the real question is, did the tougher parts of your own childhood make you or break you or a mix of both? Many people who experienced terrible childhoods end up on skid row and no one can blame them for it. But the ones who transcend their childhood abuse, use it as a hardcore motivation to give themselves everything that they didn’t get as children. When I asked AI for some examples, this is what its first statement said:
“Many notable figures overcame severe early childhood trauma—including abuse, extreme poverty, or parental loss—to achieve remarkable success. Examples include Oprah Winfrey (poverty/sexual abuse), Jim Carrey (homelessness), Charlize Theron (witnessing her mother kill her father in self-defense), and Howard Schultz (growing up in public housing). Studies suggest up to 75% of high achievers experienced difficult childhoods.”
I made it one of my major missions to give our four children a healthy foundation. Our family life wasn’t perfect, but I would confidently say that my four kids would probably all categorize it as “good.” Did I do them a disservice? I don’t believe that’s true. Even good childhoods go through trials. Our own family was hit hard by the Great Recession and we had to move to a whole other state when our eldest son was in high school. We discovered our third son had epilepsy when he was fourteen, and while this has affected him the most, it has made a mark on all of us in our family, particularly about the fragility of life.
I believe that the bigger point of all of this is, if you take the perspective that you can alchemize anything bad that has happened to you, into some sort of motivation/skillset/drive/ambition/compassion for yourself, then perhaps the hard things that happened to you, in some sense, also bear gifts, for you and for others. If you can turn your sagas into songs and your trials into trajectories, like so many others have, then you’ve won. Things that were expected to swallow you whole, instead catapulted you to your highest self. That’s why so many spiritual tomes warn against labeling anything “good” or “bad”. Good and bad can come from the same experience. Sometimes “good” or “bad” is just a matter of choice of perspective.
I don’t know if Billy Strings would trade his “sh*tty childhood” if it meant that he would not have the ability nor the ambition to take his innate musical talents to where they are today. I don’t know if Billy Strings had an amazing childhood if that would have made a difference one way or another, of him following his musical gifts to as far as they can reach. All that I can say is that I am utterly grateful that Billy Strings shares his gifts with us, however these gifts came into being.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
I did a deep-dive on the Artemis II mission this morning. I needed to bathe in some uplifting news. One of our sons drove to the other side of our state to see the rocket launch occur last week. He said that it was one of the most inspiring, hopeful, patriotic experiences of his life and being a “science geek” that wasn’t his first intention nor expectation of his adventure. Our son said that there were people from all over the United States (and all over the world, for that matter) there to experience the ground-shaking, anticipatory, excited, energy-filled moments surrounding the launch.
Today, I read more about the astronauts on the moon mission. The most moving story of the week has been the astronauts decisions to name two newly found craters on the moon. The first one they named “Integrity”, which is the name the astronauts have given the ship which they are travelling around the moon in, and the second crater, one that the astronauts claimed to be incredibly “light-filled”, is named “Carroll” for the beautiful wife of Commander Reid Wiseman, who passed away in 2020, after a five-year battle with cancer. Carroll was the mother of two lovely daughters, a neonatal nurse and as it turns out, a fellow alumnus of my beloved college, James Madison University. Commander Reid Wiseman has been lovingly raising their daughters on his own, for the last six years.
I pray that the Integrity and its leader, Wiseman, and its brave crew members arrive safely back to Earth at of this end of this week. We need Integrity back to Earth more than ever, don’t we? We need our holes filled with light. We need the quiet dignity of true visionaries and selfless leaders who know that we humans are most powerful when we work together for the mission of valuing and keeping sacred, the sanctity of our incredible planet, for all of its inhabitants. In a world full of loud and bombastic “look at me, what’s in it for me?!” energy, there is also, not too far out there, a place which our astronauts have shown that we can physically go to and explore. This place is the quietness and the vastness of space, surrounding and holding and embracing our precious planet, no matter what shenanigans we get carried away with, down here on the ground. May we put our direction away from the loud distractions and more towards the awe of the quiet dignity that holds us and guides us and supports us, no matter what is going on with us. May Integrity come back safely and soundly to Earth at the end of this week. And may we embrace her, as space continually embraces us.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
I love to write, but I love to read even more. The following essay is one of the most uplifting pieces I have read in a long time. Please take the time to read it. You won’t regret it. “You are the master builder of your life. . . . What can I build with the life pieces I’ve got?”
If you are uncomfortable with links, please google Why Some People Rebuild After Everything Falls Apart by Karen Salmansohn.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
I read this poem for the first time ever, today (although apparently it went viral about a year ago). It is just too good not to add to the annals here at Adulting – Second Half:
“I heard someone say . . . I think midlife is just becoming who you were at seventeen again, but loving her this time.” – Erin Gorrie
To all of my “beautiful, funny, thoughtful, kind and caring, strange and lovely” middle-aged lady friends here at the blog, I am asking you to join my mission: Let’s help all of the younger ladies love themselves NOW. How do we do that? We show them how we unconditionally accept and love ourselves and them and each other, “for the way that we are, not the way that we look.”
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
“Stay close to anything that makes you feel glad to be alive.” – Hafiz
Before I start with the theme that I am going with on the blog today, I overheard something on a podcast that made me spend some time pondering. The question announced was, “Are you getting older or are you growing older?” Being in the middle of one of those birthday clumps in my own family and also in my extended family, it has become quite apparent to me lately, that we are all getting older. There is no choice in that, but growing older sounds so much more progressive in a healthy way. Growing older puts me in mind of a stately old tree that has weathered many storms and yet still reaches for the sky with young, earnest branches, even with its roots running deep and spread far out. Getting older sounds so much more passive and resigned, like a frumpy old piece of furniture, decaying just by sitting there and doing nothing.
But enough of that . . . . Today I have a few new exhibits for our thought museum here at Adulting – Second Half. Most of these exhibits belong in the same room. They center around the idea of “intuition.” Intuition is less, “What do you think about this?” and more, “What do you feel about this?” Here are the exhibits:
+ “Intuition is the sum of all of the times you’ve ever trusted yourself.” The paradox of this is, the more that you trust yourself, the stronger your intuition.
+ “Your path is more well-lighted than you have been allowing yourself to realize.” – Esther Hicks
+ “Having a fear of things going wrong is totally normal, but it’s not the same as having intuition or information that things will go wrong.” – Jessica Lanyandoo So, in other words, do not confuse fear for intuition. Intuition is generally calmer, quieter, clearer, less mutable and more confident than fear.
+ “Prayer is not asking. It is the longing of the soul. . . . It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.” – Mahatma Ghandi
+ “There is a close relationship between truth and trust.” – Mister Rogers
+ “Honesty: When your outer expression matches your inner belief. Truth: When your inner belief matches reality.” – Alan Cohen
+ “Are you listening to yourself or are you listening to the story you told yourself?”
Think of all of the times in your life, when you “just knew.” You didn’t always follow that “just knowing”, but the times that you did follow it, even when it was hard, even when it went against logic or others’ opinions, you were so happy that you listened to yourself. Then there are the times which we all can recall, when we didn’t follow our intuition, and it lead us to some regret. But the beautiful thing is, our intuition never gives up on us. It never gets snide and stubborn, angrily folding its arms, blasting us with, “You never listen to me! So forget it. I’ll never help you again.” Our intuition is always there, with its calm, sweet, all-knowing, quiet, wise demeanor inside of us, like a well-spring, or a candlelight that never gets extinguished, always ready to help lead us, even when we ignored it 14 times in a row. Our intuition will happily lead us to the next right step again and again and again, without admonishing us for disregarding it. What a lovely, unconditional gift implanted inside each one of us! Have you checked in with your intuition today?
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
+ Yesterday was our daughter’s birthday and she happens to be visiting us. We had a delightful day together, mixing in shopping, eating and errands. It’s been my favorite Monday of the year so far. We did her birthday “freebie” tour and loaded up on treats from Starbucks, Sephora, Panera and others. When she was a little girl (our daughter turned 22 yesterday, so her “little girl stage” was definitely a little while ago) and I’d be taking her along for chores and errands on her various birthdays, she never failed to chirp out to anyone in earshot that it was her birthday. And she always ended up with a pile of smiles, treats and well-wishes, even before she had a phone full of apps offering birthday surprises. This unabashadley accepting the deserved joy of her birthday, is a long-standing tradition that I hope that my one and only little girl, keeps up for the rest of her life. Joy is free, and it is here for the taking.
+ I know that the blog has been quiet lately. I’m in one of my “soaking it all up” stages in life. With our two sons’ weddings and our daughter’s college graduation quickly approaching, I’ve done everything that I can to internally slow down and to make sure that I am capturing what these “moments before” really look like, feel like, and seem like, to me, both externally and internally. I’ve been trying to capture the entire picture in slow motion, and to sit with it all in gratitude and wonder. Soaking it all up feels like a giant crescendo or wave, filled with emotion, memories, perceptions, hopes, fears, surprise, pride . . . . it’s like taking the biggest swallow of life that you’ve taken in a long time, and trying to just hold it in your mouth for the amazing flavor of it all, before it is just another bite from just another banquet of your life, finished and left to digest as a memory. “Soak it all up” moments are so ripe and poignant, aren’t they? Sometimes they are bigger than the events that mark the turning points. I imagine that these past winter Olympians felt so much more in the awe and the build-up of the opening ceremonies, than even when the medals were given out. I think that we humans inherently know to slow down and to soak up so much when we are babies, and when we are elders, and during all of the times in our lives that clearly demarcate a before/after. We soak up all of “the before”, in order to take in as much of it as we possibly can, so as to better bring it forward and to assimilate it, into the still unknown of the soon-arriving after.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
