Reimagine: A Life That Fits

When you are asked to re-imagine your life, it can be a big challenge. At least, it was for me.

I have spent much of my life trying to be “normal,” so that was where my mind went first: to what a normal life is supposed to look like according to society’s rules. I already knew that picture didn’t fit me, but it was surprisingly easy to fall back into imagining what was expected rather than what might actually work for me.

Once I began looking more closely, guilt arrived too. I wanted—or needed—things that seemed different from what I was supposed to want. I have written before about wanting a normal life, but many of the things I meant were simply things other people appear to take for granted. Re-imagine made me realize that I needed to stop measuring my life against that idea of normal before I could see what I genuinely wanted.

The first wants and needs were ordinary enough.

I want the courage to walk outside during the winter. I have a strong fear of falling on ice, and while that fear is not unreasonable, I don’t want it to keep me indoors for an entire season. I want to find safe ways to continue wandering, keep my curiosity alive and keep my body moving.

I want food that does not require elaborate preparation but is still healthy enough to eat regularly. I want a cleaning routine that does not disappear because I have been away from home for a few days. I need something that can survive interruptions and show me how to begin again after a longer break.

I want to do simple things such as showering and brushing my teeth more regularly. Those are not habits I grew up with. I lived without running water, electricity or indoor plumbing well into my teens, so these routines were not embedded in childhood. Learning them later has been a struggle, and even now caring for my body in those ways does not happen automatically.

I want to keep walking. I want Aquafit, or some other form of outside exercise, to remain part of my life. I also want companionship—people I can talk with, laugh with and practise being social around without every connection having to become a deep friendship.

These may be things many people take for granted, but for me they remain difficult. That does not make them too small to belong in a vision for my life. It makes them honest.

Then there was the question of organization.

I do not do well with a strict schedule. A day divided into fixed times quickly becomes boring and restrictive, and eventually I fight against it. But I don’t do well with broad categories and completely unstructured time either. “Do something creative” offers so many possible directions that I may choose nothing, or follow a fascinating rabbit hole for hours without finishing anything I meant to do.

I need something between those two extremes.

A clear starting point helps. So does a recognizable stopping point—but not necessarily a time limit that says I must work for two hours. Sometimes a piece takes twenty minutes, and sometimes it takes several days. These blog posts are a good example. I try to publish once a week, but sometimes the central idea takes longer to reveal itself. A rigid deadline cannot make that discovery happen faster.

What I eventually found was that a life that fits me needs five things working together. It begins with discovery—something I have not already mastered, seen or understood that charges my curiosity and makes me want to explore further. For that interest to last, the discovery must connect with something meaningful to me. It also needs momentum: the initial thought must lead into something I can continue exploring or give form to, such as a Daybook page, a blog post, a series of photographs or another question, rather than ending as a short mental exercise. I need enough flexibility to change the time, method or direction when circumstances require it. Finally, I need recognition: some way to understand what the experience added to my life, whether I completed something, learned something, felt something or simply enjoyed where it led me.

Those five conditions gave me something more useful than an idealized picture of the future. They gave me a way to tell whether a plan might actually fit.

What I am taking into Reshape is a small set of principles.

The plan must support the life I actually lead, not an imaginary perfect life. It must make ordinary things easier without turning my days into a timetable. It must provide fuel for my curiosity through small adventures and opportunities for discovery. It must make room for casual connection through things such as classes, tours, activity groups or coffee and conversation.

It must also give me specific places to begin without deciding every detail for me. It needs enough flexibility for low-energy days, foggy days and days when I simply do not feel like doing what I thought I would. Most importantly, it needs a way for me to return after illness, travel or interruption without treating the break as failure.

I began Reimagine believing I had to picture a different life. Instead, I discovered the conditions that would help me live my own life more fully.

I do not need a perfect plan or a conventional future. I need ordinary supports, continuing discovery, room for connection and enough structure to help me begin without taking away my freedom.

I do not need to become someone else to create a life that fits me.

Recognize: The Five Things My Life Needs

I’ll be honest: when Recognize was first selected as part of my Year in Review, I did not know what it was supposed to be about. Reflect made sense. I was looking back at the year I had actually lived. But what was I supposed to recognize?

As I worked through the questions, I realized I was describing a manifesto of sorts. Not a list of rules everyone else should follow, but the things I have learned about how I live my life and how I want to continue living it.

Some of them surprised me. Some of them didn’t. A few were things I already knew but had never admitted out loud.

In the end, most of what I discovered came down to five things:

Meaning. Momentum. Flexibility. Evidence. Discovery.

They are not another system I am supposed to follow perfectly. They are the conditions that make it possible for me to build a life around the person I actually am.

 

Meaning

What I am doing has to matter to me or give me something in return.

That may sound obvious, but there are plenty of things we are told we should do simply because they are good for us, productive or expected. Apparently, knowing something is worthwhile is not always enough to keep me doing it.

Aquafit stayed because I enjoyed it. I didn’t see results immediately, but it was fun enough to keep me going until the results appeared. Eventually there was the medium dress. I reached a weight below 200 pounds and stayed there. The activity gave me something while I was doing it and supported something that mattered to me over time.

Photography gave me joy almost immediately. It kept my mind and hands occupied, but it also brought my curiosity back into my everyday life. The more photographs I took, the more I wanted to notice, see and understand. It led me to new places, gave me more things to create and helped me reconnect with my roots through older photographs. Those photographs will also become part of the history I leave to my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Both activities gave something back while I was doing them.

On the other hand, if something only drains my energy without giving me anything in return, I will eventually stop. That doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t worthwhile. It means it is not worth the amount of energy I am spending in that form.

That last part matters: in that form.

Meaning, for me, is not about whether something looks productive from the outside. It is about whether I can connect it to something that matters in my actual life.

If something is going to remain part of my life, I need a reason to care about it and something that gives back along the way.

Momentum

I need to understand enough to see progress and know what comes next.

I don’t need to know exactly how everything will turn out before I begin, but I do need a foothold. Something has to click. I need to understand at least part of what I’m doing or be able to see that my effort is leading somewhere.

French is a good example. I wanted to learn it because of the proposed trip to Old Montreal, and I managed to continue for about a month. Eventually it became boring and too difficult. I think having a real person to speak French with would have helped. I would have been using what I learned instead of completing exercises without any connection to my daily life.

The creative summer class ended in a similar way. I had been away from that kind of creative work for too long. Many of the tools and techniques I once knew had changed, and the new ways of doing things didn’t make sense to me. I kept trying, but without anything clicking, frustration took over.

That doesn’t necessarily mean I couldn’t learn French or understand the new creative tools. It means those particular methods did not give me a way in. After several hours of trying, struggling and asking for instructions, continuing in exactly the same way becomes another drain on my energy.

Momentum also affects whether I believe I have accomplished anything. Notes alone don’t usually count for me. They are still subject to a dozen changes before the real work begins. A solid framework is different. It may not be finished, but the idea has become mine. I can see its shape and know what comes next.

That is when preparation begins to feel like creation.

I don’t need the whole path. I need enough of a foothold to take the next step and enough visible progress to know that my effort is leading somewhere.

Flexibility

The method has to bend with the reality of my life.

Some of you will understand this immediately and some of you probably won’t, but I need structure without rigidity. I like having a beginning, a direction and some idea of what comes next. What I cannot sustain is a system that expects me to do the same thing at the same time for the same length of time every day.

Popular productivity advice often says that consistency means following a fixed schedule until the behaviour becomes automatic. That assumes I will wake up with roughly the same amount of physical and mental energy each day. I don’t.

It may be a bad pain day, a low-energy day or one of those confusing mental days when the words and thoughts take longer to come together. Sometimes my energy changes within the same day. A plan that only works when I feel well is not a particularly useful plan for my life.

Aquafit taught me something about this. I began with a grand plan to attend three times a week. Fatigue, pain, illness and travel eventually reduced that to once a week, when I am well enough to participate fully. On paper, that might look as though I failed to follow the plan. In reality, doing less is what allowed Aquafit to remain part of my life.

The original plan did not survive. The purpose did.

Energy is also specific. I can walk thousands of steps while exploring somewhere interesting and then struggle to clean my kitchen. That doesn’t mean I am pretending to be tired or choosing only the fun things. An adventure and a household task ask different things of me. Being capable of one demanding activity does not mean I have enough energy for every supposedly easier one.

Recovery has to fit inside the plan too. I cannot put the rest of my life on hold until I am completely well because completely well may never arrive. At the same time, I cannot pretend recovery is unnecessary.

I need room for both.

Changing the method, reducing the size or moving the timetable is not abandoning the goal. It is how I make space for the goal inside the life I actually have. 

Evidence

I need to look at what actually happened, not only at how I feel about it.

My internal account of a day is not always accurate. I can complete necessary errands, attend appointments and deal with something important, then come home feeling as though I accomplished nothing because I did not create anything.

That happened recently after I met with the pharmacist for a medication review and went to ServiceOntario to update my identification. Both things needed doing. Both required time, travel, concentration and energy. Yet because I had not completed any creative work, the day felt unproductive.

I know maintenance matters. Appointments, paperwork, housekeeping and cooking keep my life functioning. Research and notes prepare the ground for future work. But they do not give me the same sense of accomplishment as taking an idea from my head and making it real.

This need for evidence extends beyond individual days.

I can become stronger and maintain a weight below 200 pounds while still living in a body affected by illness, pain and fatigue. My vulnerability does not erase the evidence of my growing capability, and my increased capability does not mean the vulnerability has disappeared.

But what remains undone is not the only evidence that matters.

When my feelings tell me I have done nothing or made no progress, I need to look at the life I actually lived before I believe them. 

Discovery

I need something I haven’t already mastered, seen or understood.

This was probably the most surprising thing I recognized because the pattern stretches much farther back than this year.

When I become competent enough at something, I often lose interest in it. Sometimes I stop suddenly and sometimes the interest fades slowly, but once the challenge is gone, I usually stop.

I learned to knit and purl well enough to complete a set of fingerless gloves, and then I stopped knitting. I figured out the mechanics of weaving and left my final project unfinished. I completed three miniature rooms without much difficulty, but when other people became interested in buying them, I stopped making them.

At first that sounds like I cannot stick with anything, but I don’t think that is what is happening. In each case, I stayed long enough to answer the question that interested me: Can I figure out how to do this?

Once the answer was yes, the activity felt complete. Making more of the same was no longer a challenge. It was repetition, and repetition became boring.

That creates a strange balance. Too little understanding frustrates me, but complete predictability loses me too. I need enough understanding to gain momentum and enough uncertainty to remain curious.

Photography continues to hold my attention because knowing how to take a photograph does not mean I already know what I will find. Every walk offers different subjects, questions and stories. Writing and design work the same way. I may know how to use the tools, but each piece asks me to make different decisions.

This is also where I recognized that I move through the world in a very particular way. The subject may change, but the process rarely does:

Notice → Wonder → Follow → Understand → Preserve/Share

I notice something that catches my attention. It makes me wonder. I follow the question through observation, research or conversation until I understand it well enough for it to become part of my world. Then I preserve or share it through photographs, writing, design, my Daybook or simply my own memory.

My interests are not as scattered as they sometimes appear. Photography, wandering, history, writing, design and research are all connected by the same curiosity.

The subject isn’t the organizing principle. My way of looking is.

I stay engaged when there is still something to discover. Once the question has been answered and only repetition remains, I am usually ready to follow my curiosity somewhere else.

What I Am Still Working On

Recognizing a pattern does not mean I have solved it. There are two things in particular that I know I still need to work on.

The first is compassion for myself. I have always found it easier to make room for another person’s needs, mistakes and struggles than my own. Boundaries were little more than a word to me when I was younger, but slowly I learned to build them. They do not mean I have stopped caring. They mean I am finally trying to include myself among the people worthy of my care.

The second is learning which problems are mine to solve. Some belong to other people, some have no clear solution and some of my own problems may remain problems for a long time. Caring does not make me responsible for fixing everything. Knowing what might help does not always mean I have the energy, ability or circumstances to make it happen.

I am still learning where responsibility ends, where acceptance begins and when continuing to push is doing more harm than good.

Recognize did not give me another system to follow. It gave me five conditions that help me understand why some things become part of my life and others fall away:

Meaning. Momentum. Flexibility. Evidence. Discovery.

What I do needs to matter. I need enough of a foothold to move forward. The method has to bend with the reality of my life. I need to look at what I have actually done, not only at how I feel about it. And I need something left to discover.

Together, they lead me back to one guiding principle:

I do not need a perfect system designed for the person I am supposed to be. I need a life built around the person I actually am.

That is not an excuse to stop growing. It is the ground I need in order to grow at all.

 

Reflect: The Year I Actually Lived

We went to Montreal last October, and I was enamoured with Old Montreal. Rob said I would need to be able to walk a lot, but if I could manage it, he would take me back for my birthday this year. That led me to Aquafit. I scheduled myself for three sessions a week and decided I would walk to and from the classes once spring came. That wasn’t the way it worked out, but that was the plan.

Like many of my plans this year, that isn’t what happened. I tried, I really did, but found that, at least in the beginning, I could manage only one class a week. I even walked there or back a few times, but it just left me in pain. I ended up sticking with one class a week. Halfway through the year, my daughter and son-in-law joined my granddaughter and me, so the classes became fun. I still manage only one class a week, but it was enough to make me stronger and get me below the 200 pounds I had been trying to reach for a long time.

A lot of things were like that. One of the hardest lessons of the year was allowing other people to help me. It was strange, really. I loved helping others, including the Outsiders, but I didn’t like asking for help myself. I had to learn how to trust things and people. Sometimes that trust was betrayed, as it was with the Outsiders, but at other times I was extremely grateful for the help I received, especially from Nessa and Dean.

Last October was also my 65th birthday, and that required me to learn a whole new set of rules. Trust me when I tell you that OAS and ODSP are two very different systems, with very different rules. Among other things, I needed to learn how to budget again—not because I had less money, but because I had more. I had no idea how to handle finally having enough to survive and still have a little fun in the process.

Learning to budget again taught me that rigid schedules and the constant recording methods taught to accountants don’t work for me. I had to create my own way of controlling my spending habits.

The year was also full of medical issues and more trips to the hospital than I have made since my chemotherapy. I am learning to listen when my body says it has had enough, but that doesn’t prevent problems with prescribed medications or change the fact that I react badly to THC.

I started taking cannabis to help me sleep and forgot that it could be addictive. It did help, except for the increased depression and anxiety added on top of the depression and anxiety that were already normal for me. Another lesson learned—I just needed to end up in an ambulance before I learned it.

I remember thinking in October that I didn’t have any hobbies anymore and that I had stopped being creative. It’s funny how we remember things we have accepted as true even when they aren’t. Granted, I wasn’t knitting anymore or doing many of the other things I used to do, but I was writing. I was working on a book I had been trying to write for years. I even finished it, only to discover when I began editing that I had lost the plot somewhere along the way.

I put the book aside for a while, but I began writing blog posts again. I also learned how to make Pinterest pins well enough that I gained a few followers and began seeing my pins on other people’s boards. That was real. It was my work, and people liked it. That gave my ego a bit of a boost.

My creativity wasn’t gone, but I thought my curiosity was. It turned out I was wrong about that too. I just needed a new direction.

I found that direction when I came across a pin on Pinterest about the Wander Society. I don’t know where the pin originated, and I can’t recall the author’s name right now. Wandering sounded interesting, but I needed a way to record it because what is a wander except looking for the strange and different?

Cue my phone camera.

I began taking pictures again. It was like rediscovering an old friend and finding a comfortable companion for those walks. And while I still don’t walk to the YMCA for Aquafit, I have walked between 9,000 and 12,000 steps in a day without becoming bored or even noticing how far I had travelled. Walking returned in a new and much more interesting form. I was even able to walk a kilometre a day with Rob during the summer, at least for a few days.

We did a lot of travelling during the warmer months and even went to Calgary for a week. That cost me the return trip to Old Montreal, but it was worth it. I have been to many places and even got lost one day on the back roads near my old home in Buckhorn. My camera has been my best companion. I now seem to have thousands of photographs and so many happy memories.

One thing that emerged that I wasn’t expecting was an increased interest in history—my own history in particular, and the history of buildings and places in general. I think that as we age, we become more concerned with sharing the lives we have lived and recognizing the history of those who came before us.

One thing I am certain of is that, for the first time since COVID, living has become more than just recovery. My horizons have expanded a lot.

The Things August Gave Me

August was supposed to be my month of rest. You know, where you put down all your burdens and just relax a bit. That did not happen. Instead August turned out to be the busiest month of the year to date, which is perhaps not the best way to go about having a month devoted to rest, but apparently it is the way I do it. 

I went to Buckhorn, Toronto and Calgary. In Calgary I climbed through Reader Rock Garden, wandered through the Central Library, spent a day at Heritage Park and made it all the way to Banff and Lake Louise. I came home with photographs, stories and enough unfinished Daybook pages to prove that at some point the living had gotten well ahead of the recording. There were adventures and ordinary days, family history and new places, good meals and long walks, and somehow an incredible amount of living packed into one month.

By the end of it, I was tired. Not the pleasant kind of tired that disappears after a good night's sleep, either. My body was making it increasingly clear that there had been a cost to all that living. There were headaches and fatigue and days when very little happened because very little could happen, and eventually I had to pay attention to that whether my mind particularly wanted to or not.

And yet, I don't think August failed at rest. I think I misunderstood what I was asking of it. It certainly wasn't restful, but perhaps that wasn't the only thing I needed to learn about rest. What it did do, rather unexpectedly given how busy I was, was teach me a little more about stopping.

Not without arguing with myself first, of course. Even tired to the bone my mind can find work, or somewhere to go, or something I want to see. My body and my mind do not always agree on what I am capable of, and historically my mind has been pretty good at winning that argument. Somewhere during August that began to change. I still pushed myself, probably more than I should have sometimes, but not nearly as hard as I could have.

More often than I used to, I could look at something unfinished and decide that it could wait. The Daybook could wait. A blog post could wait. Aquafit could wait. August itself could spill over its carefully drawn boundaries and into September, and nothing terrible happened because I didn't finish everything on time. Given how much I like to make plans and then expect myself to follow them, learning to draw that line may be one of the more useful things August gave me.

September is a different kind of month for me because, if you have been following me for any length of time, you know my new year doesn't begin on January 1st. It begins on October 7th, my birthday, and I have thought of the year that way for many years. This September I'm preparing to begin my 67th year, and instead of doing the rather hit-and-miss year-end review I've done before, I decided I wanted to be much more deliberate about it.

I don't want to simply look back and make a list of what went well and what didn't. I want to know what this year actually taught me and use those lessons as fodder for my posts, my Daybook, my photography and the way I live next year. I don't want to borrow someone else's list of monthly themes this time either. I want to create my own, based on what is relevant to me and on the life I am actually living rather than the one somebody else's list assumes I should be living.

So before I began the review, I collected everything I've written this year and started putting it into some kind of order, looking for lessons learned, routines that came and went, things I tried that didn't work and things that appeared almost without my noticing them. I was looking, I suppose, for evidence of who I was this year and clues about who I want to continue to be.

That evidence has already surprised me. Parts of this year were genuinely difficult, and I don't need to rewrite them into something positive to make the year worthwhile. But when I began looking at what actually happened instead of relying entirely on how the year felt, I found something sitting right alongside the difficulty that I hadn't really expected to find there. Progress. Quite a lot of it, actually.

Maybe that is another thing August prepared me for. Rest taught me that stopping isn't necessarily giving up. Notice taught me to pay attention. Restore brought familiar parts of myself back into view, and Renew asked what I wanted to do with them. Now September is asking me to look at the whole messy collection and decide what belongs in the year ahead.

I know already that I want to carry my curiosity with me. I want to carry the permission to stop and the growing ability to listen when my body tells me something my mind doesn't particularly want to hear. I want to remember that evidence sometimes tells a very different story than feelings do, and perhaps most importantly, I want to carry something I am only beginning to understand: a difficult year and a year of remarkable progress can be the same year.

There is one more lesson from August that seems especially worth carrying with me: what fills me can also drain me. Calgary filled me. Buckhorn filled me. The wandering, the photographs, the discoveries and the stories filled me, and some of those same things left me exhausted. I don't think the lesson is that I should stop doing them. I think the lesson is that I need to become better at recognizing the cost and listening when my body says it has paid enough for now.

Sometimes being tired really is the receipt for having had a very full life, and looking back at August I wouldn't trade away most of what caused the good kind. What I would like to do differently in my 67th year is learn the difference a little sooner between that kind of tired and the kind that means I have gone too far.

I don't have to carry everything into the year ahead, only what helps me grow. September is my month to figure out what that is.