Midlife MavericksI cancelled my CrossFit membership in February. One email, and it was gone. The walks went next. Then the deadlifts in the garage. Then any evening that wasn’t work. The weekends were the last to go.
I’ve told you the good parts of this year. The new clients. The rooms I’d never sat in before. All true. What I didn’t tell you is the number sitting underneath all of it.
Five hundred meetings. Fifteen months. I counted them last week because I couldn’t work out where the time had gone, and there it was in the calendar, fifteen months measured out in half-hour blocks. For a solo operator, five hundred is enormous. A full sprint, and nobody had marked where the finish line was.
The weight, I can fix. The sleep, I can fix. The question sitting under both of them, I can’t answer yet. What do I want the next ten years to be?
I turn fifty in six weeks. Fifty is now. Sixty used to be a number that belonged to other people, and suddenly it doesn’t. Forty to fifty went by in what felt like eighteen months. If the next decade moves at that speed, I’d better know what I’m pointing it at. Right now I don’t.
Quote of the Week
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Read my calendar back and you get an honest account of how I’ve spent the year. Meetings. The meetings built everything, the clients and the brand both came out of showing up to them. They got me here.
They will not get me there. More meetings only buys a bigger version of the life that’s currently waking me at three in the morning. The thing that built the business has become the thing keeping me from working out what it’s even for.
You have your own version of five hundred meetings. The side business you run after everyone’s asleep. The calendar so full you read it as proof you’re winning. Motion feels like progress. And you can run at it for years without once stopping to ask where it’s taking you.
So I’m doing the opposite of what I’d normally do. I’m not adding anything. No goal weight, no spreadsheet with a date on it, and God knows I love a spreadsheet. I’m cutting. The meetings come down, and hard. I’ve got nothing against meetings. But a diary with no gaps in it has no room for the one thing I actually need, which is time to work out what the next ten years are for.
Own it
Everything you’re building is being paid for. With money, or with your evenings and your body. If you can’t tell me which one, it’s the second, and you’ve stopped noticing. And if your calendar’s full but you can’t name what it’s building toward, that’s the first thing to fix. The scheduling can wait.
Twenty minutes. One sheet of paper. Write down what you actually did this year. The real list, the meetings and the endless small yeses. Then go through it and mark the things that get you where you actually want to go. Most of what filled this year won’t make the mark. That gap is your answer.
One question. If less could actually get you further, what’s the first thing coming off your calendar? Reply and tell me. I read every one.
See you Wednesday,
Claudia
