After every storm, there comes clear open skies...

"Turn away from what has gone,
for the future lies sparkling and awaiting your presence."

"All the advice you give to others is for you to hear." - Byron Katie

Today, I turned on the computer and checked the date, and then the realisation hit me that there were only nine days left of me being 'forty something'. In just nine days time I will be 50 !

Wow, I thought, I will have lived for half a century. I will be the age that in my youth I considered old. . . and then something strange struck me, far from being unsettled by it, I was actually really glad!

I have a confession to make. In hindsight, I haven't really enjoyed most of my forties. Somewhere along the way I seemed to have got stuck and have lived most of it in a kind of suspended animation.

"To play it safe is not to play." - Robert Altman

I felt awkward in conversations where everyone agreed that life became so much better with age, that they were SO glad to be older, it gave them freedom, self knowledge and happiness.

I just smiled politely and sat quietly with my secret.
I had self knowledge in bucket loads, freedom too, and have always felt such gratitude that I have the ability to extract joy from the simple things of life. But, somewhere inside me, it felt as though something had stopped, and it cast such a huge shadow.

"The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life,
the clearer we should see through it. " - Jean Paul Sartre

Then I discovered something, that sometimes just the passing of time solves things. As some things decay and are dropped, other things ripen in their place. And lately I feel a real shift, a bubbling sense of new life. Whatever had stopped has started again!

Something has been transformed, inner alchemy has been at work.

So, without ever entirely understanding what caused and cured these rumblings in my inner life! I shall gleefully let go of what has gone and with open hands I will welcome the future. I will embrace this new phase and I shall begin again!

I will step willingly into my fifties. I am ready for a new adventure!

"After winter comes the summer. After night comes the dawn.
And after every storm, there comes clear, open skies." - Samuel Rutherford

Have you ever felt such a turning point? Have you had inner situations that could be felt but not understood?

Image: between today and tomorrow - Susannah Bec.