Episode 212: Closing and Opening Life Chapters

Introduction

You’re listening to Live Free Creative, an intentional podcast with practical tips for living your life on purpose. I’m your host, Miranda Anderson. And I believe in creativity, adventure, curiosity, and the magic of small moments. I hope that every time you listen, you feel empowered and free to live the life that you want.

Welcome back to the show. You’re listening to episode number 212 of Live Free Creative podcast. I’m your host, Miranda Anderson. Thrilled to be here another week to share some ideas and thoughts with you to help you feel a little bit better in this life. Crazy life.

I’m super excited today to be able to share some thoughts around the ideas of transitions, opening new chapters, closing old ones, what it looks like and how it feels to move through different distinct phases in our life.

Although everyone goes through different seasons and chapters in their lives, they aren’t all the same length. They aren’t all the same story. The timing and the process of what turning those pages over includes is going to be unique.

I’m going to share some examples today from my own life and from some other friends’ anecdotes that I’ve heard, and hope you are going to get the most out of this episode.

If, as I share about these ideas, you are self-reflecting, thinking about how you have felt that or not felt that, or you’re looking forward to something like that transition or you’re going through something similar, although not exactly the same as what I’m sharing.

Our lives are made up of these different seasons, and a lot of times we forget that there are some steps involved in the transitions and changes and opportunities.

It is not intended that we carry everything–emotions, ideas, relationships, belongings–with us from birth to death, and yet sometimes we forget or are unaware or maybe deny that one part of our life is closing and it’s time to dig a little bit up, clear a little bit out, and create space, open our arms and hearts to what comes next.

Peaks of the Week

For today’s segment, I thought I would share some peaks of the week, things that I’m really loving in this chapter, this season right now of my life.

I have four peaks of the week for you today.

Incense

The first one are these most delicious, earthy, deep, smokey smelling incense sticks. So they’re the type that you put in a little incense holder. They stick straight up and then you light it and blow it out, and it just has this little gentle waft of incense smoke that heads out into the room.

I walked into a store downtown Richmond. It’s called Dear Neighbor. It’s really cute, so I’ll link it in the show notes if you’re interested. If you’re in the area, definitely worth a visit. I walked in and was like, “Whoa, it smells amazing in here. I want my whole life to smell like this store smells.” And they directed me to the incense that was burning.

I bought this cute little ceramic incense holder, and then the incense I’ve gone through an entire package in the last two months and just ordered some new. The incense itself is from PF Candle Company. The exact scent they were burning in the store that I fell in love with is called Teakwood and Tobacco.

Remember, if you’re a longtime listener, you know I’ve shared a few times. I have this real obsession in the fall winter, especially with that smoky, earthy. Just lingering cozy, deep scent. So the Teakwood and Tobacco is amazing, and if you don’t like to burn incense, PF Candle Company also sells this in candles and in reeds sticks.

In addition, I thought I would try a couple different ones as well. So Teakwood and Tobacco is my favorite. I also just ordered the pinon inset sticks, which have a little bit of a spruce. I thought it was fun for the holidays, and then also sandalwood rose, which is a little bit lighter, but still has that delicious sort of deep smell.

I will link all of these in the show notes as well as PF Candle Company, so you can give them a try if you’re craving that sort of a yummy, cozy smell in your house for the holidays.

Matte Nails

My second peak of the week is this fun product that I didn’t know existed until last week. Did you know that you can make any nail polish matte with a matte top?

I get my nails done at a local manicure shop, and they don’t have matte in gel. They only have it if you do the dipping powder, which isn’t my favorite. I noticed someone with these really beautiful matte black nails around Halloween and I complimented her on them and just said, “Oh, I would really love to do matte nails. They’re so cool.”

And she said, “Oh, you can just buy matte nail topper.” There’s like a gel coat that you can buy. I bought mine at CVS. You can just paint it over any nails. It doles them into this really cool matte finish. I love the way that matte nails look. I like shiny nails as well. It’s fun to change it up and I just didn’t know that it was a thing.

So I bought the gel topper and while I’ll continue to have my nails done locally, I can finish them off with this cool matte topper when I want matte nails. I will link that in the show notes so you can check it out if you’re interested.

Pajamas

My third peak of the week are Hannah Anderson PJs. You are probably familiar with these.

They’re like the original matching set, top and bottom organic cotton PJs. They are amazing year round, and especially as you’re heading into the cozy season where you might actually want to have longer PJs. Hannah Anderson have been our favorites forever.

I love that the company has a vested interest in sustainability. These pajamas last forever. Seriously, they’re like the magical growing PJs. I think that we had a set for Christmas maybe five or six years ago, and not only have my kids been able to wear the same pair for a couple years in a row, even though they’re growing because they’re stretchy and cozy, then they pass through the children and we’re talking five years later and one of these pairs of PJs is still being worn by my youngest, who was probably at that time worn by the oldest.

They last forever. So I am, right now, buying our Hannah Anderson PJs for this year. This holiday season, I’m going to get matching ones. I don’t every single year, but this year our family does need new PJs for warm weather and so I’m getting these cute ski ones and I like that they have the flannel button up and looser pants for bigger kids or adults. And then the cozy, stretchy ones for the younger kids.

So if you are in the market for cozy PJs that are long lasting and sustainable, I highly recommend the Hannah Anderson ones and I cannot wait to get ours and use them the whole season. I’m actually going to pass them out right after Thanksgiving so that we can wear them all winter long.

Minky Blanket

And my final peak of the week, I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m going to again, even if I have. This blanket that I travel with and that I sleep with every single night. I feel like I have an adult blankie. It really is that cozy, comfortable, soft, lovely. And I just use it all the time.

I bring it everywhere with me and especially as we’re heading into cozy season, I like the added warmth and weight that it gives to sleep well overnight and to cozy up, when I’m reading a book by the fireplace. The blanket is made by the brand Minky Couture.

The first one was given to me as a gift and such a great gift, and now I have two because I lost it accidentally somewhere in my house, and I did end up finding it later. But in the meantime, Dave bought me another one so that I–it’s like truly like a toddler–that I have two versions now and one of them is a little smaller than the other, so it’s easier to pack up to travel with. And then I found the original one, which is my nightly Minky tour snuggle blanket.

I’ll link them in the show notes. They do have the feel of a weighted blanket, even though they are not advertised as weighted blankets. They’ve got this really nice heft to them, and the fabric itself is just so soft. It’s like nothing you’ve ever felt before. It’s not like fleece or some of these other types of blankets, that sort of pill over time.

I’ve had mine for now over two years, and I wash it, and it comes back out as soft as before. So the Minky Couture blanket adds to the coziness of the season. Those are my four peaks of the week today, Incense, the matte polish, the Hannah Anderson PJ’s, and a Minky blanket.

Main Topic: Closing and Opening the Chapters of our Lives

Now let’s turn our attention to the idea of closing and opening of the chapters of our lives. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in my own life as I have been closing and opening chapters a little bit recently, and they feel very present.

One that feels really interesting to me is, and that we’ve talked about a little bit on the show here, is having a teenager. I feel like in some ways I have firmly closed the chapter of having young kids. My kids are now all school aged, and even getting to be high school aged.

I don’t have any diapers. I don’t have anyone learning to walk or needing a stroller. I have kids that are learning now to function in this in-between space where they’re almost as capable physically as adults in some cases, and the types of things that they can learn to do are now more adult type behaviors and their social emotional processing, their development, is still happening at an appropriate school-aged kid teenage stage.

Being able to recognize, to expect what comes with this next chapter, and at the same time, consciously close the door on the chapter that we’ve left, enables us to live in the present and enjoy life as it’s happening, rather than clinging to things that are behind us or trying to fast forward to things that we expect in the future.

Lecture by Arthur Brooks

A couple weeks ago when I was at school, I listened to a lecture by Arthur Brooks about aging well. At the beginning of his presentation, one of the first slides that he showed had lifespan from about 16 to 80 across the X-axis and wellness or satisfaction with life on the vertical or the Y-axis.

As he was speaking, he was identifying the slope line that we saw descending and then troughing out, and then starting to increase a little bit again and then average out on plateau towards the end of life.

And he spoke about these sections of our life in pretty clear seasons, pretty clear chapters, and could explain with some degree of confidence because of vast amounts of gathered data across populations. The spectrum he was showing was like in the thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of answers to this particular question of life satisfaction and age.

He identified some reasons or some theories around why we have higher wellbeing earlier in life, why it descends through middle age, why it troughs out in the forties to fifties, and then why it may begin to ascend and then he talked specifically about the end of life, sixties and beyond, and how to live well and continue an upward trajectory toward the end of life rather than to slide down further in old age because you have lost your sense of meaning or purpose.

I’m not going to go into all of the different pieces of this in this episode, but I think that it’s really important to note that we are not alone in the opening and closing of chapters of our lives. Many of us go through very similar emotional states and feelings as we’re going through similar stages or chapters of life.

Something in particular that he pointed specifically to this end of life, how to continue living well throughout the end of your life was to accept the chapter of life that you had moved into that once you are past sort of fifties or sixties and some of the attributes that he gave to that time of life were that most likely if you’ve had children, they may be grown and leaving the nest. You may feel less pressure at work because you have built your career and now you’re at the tail end of that. You may have more financial stability than you may have earlier in your career and your life.

And something that really contributes to your ability to continue to feel better as you age rather than feeling worse, is the acknowledgement of the new stage. And to choose hobbies, expectations, and identity that correlate well with wellbeing in those later years. Just as an example, he specifically mentioned that our fluid intelligence, our ability to innovate and to come up with new grand ideas that have never been thought of before, diminishes as we age.

So people want to continue to be as quick and innovative and creative in that fluid intelligence way that they were in their twenties and thirties are going to be disappointed because physiologically, our ability to innovate declines as we age. However, he made sure to highlight that we have this other type of intelligence, this crystallized intelligence that increases as we age.

And so that is the type of intelligence that leans on wisdom and making sense of things that we’ve gone through in our lives and the experiences that we’ve had. And when people recognize in their older years that they are going to be less good at some of the things that they used to be good at and better at some of the things they might not have been so good at earlier in their life, they’re going to meet this place with satisfaction and fulfillment, where a mismatch of expectation and chapter or season of life will usually be met with some sort of disappointment.

Examples of Closing a Chapter of Life

I want to share a few examples that I thought of different chapters of life that you may or may not find yourself in at one point.

Schooling: elementary school, moves on to middle school, moves on to high school, moves on to possibly college or trade school, moves on to possibly at some point being done with school. And as I now know, at 39, going back to school, graduate school in a different season feels very different than doing an undergraduate degree before I was married.

So there is not one specific timeline that matches any of these chapters of our lives. We can open and close them all along the way if we choose to. Leaving school aside…

Relationships: there’s a chapter of our lives when we’re building relationships, when we’re dating, maybe marriage and partnership, maybe marriage with children. That relationship is a new chapter. Maybe divorce or uncoupling. Maybe you’ve moved through marriage and you are on the other side of it, and that in and of itself is a new chapter.

Let’s talk about kids for a second. Think of some of the chapters of raising children. There’s the newborn phase, there’s like the diapers and no sleep and everything, kind of a mess all the time. And then there’s strollers and tattling and walking and maybe there is a tricycle and then a bicycle. Maybe there is. Two naps, and then there’s one nap, and then there’s no nap. I remember that chapter closing and throwing my hands up, wondering what I was going to do.

Now what about the chapters of growing a family? Maybe the anticipation of wanting to have children, and maybe that chapter for some of you is really long, the anticipation and maybe an infertility chapter, maybe that chapter comes later. You have children and then you have a desire to have more later and it’s not as easy as before.

What about the chapter of having children that were unexpected? What about the chapter of deciding that you don’t want to have any more children and being able to choose to close a chapter that maybe generations previous to us or different types of cultures or religions, would consider not an appropriate choice.

I also like to think about the chapters of our homes and our living spaces. For example, in our last two houses, we have not had a toy room, a playroom or a space specific for toys because our kids have been old enough that we had moved out of the major toy phase.

Now my younger kids do still have some toys and they like to build with Legos and play with dolls on occasion. But the chapter of my life where organizing toys into different, separate bins for the different types there were, has passed. The transitions between these chapters isn’t always quick. Sometimes you’re ready to just move on to hop forward. Sometimes there’s a little bit of a drag or a slow closing before you’re ready to finally turn that page over completely.

Ideas to Help Us Live More Presently In Our Current Chapter

What I want to talk about today is some of the ideas that can help us to live more presently in our current chapter. And two of the skills that will be really important for that are to recognize and accept the closing of the chapter that we are emerging out of with everything that entails and the deliberate opening, planning and setting accurate or reasonable expectations for our enjoyment of the current chapter that we are in.

I’m going to share some examples from my own life and from friends and family that I’ve talked to, and again, I want to just invite you to consider if these examples don’t fit your own unique lived experience, that you think of them as metaphors for other examples that you might find in your own life.

This first idea of firmly closing the chapter that you have. At the time you’ve left it. Again, sometimes that’s a slow process, but there will be a point at which a chapter can close, and being able to do that consciously and purposefully will help you to move forward out of it.

One thing that I’ve run into over years of hosting Decluttered, my intentional living masterclass, that has a component of physical decluttering and organization, is that most people hang on to things that no longer serve them out of commitment to the past, or reflection or sentimentality of things gone by. Even when those belongings are distracting and detracting from their current phase.

A simple example of this may be toys. I just mentioned that my current stage doesn’t involve a toy room or baskets and bins of different toys, and one of the reasons why is that I recognized as my children moved from the phases of playing with a lot of toys that they were no longer necessary, and I moved them out of the house. I donated them or gave them to friends. So we were operating in the current season with the appropriate tools for the season, not with an overflow of things that no longer service from past seasons.

Another simple example of this could be clothing that you store. For younger kids and when you no longer have another child coming along to take the hand me downs, the ability to recognize that and donate those clothes or give them away enables you to step more fully and be present in your current chapter.

Another physical example of this is with our bicycle situation. We, for many years, had a Madsen cycle. It’s a bucket bike where I could put all of my kids into this bike, ride them around town. This was before they could ride. And then one by one, my kids learned to ride a bicycle on their own.

So I would have Eliot and Plum in the back of the Madsen while Milo rode along. And then a couple years later, Eliot learned to ride a bike on his own. And so I had Plum strapped into the back of the Madsen, and Eliot and Milo would ride alongside as we cruised around the neighborhood and went up to 7-Eleven to get Slurpees.

And then a couple years ago, Plum learned how to ride a bike. And so I was riding the Madsen with no one in the back, and Eliot and Plum and Milo riding around with me.

I recognized that as much as I loved the Madsen, we had graduated past it as a family, of course I could have kept it to get groceries or to do gift deliveries around town. But in our current chapter, we also live in a small house in a city where we don’t have a garage and don’t have a lot of storage space.

And it made more sense to close the chapter on the Madsen and open the chapter on all of us being able to independently ride on our bikes. I was able to sell it to a friend who was super excited to have it for her stage of life, and I bought myself a single person bicycle. It was the first time I had my own bicycle in about eight years.

Now we all can ride together on our independent little bikes around the neighborhood, and it’s such a fun chapter of life that I was able to step into and fully embrace and be excited about because I made sure to firmly close the chapter behind me.

I know some of these seem like such simple silly examples, but I want you to consider for your life, are there some chapters that have passed that you’ve moved beyond, that you are clinging to remnants of? Are you unwilling for some reason to firmly close a chapter that you may have finished reading and you’re done, and yet you haven’t actually made the changes necessary in order to call it closed?

This may be in the form of simply an emotion, a feeling that a stage of your life is over, even if it seems to be going well.

I have had times where I’ve been ready to close the door on something that was going really well and that I was really good at and successful in, and yet I didn’t feel drawn to it anymore, and in order to create space for what comes next, we need to be able to close the doors on things that are not currently serving us well.

Ritualizing the Closing of a Chapter

One way I like to think about closing chapters is with some sort of a ritual. It may be the actual donation or selling of a thing that helps you move past it into a new stage. Maybe there’s a memory that you want to capture around that chapter. Maybe it’s a photograph that you take or a letter that you write, or simply giving yourself a moment to reminisce and to think about and really fully appreciate all of the things that you’ve learned in this chapter, so that then you feel ready to have the closure and move on into the next.

You can decide what feels right for you. I do think that acknowledging the transition enables our minds and bodies to feel more ready for what comes next and to live fully into the moment that we’re experiencing now rather than trying to live between chapters.

When we moved this time last year, I guess in December last year, we decided to look for a little bit bigger house. We found one nearby and had a very whirlwind move where we put an offer on a house. It was accepted later that afternoon. Closed on it like a month later, and in the meantime had prepared our house to sell out of nowhere. And it was this upside down topsy-turvy transition, one chapter that I felt ready to close when we moved.

And I think the aid of a physical transition is sometimes helpful in like the opening and closing of these different chapters of our lives and being able to wrap our arms. The place and space. I decided that where I have spent about 10 years sharing DIY home design construction and remodeling projects on the internet–really since 2007–so over 10 years I’ve shared a lot of the ins and outs of where I’ve lived and what it looks like, and putting it together.

I felt ready to move beyond the chapter of being, I guess you could say, a DIY blogger or a home designer decor influencer, and to keep my home a little bit more personal and private.

This wasn’t a right or wrong decision. It was just something that felt right for me at this stage. And the clarity that I had around what I want to share and what I don’t want to share felt like a new chapter like I, in moving, left behind the idea that the nooks and crannies of my home were going to be available for everyone and that I would do a walkthrough and the layouts and not that those things are wrong.

I love seeing other people’s houses. I love following Instagram influencers who show design and decor and show you how to do it and how they got there. And I was ready to close that chapter in order to both have some space in real life that felt more personal for my family as we grow. I’ve also really enjoyed the clarity of shifting content online.

Shifting my purpose from more of an influencer–which I don’t love that word, but I would say that’s what I would’ve identified as for the last several years– into an educator. I want my website, my Instagram, this podcast, to be a place where you can come and, yes, learn a little bit here and there about me and get to know me.

I hope that I feel like your friend, that you just get to carry around in your pocket and also that you get to learn something new, that you hear something that sparks an interest in you or that gives you a little bit of clarity or awareness around things in your own life and how to handle them in a way that feels easier or more interesting or a little bit better.

Sometimes you may want to close a chapter and open a new one just because that’s what feels right to you, and that’s where we can often get really wrapped up in what we should be doing. I have a whole episode around should you can listen to it, episode 152. We’ll walk you through some of that should mindset. You’ll feel a lot better about these optional chapters when you are listening to yourself, when you’re listening to your heart, when you are relying on your inner self, knowing your intuition.

Of course, when these decisions involve other people, it’s important to discuss that and have compromise and come to an agreement. I do think we often discount our own ability to make choices that are good for us. So I want to invite you to consider that as you’re thinking about some of these optional transitions or optional chapter closes and openings.

Some of these for you may have to do with family planning. I was talking to one of my sisters-in-law last week around the idea of whether or not to have more children–not me, her–and it was interesting because she doesn’t really know, which is okay. The reasons why she would or wouldn’t though are so diverse and include lots of other people’s opinions.

It was a good reminder as we had this conversation, and I shared a little bit about my decision to have three children, no more, no less. You can listen to that decision process in episode 24. I shared about growing a family in that episode, and one of the things that really played into that for me, this decision to have another child or not, was the idea of chapters.

I remember so clearly as I was pregnant with Plum and I had decided during her pregnancy I was not going to have any more children. I started to get excited for that day, five, six years off. All of my kids together would be able to go on a hike around the river or that, in five, six years we would all go to Disneyland and we wouldn’t need to take a stroller because they would all be here.

I was so looking forward to and excited about the idea that, by having made the decision to have my last child, I could close that chapter not on raising babies, because of course she still was a baby when she was born. But on the family planning, on thinking about being pregnant again and all of the things that entails, it was a really nice decision.

I know that it doesn’t happen that way for everyone. That families look all different ways and those decisions sometimes are made and then like you don’t always have control over everything that happens.

And when you decide in the ways that you can that a chapter has ended, think how you can firmly close it, how you can ritualize the end of that chapter, getting rid of things you no longer need, having some sort of goodbye ceremony releasing it with gratitude for everything that you learned and everything that was wonderful about it.

How to Open a New Chapter

And now turning your attention and your focus forward to what’s happening next to what’s happening now.

One of my coaching clients is an empty nester, and we are talking about how her schedule can look like she’s recently retired, no children at home anymore. And this week it’s like this beautiful, daunting idea of I can do whatever I want, so what do I want to do?

And we started to put things back into life in a way that made sense for her in this new chapter. Leaving behind ideas that don’t serve anymore identities that were wrapped up in work or in motherhood. That day to day type of motherhood, that it doesn’t really matter anymore because those chapters are over and this new one awaits.

I shared with her some research around how transition time, big changes in life, is actually a really amazing time to set some new goals for yourself and to build new habits because things are in shuffle anyway. Our brains are actively building and rerouting our brain pathways, those neural pathways, and our expectations of the way that the days are going to feel.

And so when you close a chapter and open a new one, it’s a really fun time to consider, What do I want from this new chapter? How can I build those things in now? What am I looking forward to? What are the tools and skills that I will need to build in order for this new chapter to be successful. What does success look like for me in this chapter?

You can acknowledge the things that are hard and get excited about the things that are thrilling. In our current chapter with teenagers, Dave and I, at least once a day, look at each other and say: Being a teenager is hard. Being a teenager is hard work.

And although parenting a teenager is also hard, by acknowledging that we are all going through some of these rollercoaster moments together, we find ourselves firmly planted in the ability to enjoy what’s good about it, enjoy late night conversations about real life events, because our teenagers mind is going there.

He’s thoughtful enough and aware enough to know what’s happening in the world, and to be able to have a coherent conversation around it is really fun.

On Halloween night after the younger two had gone to bed, my oldest and I turned on a scary movie and ordered a bunch of food and stayed up until midnight, watching a movie and eating and chatting, and it felt like I was hanging out in high school, even though he’s the one who’s high school aged.

I shared a fun conversation around this, the teenage chapter with my friend Brooke Romney, a few weeks ago. That’s episode 206, and it was a good reminder that every chapter will come with both hard pieces and good pieces, pros and cons. There are no chapters that are purely good or purely bad, even if sometimes our focus and attention make us think that they are.

Allow yourself to lean into the chapter that you’re in, and if you’re in the middle of a chapter that hasn’t felt very fun. Give yourself a little space to consider: What are the challenges that I’ve been facing? What are some ways that they could feel lighter? What are some of the benefits of this stage of my life that I am going to get through at some point?

None of these stages last forever. How can you build up and enjoy even more and prioritize positivity for the stage and chapter that you find yourself in? Sometimes I just need the reminder that our lives are made up of different chapters and it’s okay for them to close and open and for us to move through them at the pace that feels right for us.

Or if something feels imposed upon us, that I still have the opportunity to step back and with a little bit of perspective, consider how I want to make the best of the chapter that I’m living.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve had a chance to think about your own life as I’ve been sharing. Opening and closing the different chapters of our life and some things to consider as you’re going through that process.

If you feel like you could use a little bit of help, some support or accountability as you’re transitioning through chapters in your life, I’d love to invite you to join me in a one-on-one coaching relationship.

I have a couple spots available as we head into the holiday season, and I would love to work with you to help you listen to your own intuition, find some clarity. And some goals for your current stage that can help you feel a little bit better.

Find all of the details at patreon.com/livefreecreative and email me at Miranda@livefreecreative.co if you’d like to join me for a quick free discovery call to see if it’s a good fit.

Have a wonderful week as you embrace the chapter you’re in.

PODCAST

Episode 212: Closing and Opening Life Chapters