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Dream Weavers: Finding Meaning When Life Hits Hard in Midlife · Butterfly Days w Tami Jorden

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  Tami Jorden (00:02.22)
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  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.
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  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!
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  Tami Jorden (00:56.206)
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  Welcome to my realm. This is Tammy Jordan, and you're listening to Butterfly Days. I think Gen X and Jen Jones women have magic to make that maybe we didn't notice yet. And if we could leverage that, we would blow open this whole over 50 is bad deal that we believed. So here are some power shifts to make your day, your week, your life better. Way better.
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  Somewhere in your life, I bet that you've watched two people take the same blow, the same diagnosis, the same layoff, the same stunning divorce request, the same unfair knock the wind out of you turn that nobody signs up for, and you watch them move on as two completely different people. One got smaller, harder, bitterness may have set in and sort of calcified until it colored everything.
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  The way they healed, the way they let people love them, maybe, whether they could love anybody back, whether they would ever trust doctors again. But the other one, dealt the same hand, somehow got bolder, brighter. Not because it didn't cost them, it literally cost them everything. It cost them the person they were. But somewhere in the wreckage, these folks started scanning for what was still there, for what was still possible.
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  For the next true thing that they could do. Same event, two different lives, two different outcomes. And here's what I want you to sit with today. The difference wasn't the blow. Gonna say that again. Same event. So difference wasn't the blow. It was their lens in how they saw it. The poet Mary Oliver asked the question that follows a lot of us into midlife.
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  What would you do with your one wild and precious life? And most of us hear that question about our circumstances. What will you do as in what will you accomplish? Where will you go? What will you build? But there's a quieter layer underneath that I'm revealing. Victor Frankl, who survived about the worst circumstances a human being can in the Holocaust, landed here when he said they can take nearly everything.
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  Tami Jorden (03:24.362)
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  Everything from you, but they can't take the last human freedom. And that's the ability to choose your response. In other words, to choose how you meet what's in front of you, what's happened to you. That's our last power, not power over what happens. You and I both know we don't always get that one. I'm sorry about it, but facts are facts. But power over what you make out of it, how you translate it, what you decide it means.
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  And what you do next. This is not just a pretty idea. You've actually probably seen it in real life, especially if you watch those two people, same hand dealt, two different outcomes. So it's not a philosophy that I'm asking you to take on faith. It's probably already an experiment that you've seen lived out, which means their outcomes were never locked in to the event. There was always room.
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  Always room. Do you see it now? That space in a situation is where our power lies. So here's my first pro tip. The next time life hands you something hard, before you decide what it means, remember you do have some power. Breathe. Adjust to the moment. This is happening. It's happening. And ask yourself, this is my life. How do I want to play it?
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  First pro tip. Now, a lot of us are running a program we probably didn't choose. Some of it's temperament, you came out of the womb a certain way. Some of it's what life taught you, the hard way, about what to expect. For a long time that program just felt like reality, like the plain truth about how things are. Here's the thing about us humans, we're pattern locators. It's how we make sense of what's happening in real time. You see, the mind scans the mess.
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  And it finds a shape fast, so we know what to do, and that's a gift. But it comes with two catches that a smart woman will want to know. First, that locator in our brains doesn't only find true patterns. It first finds familiar ones. It'll grab a familiar one, call it the truth, simply because certainty feels safer than not knowing. I always get passed over. This never works for me.
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  Tami Jorden (05:52.386)
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  You can't trust people like that. That's just how life is. Those are tidy, certain, and safe patterns, but they are often flat wrong. Second, once it locks in on it, it runs on autopilot. It'll replay that same pattern for years and not ask if it's still serving you. Living on autopilot just for the comfort of feeling safe rarely pays off.
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  We know that even when it scares us, it really pays to be intentional and deliberate, ladies. But you're not 25 anymore, and you know not everything ends in a loss. That's your whole advantage. You've got decades of patterns behind you now, and you've watched enough smoke turn into fire and enough dread evaporate into absolutely nothing to know the difference.
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  Which means you're finally skilled enough to do something you couldn't do when you were young. You can catch your own automatic read and ask if you still want to run it. That's the new Gen X power move. You notice how you're reading situations and then you ask, Is this the lens I want? Or do I want to mix it up? Try another angle and see what it shows me. I can hear your objections, so let me be clear.
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  This is not putting a happy face over life. I am not interested in that, and I know you are not either. What I'm talking about is facing the problem and then go looking for what's still possible inside it. Scavage the wreckage, you know what I mean? So my second pro tip is catch the autopilot read in you when it happens. And then ask, is this pattern true?
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  Or just familiar to me. Keep it or weave it into a different thread. Your choice, but know that you have a choice. You know, Elizabeth Gilbert tells the story that changed me. She once met a woman who'd been hiking by herself when the ground gave way beneath her, and she fell into a ravine and broke her back. And she lay there at the bottom for a long time, sure that she was dying. And what stayed with her?
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  Tami Jorden (08:15.81)
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  Because years later when she talks about it, wasn't the fear, it was the wonder. Flat on her back she looked up and she saw the sky like it was the first sky she'd ever seen, and she heard the birds, and she could smell the earth all around her, the very earth that she thought was about to bury her, and it struck her as almost unbearably beautiful.
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  And there was this bead of dew making its slow way down a leaf just above her face, too far to touch, and she said she had never seen anything so beautiful in her whole life. It was just lovely. She lived to tell about that, and when she did, her eyes filled, not from the trauma of it, from love, for how beautiful the world had been the whole time, while she'd been moving too fast to notice. That's a woman who stopped the autopilot read.
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  and saw what was glowing in the wreckage. Now, I'm not telling you this, so you'll go chasing some heart stopping experience to wake yourself up. Trust me, life will hand you plenty of those uninvited, we know it. I tell you that because she got a rare view, the view most of us are only granted at the very end. That view from the edge looking back, where the ordinary turns exquisite
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  And you realize this whole flawed, fragile, unfair, unrepeatable experience could hide a gift the whole time. I know that's Adula and me talking, and I will tell you that view is real though. Loving this life exactly as imperfect as it is, man, that is medicine for weary souls. So the question this episode is really asking, do we have to wait for the ravine?
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  Or can we choose that view now while we've still got all this road left to walk? Leads me to my third pro tip. When you're deep in something, try the higher view on purpose. Ask what this will look like from the end looking back. That shrinks the small stuff down and it allows the big stuff the weight it deserves, so you can manage it with more grief. And good news, ladies.
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  Tami Jorden (10:34.634)
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  Midlife is exactly the place to do this work. Not in spite of your age, but because of it. The culture sells us a different story shore everywhere we look, ads, feeds. This whole season of our life gets framed as like this one long column of losses. What's fading, what's falling, what's behind us? Sure, we are living some of the most challenging ground right now, but I don't have to accept
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  Anybody else's read of my own season, and neither do you. The truth is you're not over the hill, you're at the top. And this is the best vantage point you'll ever get, the highest clearest view that you've had yet. Yes, the path eventually heads down, and that's true for every single one of us, and it's exactly why you should enjoy the altitude now while you've got it. Life is not simple up here.
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  It's far more complex than it's ever been. More roles, more history, more that you've loved, lost, and learned. But complexity is not the enemy of meaning. Complexity is the raw material of meaning. A simple life has less to work with. And you are now bearing the richest palette you've ever held. Please don't forget that. You're carrying more than you give yourself credit for.
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  All those skills you've picked up along the way, the ones that feel so ordinary to you now that you don't even count them as gifts because they come easy. Those are exactly the ones worth mining. Your knapsack is full, and you can listen to episode Baby You Ain't No Cupy for great insights on this. You just forgot to look inside that knapsack. Here's your challenge for this week. What hard situation are you concerned has no upside for you?
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  This week I want you to look at it again. What's possible that you missed in the first glance, even if it's tiny, what's the space you have some power to do, be, or acknowledge? I want to encourage you to go back and find what's glowing in the wreckage or in the challenge. And I want to thank you for listening this far because I want to leave you with this image that will change your life.
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  Tami Jorden (12:57.314)
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  Butterfly Days is designed to be your fast track to being the most amazing you that you can be in your own distinct way. This is the shift midlife makes possible. In early life, we're only pattern locators, reading the shape of whatever's happening to us and trying to discern it. But we don't have to stop at reading. This is where this part of life is where you become the artisan.
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  The one who doesn't just find a pattern, but makes one, who takes the threads that she's been handed and chooses on purpose to weave something richer than she was dealt. That's the upgrade midlife offers, from locating patterns to making them intentionally boom. Imagine this, your life is your own artwork, your own tapestry woven of what happened and what you did with it.
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  When you're in the middle of your life in real time, you're likely looking at the back of the weaving where the work happens. And remember, if you think about it, the backside is a mess. There are knots, loose ends, threads crossing each other, no rhyme, no reason. And from here, it may not look like anything at all. But I don't want you to get discouraged, because by midlife, we've lived long enough that we can flip it over.
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  The years have created something that you may not have realized. On the other side, those exact same threads, the dark ones and the bright ones, the snarls and the straight clean runs, they make a pattern. Something you could never see from the back of the tapestry. Something startlingly whole. You can see themes in your life, your story that's are actually really cool. Please know
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  I'm not handing you a bow on top. Nobody handed you all your threads. You didn't choose every color. Some of your threads are grief. Some of them are things that never should have happened, and that is real. And I'm not going to tell you they were secretly a gift or part of some plan. I'm just not. What I want you to know is that you are the weaver. You may not get to choose every thread, but you can keep using the ones you're given to make something uniquely, unmistakably yours.
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  Tami Jorden (15:19.928)
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  The knots don't vanish, they just turn out to be a part of a pattern only you could have made, because in anything handmade, the imperfections are not the flaws. They're how you know a living hand has made it, and that the life is truly yours. It's kind of startlingly beautiful to realize how your life events and your choices have built this life, this person that you are now. And once you see your handiwork, it's kind of cool.
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  What are you gonna do with it? What else could you add? Think about your life story, and you'll begin to see the patterns that are so beautiful, how everything that happened kind of wove into who you are now. So the final pro tip, the one to keep when the philosophy fades and you're just living on an ordinary Tuesday, when times get crazy and you can't make sense of it or imagine an outcome you want, don't demand the ending now.
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  Just turn your life over for a second and ask yourself one question. What am I weaving here? What do I want to create? And what do I want to be even in this situation? You're still at the loom, girl, and you've still got thread. You're still making art. You're not a body trying to last longer. You're a life trying to matter more. This is my benediction for you.
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  May you face whatever happens in your life, knowing even in the darkest moments no one can take your response. May you trust that your choices matter, that thread by thread they'll build a legacy you're proud of. May you be able to see how exquisitely beautiful your life is in its imperfection and its glory. And may you know your story matters a single thread in a greater tapestry of our moment.
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  Part of how Gen X and Jen Jones will move the needle for the generations behind us. So get out there and show us what you got, baby. I'm rooting for you. Hope you enjoyed this solo episode. Join me next week for another interesting interview where you can feel you're at a cafe listening to the women at the next table share their best stuff. And if you enjoy butterfly days, would you help me expand my mission by liking, rating, and sharing it, please?
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  Tami Jorden (17:46.168)
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  Thank you in advance for being a woman who helps other women, and if you need me, find me at Tammy Jordan dot com.
• 0:47
  Tami Jorden (17:57.132)
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  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.
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  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.