Women Are Redefining What It Means to Be Alive

This story is adapted from A Call to Further Becoming, by Sue Brightman.

There are times of rising. And for women well over fifty, this is one of them.

At this moment in history, women are redefining what it means to be alive and “continuing to become” at a stage of life previously called the autumn (read: dying) of our years. Gone are the days of going gently into the night, going grey, or going away.

We are here. And we’re not going back.

We are here and we’re continuing to grow: physically, mentally, professionally, spiritually. In every colorful way readers can imagine.

We are here contributing on the political stage, the performance stage, the educational stage, the research stage, the corporate stage.

We are here launching businesses that we’ve secretly envisioned in our hearts for decades.

We are here liberating our creativity — through painting, singing, acting, photographing, writing, and dancing.

We are here pioneering on every front possible, including new ways to travel and serve along the way; new ways to invest in meaningful relationships; and new ways to define intergenerational family-ing.

We are here proclaiming, initiating, and advocating beauty in the world — not showy, artificial or commercialized beauty, but pure, soul-stirring, authentic beauty.

We are here running marathons and declaring new rules for winning.

We are here honoring the decades of women before us who had far fewer choices, while also living large in our freedom and experimentation in ways they could not.

We are here building mentorships with younger women in our quest to share the hard-earned lessons we hope they don’t have to repeat.

We are here retiring the word “retirement” — or at least its meaningless definitions from yesteryear.

We are here to further the evolution of goodness in the world.

And we have the backbone to do it.

What this looks like for every woman is as different as millions of grains of sand under a microscope and magnified 300 times: sublime beyond imagination, each a different color, history, shape; contoured by the rumbling waves that brought us to stretching shores across time. None can ever be replicated, and each has an essence that contributes to the grand whole, exquisite and timeless.

Whomever you are and wherever you are in your life journey, let this be your takeaway:

Women over fifty — and especially those in their sixties and seventies — are not on a downward arc of any kind. We are, in fact, rising.

My book is dedicated to the rising.

A New Blueprint for this Stage of Life

A Call to Further Becoming: The New Declaration from Women Over 50 identifies ten themes representing who we are and what we are learning as we’re living it.

Yes. At the same time we’re walking it, we’re beginning to define the rising.

We are here putting off the old narrative and putting on the new. Rewriting our identities and storylines. It’s not because women over fifty consciously decided to demand a new narrative, but more that we’re already living and experiencing it, whether we are aware of it or not.

This pioneering spirit and irresistible impulse to redefine our purpose and ourselves at this stage is crucially important to name and claim.

I began to recognize unmistakable signs of this massive shift several years ago when I was in my mid-fifties. Whether I was at home in Colorado or traveling internationally for work, a trend began to present itself: my female friends, colleagues, international coaching clients, as well as women in workshops I was facilitating were all deeply questioning conventional post-career models of life.

I discovered many of us over fifty were not the least bit interested in retirement in its traditional forms. Many of us did not have the option or desire to stop earning. And many of us wanted to complete former career paths and move on to something different (more creative, meaningful, satisfying). We no longer believed the once-unquestioned arc of diminished options that lay ahead after working successfully in impressive careers.

Instead, we were — and still are — living the question, “What now?”

In fact, we’re living a myriad of new questions. Who are we at this age? What’s possible? What are we being called to do? Why the unrest we feel?

Once I committed to my book and started interviewing women over fifty, I found the questions became even wider in scope: How do we channel our well-informed wisdom into a world that seems to be calling for a whole new form of leading and living? What do we want this stage of life to be, for ourselves and in service to the greater good?

As I heard these questions being asked by hundreds of women with whom I came into contact, I was also hearing desires from women in the over-fifty age range. The themes were resoundingly similar:

· Strong inclinations to continue contributing in the world, but not in the same way.

· Restlessness fueled by physical and intellectual vibrancy, with long lives ahead and no desire to “wind down.”

· Creative interests re-emerging that had been put on a back shelf for decades.

· An attraction to experimenting.

· Intolerance for…well, many things.

· Freedom from the need for recognition or further achievement and the new spaciousness that brings.

· A desire for spiritual exploration and development.

· Quality relationships as a non-negotiable priority.

We’re Entering a Time of Wilderness

Having studied change and transition for thirty years as an organizational development consultant and leadership coach, working globally in numerous business settings, I’ve come to see how transitions both large scale and small usually begin with an ending.

Something comes to completion (though not always planned) — something we’ve outgrown or seen beyond in our evolving ways of being. Then there’s a wilderness period before we reach the new beginning.

This wilderness period is often disorienting as old models and paradigms begin to disintegrate and an old sense of identity fades, but a new one has not become apparent. It’s also marked by distinct feelings of aloneness at times, and a lack of concrete handrails to grip in the dark. We often don’t choose the unsettling territory of a wilderness — especially when we don’t know what it might include and didn’t take the course (if there was one!) on how to make it through safely. Though I see this as specific to the new ways women are experiencing and redefining life after fifty, I believe we can also see how the whole world is very much in a wilderness phase right now — as so many familiar structures and beliefs are crumbling and needing to be re-formed.

The good news is, wilderness periods are ripe for creativity, curiosity, and the forging of new ways to create the future we want for ourselves personally — and also collectively. We can greet these transitions with expectancy, a feeling of opportunity, and attraction to what may emerge in the newness.

Given the importance of the profound shift I sensed happening with women in the fifty to seventy-plus stage of life, I set out on a discovery to find out more about the burning questions I was hearing from others and experiencing in my own life. That is why, beginning in 2016, I decided to interview 100 women over age fifty.

With forty years of interviewing experience — first as a children’s protective services investigator, then a social worker certifying foster homes, then a Human Resources manager, and finally for most of my career an organizational consultant conducting corporate culture surveys and large-scale diagnostic assessments, I knew how to craft thoughtful questions.

More than that, I’ve always loved listening.

I never would have guessed that the new territory I was exploring — in my case through interviewing these 100 women — would be my way out of my own wilderness and into a whole new arena of creative work — that of offering this map called a Declaration of Further Becoming for the women who suddenly find themselves here.

About the Women You’ll Meet

The majority of the 100 women I interviewed for my book have been at the top of their game across various professions and what had been glass ceilings, glass walls, and glass entry doors. From them and from others who have walked different paths, I wanted to hear what’s happening at this stage as we approach a massive transition and redefine what it means to be over fifty. I wanted to hear them speak about the new tracks we’re laying down as we each take new steps in our individual lives and begin to witness the new emerging pattern.

As I stepped into the interview process, I had specific questions I wanted to explore:

· What’s happening in the lives of women age fifty-plus, especially those who have had strongly defined careers over the last few decades and are facing a major work-life transition?

· What’s common? What’s not?

· How are we navigating the big “what now” question, especially as we enter our sixties?

· Is traditional retirement (travel, volunteering, relaxation, ease) a thing of the past?

· What’s most important at this stage of life?

· What are we learning as we navigate this new territory that might support other women?

· And what answers might all of this reveal to the world at large?

Every woman I interviewed was wonderfully generous with her life lessons and learnings as we explored these topics. I felt, and still feel, deeply privileged to have heard each woman’s story.

A few more facts about the interviewees. They were all between fifty-one and ninety-three, with the large majority in their mid-fifties to late seventies. The 100 women also represent diversities of race, religion, upbringing, professional background, marital status, and economic levels. They hail from all parts of the US and from Western Europe with a few interviewees from India, Mexico, Australia, and Madagascar. They include Caucasian, Latina, African American, African, Indian, and Native American women.

In terms of socioeconomics, some interviewees had periods of time where poverty was at their doorstep, but none lived in chronic poverty. However, the anxiety of low wages and/or the inconsistency of income was a reality for some. Others enjoyed salaries at the top of earning scales and would appear, to many, as 1 percenters. The majority fall squarely in the category of middle to upper-middle class. Some are married; some divorced or widowed; some remarried, some single; some gay; some satisfied not identifying in any category related to relationships.

I didn’t intend to conduct “hard” research, per se. For example, not all continents are represented, nor are distinctly rural lifestyles represented nearly as much as city/town residencies.

Also, I haven’t tried to identify distinctions for subgroups within the 100 women, such as responses specifically from those outside the US or from specific ethnicities. I allowed women to speak directly to the questions I asked and to tell their stories in their own words. Where women mentioned economic level, religion, or race as a key part of a quote, I tried to keep the integrity of that context when quoting them.

My deepest thanks to these 100 remarkable women who helped make this Declaration possible; who trusted me with their stories and allowed me to hold them with integrity for all to hear.

How My Discoveries Emerged

The due diligence I applied in order to accurately identify key themes from the 100 interviews had numerous precise steps that eventually led to my book and the Declaration it represents.

First was collating every response to every question from 100 one-hour phone interviews. I took verbatim notes; a skill I learned long ago for which I’m enormously grateful. I then mapped them into similar threads or groupings per question. Following, the groupings were organized by decades (fifties, sixties, seventies) so I could identify significant differences per ten-year period. I took great care not to name a main headline or theme too early. (There’s a reason my coaching colleagues once dubbed me Precision.)

Sometimes during the mapping process, after carefully studying a pattern of responses, I recognized a further, more specific split of one into two themes. For example, in capturing and tracking what women shared as nonnegotiable practices in their lives — a specific question I asked — I noticed the majority of women mentioned some type of prayer practice. As I studied this, it became clear that prayer and meditation were two distinct activities and that “walking in nature” — mentioned by some women as a prayer practice — was a third category. I paid close attention to these differences. They fascinated me. I felt it was important to reflect all the elegance and nuance of the 100 interviews. In a word, it was about integrity.

Occasionally a theme emerged that had immediately-clear sub-themes. One example is the Declaration called “Self-Witnessing in Solitude” with its rich, distinct sub-themes about how the 100 women practice this in ways deeply meaningful to them.

As I listened and studied the responses, I started discovering fascinating themes that were not direct responses to questions but were statistically significant. For instance, the Declaration “Done With That” is an example of an unmistakable pronouncement that emerged, though not in response to a specific question about it. These were thrilling for me to hear, because they arose unexpectedly and totally independent from the focus of any given question. Long ago, I learned as an interviewer that themes of importance to the interviewee will eventually come out, no matter the questions. We just have to listen.

I do not intend to assert that if something didn’t emerge as a theme, it isn’t important to women over age fifty — or to these 100 women. It simply didn’t emerge with consistency, or at all. In short, I listened for similarities — clear themes of statistical significance in my 700 pages of notes from 100 one-hour phone interviews — using a rigorous process learned in my corporate background.

That said, I allowed many months of reflection about what women did not say. For example, the phrase “bucket list” did not come up even once. (My take? Women over fifty want to live fully now, not later.) Women also did not mention finding a life partner as a priority, which surprised me. Again, this does not necessarily mean this isn’t important to women over fifty, or to these 100 women. It does mean that when responding about priorities, practices, advice to other women, stepping-stones that helped them become who they are today and similar questions, seeking a life partner was not mentioned with any statistical significance.

The Distinctions between Decades

One of the biggest breakthroughs of awareness for me came from separating responses by decades. I was able to hear what women in their fifties are saying distinct from women in their sixties (a big difference), and women in their sixties as somewhat distinct from women in their seventies.

Whereas the fifties seem to be a hard-charging completion of what’s taken place up to this decade, with a significant reckoning toward the end of those ten years, it appears to be our sixties and seventies where the biggest change is taking place. For those who are over sixty, there seems to be a whole new way of being that we’re discovering, however confusing it might be to those of us pioneering what is not yet completely defined.

Women interviewees in their fifties, however, oftentimes had one or both feet still in the professional arena into which they had already poured much energy. I certainly did. So, the counsel flowing from women in later decades encouraged women in their fifties to make full use of the intensely focused steam still available for whatever full-on push might light them up. There was a rally cry of “Go for it!”

Women who had reached the sixties and beyond referred to the fifties as “the decade you’ve been working up to;” “a time to do what you’ve always wanted, full on.” Recommendations came loudly and enthusiastically for women in their fifties to give themselves the gift of full permission to go for what they really want. Getting a coach, finding ways to strengthen the gifts they most want to use, and seeking help in whatever way would support fulfilling the dreams they’d been working toward were all mentioned as important considerations.

Several women said their fifties was the decade within which they reached their highest professional achievements; a time when they could enjoy the fruits of all their hard work and feel the spaciousness of claiming their mastery. One woman used the phrase “the fabulous fifties” — and offered the view that we should begin to embrace the idea that something is still to come up ahead. Just the idea of a next phase of adventure is important to claim! This is when we begin to replace the ridiculous notion that we’re coming to a hill, going over the hill — or that there even is a hill.

Woman after woman spoke to me of the grand possibilities of the fifth decade. Not that these possibilities don’t continue beyond. But it’s a different flavor than the freedom and independence arriving in one’s sixties. In the fifties, a special surge of energy and “take no prisoners” attitude came forth. Women spoke of it as a time of reaping; a time to harvest.

There was also a side of counsel about beginning to look ahead wisely. The period between fifty and sixty begins to crystallize the importance of some things and the unimportance of others. This crystallizing begins to prepare us for the rich years ahead, gently launching a thought process about where we might want to live, what relationships we want to invest in, and what thriving might look like over the next few decades. All this happens alongside continued expressing and working — and hopefully alongside increased self-care.

I love what one interviewee said. “Stand for what you bring in your fifties! Don’t wait for one more thing to take your seat at the table. Step into yourself fully. If every woman acted and spoke from her essence the world would be so different! We need it. Don’t wait ‘until.’ Do it now.”

As I often heard a “go for it” blast of counsel for women in their fifties, I also heard a new and different empowerment that seems to arrive when entering our sixties.

I caught whole new glimpses of the expanded ways women in their sixties and seventies are expressing bursts of new effort and soulful passions in areas that feel deeply satisfying — and that further the evolution of good in the world. Where physical fertility has waned, spiritual fertility and creativity are birthing! Not only did I hear this in abundant measure from women in their sixties, but also the arrival, perhaps slowly, of active assurance that evolution — life itself — has a larger pattern that we’ve lived long enough to see and trust. The combination of creative energy, conscious un-tethering from things that no longer serve us nor that we want to serve, and trust in a larger design allows us to embody and engage an enlivened, exciting way of being.

Even in the wilderness of the transition, many women in their sixties recognize the strong impulse to continue becoming — with freedom, active wonder, liberation, and a deeper joy that life is living through us. Cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson calls this the presence of “active wisdom.”[1] I call it “active assurance”; a growing awareness of life’s patterns and our natural inclination to play an engaged role in them. We realize we are so not done! — and begin to face down the lies of cultural programming that have surrounded us for centuries.

Women in their seventies were also far more engaged across many domains than I realized when I began this interview process — doing things for the first time or acting on long-held desires they’ve always wanted to express outwardly. It’s as if the active assurance and burst of creativity in our sixties takes deeper root in its expression during our seventh decade, each woman’s experience unfolding individually in this new stage of life and its new path.

We also seem to be recognizing that we’re the product of the women’s liberation movement, whether we consciously participated in it or not. It was in our time that we stepped into places of leadership, though a long hard climb for many of us who did. Simultaneously, we raised children, poured our attention into our families and communities, and tried to take care of ourselves in the midst of the grand juggle. An interviewee made the profoundly simple statement about “the gems we are bringing forward” as a result. Indeed, the world seems to be calling for what we’ve learned; what we know.

What great potential to be leaders and guides!

And what an opening to create a new narrative not just for ourselves, but for its promise about everyone.

There is a certain quality to the unique standpoint of women over sixty and the strength that comes with it — a lively embodiment of what it means to break new ground, be playful, be on fire in new ways — and not to be lulled by the cultural expectation that we are slowing down, dulling out, less able.

New ground for women who are well over fifty? Indeed. And not only that, there’s a whole new flourishing field of flowers and trees and rivers and valleys and mountains on that new ground. That is what my book is talking about.

At one point in the process of writing my book, I stopped to consider whether I should completely reshape its focus, leave out the interviews with women in their fifties and narrow it to those of us at sixty and beyond who represent the especially notable rising of a new narrative. But I realized several things that I value greatly by including the fifth decade in this conversation — things that I believe are important to readers of this Declaration.

First, responses from women in their fifties and the life patterns of that decade, especially related to work and life priorities, actually help crystallize the decade differences.

Second, the differences I gleaned from one’s early fifties to one’s late fifties are significant. The shift that begins to happen — especially related to the theme “Done With That” — takes place for many during this decade.

Third, the timing and unfolding of our “Further Becoming” is unique to each woman, so there is nothing set in stone, per se, about decades. They represent general categories of time, not predestined limits or precalculated predictions.

In fact, we refuse to fall for the masculinized form of limited, linear thinking! Rather, the generalizations I make regarding decades as revealed by the responses in the 100 interviews, are to release fears of limitation and celebrate not only what is possible, but what is happening.

The rising. It’s here. And we are beginning to claim it.

A Declaration of Further Becoming

I call my book and its ten key themes a Declaration because it proclaims what is here; what is dynamic and active at this moment in time, and how the alchemy of the ten themes is directly linked to Further Becoming. We’re seeing it everywhere with women over fifty.

It’s also a decidedly feminine blend of wisdom.

One of the ways this wisdom emerged in the 100 interviews was the degree to which women felt this new way of being is a process rather than any assertion about an arrival. This is an ode to how women see themselves: on a path — unfolding, emerging, and new — rather than resting in a destination. Such is the way of the feminine.

This is also why the language of the Declaration is: “We are learning…”

No less profound, its pronouncements leave room, always, for more.

Since the word “feminine” is used throughout my book, I offer my definition as a set of qualities available to all genders but more associated and perhaps more readily expressed by women. Receptivity, intuition, grace, preservation of life, patient perseverance, the ability to hold complexity, sensitivity to timing, diligence, resolve, humility, and moral fiber — these to me are hallmarks of the feminine. Not as boisterous bravado or a continuation of the feminist fervor once needed and necessary in the past, the Declaration of Further Becoming and its model of living and leading from a new place counteracts overuse of the masculine but does not reject it wholesale.

This kind of living and leading, especially when blended with the best of masculine qualities such as strength, structure, courage, boldness, precision, action, guardianship, etc., allows the best to come forth. Being a woman does not guarantee it, nor does being a man exclude it.

But overuse of the masculine for so many years has warped the well-being of many systems and ways of living and has led to unhealthiness on a far-reaching scale for organizations, individuals, and whole swaths of humanity.

For these reasons and more, my book is declaring something wholly new.

[1] Mary Catherine Bateson, Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).

To learn more about the rising, you can find A Call to Further Becoming on Amazon.

SUE BRIGHTMAN is the founder and president of Women on the Journey of Their Lives, LLC, a coaching and women’s workshop and retreat enterprise supporting women over 50 at this emerging stage of life. For 30 years she has worked with organizations, teams, and individuals as a Conscious Business coach and consultant to some of the world’s largest organizations. She now combines business, spiritual practice, and research for this book to help women enact their unique paths of continued contribution, joy, and Further Becoming.