Latest / Butterfly Days w Tami Jorden / Candles in the Wind: Real Hope When Losses Pile Up

Transcript

Candles in the Wind: Real Hope When Losses Pile Up · Butterfly Days w Tami Jorden

• 0:10
  Tami Jorden (00:02.22)
• 0:15
  Welcome to my realm. I'm Tammy Jordan, and this is Butterfly Days, the podcast that proves you're not past your prime. You're living in it right now because women don't have expiration dates. Butterfly Days is a celebration of the extraordinary potential of Gen X and Boomer women. Throughout history, women have shared wisdom to uplift and empower one another. And you're about to learn hard-earned wisdom and best-kept secrets.
• 0:20
  From interesting, inspiring women. So if you're ready to embrace your butterfly season with confidence, find joy in the present, and create a legacy that matters, you're in the right place. No more holding back. Let's spread our wings now. Here we go!
• 0:30
  Tami Jorden (00:57.368)
• 0:35
  Welcome to my realm. This is Tammy Jordan, and you're listening to Butterfly Days. Here's something that we all know for sure at this stage. You cannot eliminate difficulties in life. You can only try to navigate them well. Because life is always going to hand you something you didn't see coming and you didn't plan for it. That's just the deal. Many of us are in a hard season right now, and my heart goes out to those who are struggling. So
• 0:40
  Let's say the hard thing out loud first, because that's how I roll. Hard seasons in midlife are pretty specific. Maybe your house went quiet, birdies flew the nest, and you're standing in a life that was built around a role that just now ended. Maybe you're caring for a parent who is slipping, and it's so much harder than anyone ever warned you that it would be. Maybe your own body has started renegotiating the terms.
• 0:50
  The hormones, the health surprises, the strange new way the world treats a woman once she passes fifty. Or maybe you've begun burying people that you love, and you're learning that this is the part of aging that's not a selling point in the brochure. Listen, I refuse to tiptoe around any of this. Those losses are profound, and here's the hard truth. They don't arrive one at a time in a tiny line like airplanes landing. As we age, we
• 1:00
  They can start to pile up. And here's what makes a hard season dangerous, not sad, dangerous. It lies to you about the future. Grief and exhaustion and loss can quietly flatten the road ahead until it looks gray and endless. And that's why despair in our later years can be so devastating, because it whispers that there is no meaning left to make, and that lie is the one thing it does.
• 1:10
  Cannot actually know. Think about it. When we say we want to live longer, we never mean we want more years of suffering. We certainly don't w mean that we want more years of being bored. We want more meaning. We're not bodies trying to last longer, we're lives trying to matter more. So the flattened future, it's a lie, and I say hope is how we call it bluff. Not the cheaply gilded Hallmark Flinzy stuff.
• 1:20
  Tami Jorden (03:24.29)
• 1:25
  The kind that's medicine. Let's talk about that. I'm careful about what I mean by hope and why that matters, because the word can be degraded by toxic positivity. Ugh. But real hope is not pretending the dark isn't dark. The old psalm doesn't say there is no night. It says weeping may endure for a night, but joy, joy comes in the morning. It names the night first.
• 1:30
  Hope just refuses to believe that the night is the whole story. Do you understand? The Buddhist monk Thiknut Han said it plainly Hope can make the present moment less difficult to bear. That's it. Hope doesn't erase the hardship. It makes today doable. So here's the definition I'd bet the house on. Real hope makes space for grief.
• 1:40
  And it keeps a candle lit beside it. Not instead of beside. You feel the loss all the way down, you're real about it, but you keep a small light burning in the same room. That to me is the entire thing. There's this line that's often credited to Rumi that says The wound is the place where the light enters you. The wound is not the enemy of the light, y'all.
• 1:50
  Sometimes it's the very doorway the light comes through. Rabendranath Tagore wrote Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark. That's the posture of hope. Singing before you can see the sunrise, not because you're naive, but because you've decided to stay ready for the return of the light. And can I just tell you?
• 2:00
  For a minute be Frank about something that makes me crazy. Sometimes when I say things like this, people tell me that it maybe I'm just naturally positive. Listen, hopefulness is not my disposition. It is a choice I've made for decades, eyes wide open, because I've seen hard things, not because I've been spared them. You know, I always think about how Anne Frank wrote that she still believed people were good at heart.
• 2:10
  Tami Jorden (05:49.504)
• 2:15
  And she wrote that in hiding from people who wanted her dead. That's not naivete. Hope is a powerful choice, and I just refuse cynicism, it's cheap. It risks nothing so it can never be disappointed. I would rather pay the price to think, to love, to make room for joy, and to hope anyway. I'd rather sing before the sunrise too. So how do we actually cultivate this?
• 2:20
  Here are some tools that actually work when losses pile up around you. First of all, gather your sources of strength around you on purpose. Hope is not willpower floating in the air. It's scaffolding that you can build one piece at a time. People who tell you the truth, ideas that steady you, a practice that grounds you, a place you feel safe.
• 2:30
  Music that moves you. You are allowed indeed it's wise to surround yourself with what holds you up. And here's the pro tip stock the shelves before the storm, y'all. Build your inventory of strength now while it's calm. People, words, practices. You don't construct a lifeboat in the middle of the wave. So number two, keep two rooms inside you.
• 2:40
  Give your grief a real room. Rebe Nochman, the Hasidic master, taught that it's a great mitzvah to be happy always, and in nearly the same breath, he said to set aside time each day to pour your heart out completely, to feel it fully on purpose. And that's exactly what clears space to keep a candle. Drowning in the grief and pretending it away are both traps. Keeping two rooms is
• 2:50
  That's the third path. Number three, practice the holy shift. This is where Amur Fati, that Latin phrase that I love comes in. The love of your fate. Please hear me carefully. Amur Fati does not say the loss was secretly a gift. And it never asks you to call a hard thing good. It asks something quieter and braver.
• 3:00
  Tami Jorden (08:16.472)
• 3:05
  To love your one actual life, wounds and all, instead of resenting it for not being the life that you imagined. When loss lands, practice shifting from why me, this isn't what I chose to this is my life, and what does loving it holy ask of me? Now same event, different posture, and that posture can be trained.
• 3:10
  This is the thing that I really want you to hear today. Your losses are real and they do deplete one kind of account in your life. For instance, the body, the roles, the people, the things we were sure would always be there, those can be depleted. But embracing Amor Fati does something with each loss. It books a deposit somewhere else, in wisdom, in depth, in capacity.
• 3:20
  In a kind of love that has been through the fire and come out truer. Nobody hands you that. You have to be looking. If you're paying attention, you'll notice something remarkable even in hard seasons. As things are being taken, riches are quietly accumulating where they matter most inside you. Amur Fati's payoff matters most at the end of life.
• 3:30
  It can make you the woman who shines from within, the woman not easily forgotten. So if you're in it right now, the quiet house, by the side of a failing parent with a changing body, seeing the empty chair, please know this. You do not have to rush your grief. Real hope would never ask that. Sit with it as you need, and while you're sitting there.
• 3:40
  Keep one small candle lit beside you. Gather your people, your words, and your practices close. Love your actual life, the whole of it because it goes so quickly, and trust that even now, especially now, something is being built in you that no season can take. You are not a body trying to last longer. You are a life trying to matter more. And this is my benediction for you.
• 3:50
  Tami Jorden (10:41.196)
• 3:55
  May you find safe harbor as you weather life's storms. May you take a higher level view of struggles and find in doing so that your lit candle can become someone else's light. May your song never be dimmed by the darkness. Never forget there's not enough darkness in the whole world to put out the light of a single candle. And remember, even there I'm rooting for you.
• 4:00
  Tami Jorden (11:11.756)
• 4:05
  This episode is dedicated to a woman who shone her light and touched so many. Anne Simpson, the beloved wife of former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson. She never let the difficult times dim her light. May her memory shine on as a blessing always.
• 4:10
  Thank you for listening and I wish you an amazing week. And remember, keep the candle burning. It's worth it.
• 4:20
  Tami Jorden (11:42.764)
• 4:25
  I'm so grateful you listened to this episode. I hope it was a real value to you. If there's a sister in your life who needs this message, please share it. Just like women have done to lift each other up over the centuries and across cultures. Women lifting each other is so important. It's why I do this work. And to avoid FOMO and keep up leveling your own life, make sure you don't miss the next episode.
• 4:30
  You may be losing hormones, but your life has given you powerful perspective. And I believe you have something to give that no one else does, that the world needs. So remember, I'm rooting for you. Let's go.