Second Acts that Change Lives

Making a Difference in the World

by Mary Beth Sammons (more about this book and author)

Chapter 6: Identify the Next Steps
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Do your homework. Ask for guidance —   within yourself, and through the research you do. Listen deeply. Solutions emerge where the questions are posed. So ask, What next?

It’s not the answer that enlightens us, but the question.

— Eugene Ionesco

Midlife is not a crisis; it’s a time of rebirth, according to best-selling author and lecturer Marianne Williamson. Indeed, the need for change as we get older is a powerful one. We’re at a time in our lives when a lot of the old ways of being are gone. Our kids are growing up. Our relationships are being challenged. We can dwell on these transitions as loss, or we can embrace midlife as a chance for something new to be born.

Second act reinvention in itself is big. But, no matter what reinventions are, they are change. In this chapter we look at individuals who are exploring ongoing changes and
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have made some that, to the outside world, may not seem momentous. Nevertheless, by acting on their dreams, they have become role models for themselves and for all of us.

Turning Points

The splendor of Acapulco and the challenge of rafting the rapids helped Lois Coldewey leave her marriage, her career, and life as she knew it  —  and reinvent her future.

When the time is ripe, the vision will come.

— Joyce Rupp

Lois Coldewey spent much of her adult life married and raising her two children. She became a part-time student working on a master’s degree, a process that took twenty-three years. After that, she worked in a variety of health care specialties, from medical and surgical positions to psychology, faith partnerships, administration, community outreach, and cancer support.

Lois Jean Coldewey, 65, Des Plaines, Illinois

Act I: Wife and mother of two grown children, Michael and Tracey; grandmother of three, Rachel, Sean, and Danny; registered nurse.

Act II: Spiritual director, pastoral holistic nurse, and healing touch certified practitioner.
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Life before the Leap

Lois’s marriage was not fulfilling, and she yearned for a career that would make a difference in the world. Her own illness pushed her to give back and become a champion for others navigating illness and loss. Lois harnessed the loving energy from her years as a nurse and mother and became a spiritual director and healing touch practitioner.

The Epiphany of Change

The biggest transformation in Lois’s life started as a fluke. In 1997, she was just about to turn forty, had recently recovered from heart surgery, and was on vacation in Acapulco with her husband. Lying on the beach and soaking her senses with the sound of the surf slapping the shore, the soft, gentle breezes, the warm sand, and the lapping waves, she experienced a misty, mystical moment.

Lois was grateful for her health and happy to be alive, but her marriage was shaky, and she felt a restlessness to find deeper meaning and awakening and insight into what lay ahead. “I had just recovered from many health problems, and I knew life wasn’t infinite,” says Lois. “I wanted to thank God for getting me through.” Lois seized the opportunity to issue a fundamental plea: “God, send me a sign for a way I may say Thank You to you for my life. . . .”

Suddenly, before she had even finished her query, a hang glider passed above. She remembers saying, “Oh no! Please, not that.” Even though she loves the ocean, she’s not a swimmer; she fears encounters with sharks, and heights
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terrify her. She had no intention of taking up hang gliding. But she surrendered to the metaphorical significance of the moment.

Standing on the Edge

“The Spirit’s call was as intense as the fear, and I realized that in facing my fear, and trusting in the source of all life, I would indeed honor life,” says Lois. In late 1997, she became a nurse. That began her odyssey into fundamental questions on how to live her life, and a scary journey of self-reckoning that would shape her next two decades.

The question that would guide that journey: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Lois’s midlife journey would be exactly that  —  wild and precious, she now laughs in reflection. Today, she defines her second act as “She Who Listened,” in contrast to her previous outlook on life, “She Who Is Much Afraid.”

After returning from her Mexican vacation epiphany in 1983, Lois knew she needed to start reinventing her life. But she concedes she dipped her toes in slowly. She continued to work on herself and on her marriage, joined Al-Anon to help cope with and understand her husband’s alcohol addiction, entered a chaplaincy program and pastoral studies master’s and, while raising her kids, went to school and pondered her next steps. “I don’t think any of this affected my kids because I still did everything and I studied quietly in my bedroom,” recalls Lois.
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The Liftoff

The huge leap came when Lois took a job as a parish nurse for $10,000 a year. In 1998, she separated from her husband and lived “very frugally.” She roomed with a woman she’d met at Al-Anon for six months. When she and her husband divorced in 1988, she moved back into their house, but she sold it shortly afterward and bought a condo  — “My first independent purchase,” she says.

“I felt like God had called me into new life, like an IV transfusion,” says Lois.

A Circle of Friends

One way she chose to celebrate the milestones  —  her new determination, patience, facing her fears, and hard work  — was to invite the support and encouragement of friends.

Lois began using parties and birthdays as celebrations of the new joy she was tapping into. One thing she could control amidst all the transition was what she did on her January 8 birthdays, so she began using them as launching pads for what lies ahead. “I’ve always tried to create some way of honoring the day I was given the gift of life.”

For her fiftieth birthday, in honor of celebrating her conquering of another life-threatening health event  —  cervical cancer  —  Lois was reminded again of her beach promise to risk more and have more fun. She wanted to, as she explains, “express my old broad” years, so she held a bash and dubbed it, the “When I’m an Old Woman, I Shall Wear Purple” party. She and her friends dressed wildly, told bawdy jokes, and even “practiced spitting” in the snow. She then traveled
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to Sedona, Arizona, alone, and took a “hot air balloon trip” facing another of her fears  —  heights.

“I went on to take more risks, be less afraid, and value the rich life experiences that I had and continued to say ‘yes’ to,” she says.

At fifty-two she joined nine other women in a rapids-rafting trip on the Colorado River, calling the trip “Twenty Boobs in a Boat.”

They say that rafting the Colorado River changes you. Running rapids brought a realization. “Talk about facing fear! I had many incredible and harrowing experiences. One story is when the little river came up on the shore and swept me away!” Surviving and seeing the vast beauty of nature was its own reward.

From that trip she carried away a metaphor for her newly created life: “The river (life) sometimes sweeps you away even when you think you are not ready, and the river holds you through it,” reflects Lois.

“A year later, as I reached age fifty-six (the official age of ‘cronehood’), I gathered many wise women around and we explored and celebrated life’s learnings,” Lois says. Their strength supported her through a “job downsizing,” which left her no choice except to launch her own touch practice.

Recently, for her sixty-fifth birthday, she gathered friends for an afternoon of her “Awake: A Celebration of Living.” She offered this tribute to her own life: “I have a heart full of the love of family and friends, and I know that I can face whatever comes.”

She had a friend compose a song for the event: “It’s good where I’ve been and it’s good where I’m going.”
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The View from the Other Side

Fast-forward to today. At sixty-five, Lois makes her living as a healing touch spiritual minister and spiritual director, giving retreats for women that help guide them to ask and answer for themselves some of the same deeper questions of meaning that Lois has explored. She has sought out a contemplative life, and she helps guide others to a life that unites them with both the Creator and creation.

As a healing touch practitioner, she works with cancer patients and many others who are dealing with terminal illness, along with individuals seeking emotional and spiritual wisdom, courage, and comfort.

Biggest Hurdle

“Facing my many fears was huge,” says Lois. “I feared physical danger, failure, the end of my identity, many relationships, dreams, a total unknown, the ‘road less traveled’ in my career, and at the same time I was battling some significant health crises,” she says. “To get through, I tapped into my deeper spiritual place for strength and courage.”

Throughout the years, she has come to embrace risk taking as a teacher of many valuable lessons.

“Every day I can celebrate the authenticity of my life,” Lois says. “I’ve gained confidence in following my inner voice and learning to trust in my ability to live life according to my values. But mostly it is the chance to use my gifts to make a difference in the world. Life is a great gift. It is very rewarding to be able to help someone challenged by life’s
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circumstances to change what they can and accept what they can’t and to live life fully.”

What’s Next?

“And now, at sixty-five, I’m finally completing my ‘Five Wishes’ (a living will with heart), beginning Social Security, and facing my physical mortality once again (probably heart surgery). I pause to focus on quality of life, acknowledging what has been, letting go of what is no longer, accepting more of who I am and who others are, and going forward to cherish the future present moments.

Words to Inspire

“I hope I am a healing presence in the world, empowering others to see their goodness and what is right versus wrong, through compassionate listening, belief, and resources. I work in a partnership model  —  ‘I/Thou and Spirit.’ Whenever I ask about my life ‘purpose,’ the answer is always ‘Just love’ (and let go of the outcome)!”

Embracing Midlife

This fearless woman grabs for the reinvention rung to create new life after the working-mom track

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

— William Butler Yeats
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At age fifty-four, Pam Mitchell  —  married in her twenties, now a mother of a young adult daughter and a son in high school, and caregiver for her aging parents  —  finds herself reexamining choices she has made, including her profession and what she wants to do with the second half of her life.

You don’t spend nearly thirty years on the working-mom track, balancing a busy career as educator and raising two children, without learning carefully how to navigate your next move. But sometimes, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.

Pam Mitchell, 54, Inverness, Illinois

Act I: High school and college biology teacher; mother of two children, Will, 16, and Susan, 24; wife to Bill.

Act II: In process.

New Script

“I would like to use my educational and biological backgrounds in new ways, as a volunteer tutor or as a degreed and certified genetics counselor. I am looking into volunteering for the Jesuit volunteer corp and beginning graduate programs in genetic counseling.”

Life before the Leap

Pam was an accomplished college and high school biology teacher with a daughter about to graduate from college and
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embark on a nursing career and a son entering high school. Pangs of the impending empty nest began to creep into her life script, forcing her to begin considering the what-ifs. “What if I go back to graduate school? What about full-time volunteering?”

“I wanted more flexibility than my full-time job gave me,” says Pam. “Also, I wanted to do something that would give back to the world.”

The Epiphany of Change

Suddenly crisis struck, but not in the form of the midlife version. A car crash would give Pam months and months of time in a hospital bed to reflect on her second act  —  and remind her of the adage to live each year as if it’s your last. Just a week before her daughter, Susan, would be graduating from college in the spring of 2006, Pam and her husband, Bill, were driving on a rural road near their Wisconsin vacation home when they were broadsided by a truck.

Standing on the Edge

She would spend the entire summer in the hospital with internal injuries as well as damage to her legs and shoulders. Her husband sustained only minor injuries. With the wonderful care and concern of endless medical professionals, family members, and friends, Pam’s numerous injuries, surgeries, and rehabilitation gave her the incentive to renew her faith in humankind and to appreciate each new day. It also prompted her to think about paying back, doing for
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others what had been done for her. When she couldn’t get to a therapy appointment, she called on the local FISH (For I Shall Help) organization for a ride. (Now she is a regular volunteer driver for that group.)

Pam found herself reexamining old dreams and creating new ones. Some were dreams she had talked herself out of fulfilling because, at the time, she was caught in a balancing act between what would be good for her family versus what she would like to do.

One thing she knew for certain is that she wanted to incorporate her innate drive, passion, and previous years of experience as a teacher with a willingness to learn anew with a relaunched career and life purpose. Pam is finding a lot of pleasure and a challenge in pondering the different options for what could lie ahead. What’s easy is knowing she wants to follow her passions to carve out a new path.

“With my children moving on with their lives and at my husband’s career stage as he heads closer to retirement, I want more flexibility to travel, and I have a keen desire to do something new (not just be a pampered, stay-at-home socializing and shopping suburban woman),” laughs Pam. Having taught at the college and high school level for twenty-seven years, teaching is no longer on her list of “someday I’d love to.”

“I loved teaching college biology at Harper [a suburban Chicago community college],” says Pam. “But I was ready for something different. I have affected many lives with my teaching, and I want to keep leaving my mark. Joining a volunteer group or going back to grad school would be new challenges.”
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The Liftoff

With the Internet at her fingertips, Pam is savvy about doing research. She spends hours researching for her “next” opportunity and studying others who are successful. She is tapping into the journeys of mentors for guidance and example. One is a friend from her community who commutes to Chicago’s inner city to work with the Jesuit volunteer corp. Another is Ricky Lewis, author of the textbook Human Genetics that Pam used to teach in her college class. Ricki “has built a multifaceted career around communicating the excitement of life science, especially genetics and biotechnology,” and provides an excellent role model for Pam.

The View from the Other Side

“I’ve tried shopping, spa visiting, lunching, etc., and I feel purposeless,” says Pam. “I cannot just do this. I need to do something important, using my gifts and abilities.

“I am trying to be cognizant of what I can do for others. I’ve been on the receiving end for so long it’s my turn to be able to give something back. I have been volunteering for FISH, driving individuals with special needs to doctors’ appointments. And when friends’ children are struggling with their science classes, I have tutored and guided them through tough tests and finals.”

She adds, “Working in the campus ministry office at my son’s high school gets me back into the school scene and reminds me how vital, exciting, and fast paced it is. I am also working hard on an alumni committee at the high school to help reestablish the connections and involvement that I have s
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o greatly benefited from. I also continue to offer guidance to colleagues at the college when curriculum issues arise. I cannot totally step away.”

Be a Shadow for a Day

What do you want to be when you grow up? Teens play that all the time. Shadowing is just like it sounds. You follow someone around watching what he or she does. With the easy resource of the Internet, you can do some research and see if there are professional associations or groups in your area of interest. Often, they will know of educational or mentoring programs for you to contact and see if you can shadow someone for a day. Also, network. Let your family, friends, and friendly colleagues know you are interested in exploring this new arena. Often they will know someone you could contact to ask what it is like and to ask if you could shadow them

Making a Difference Every Day

When we get to the point where we feel we have hit the wall of void, the total absence of meaning in our lives, what do we do next? How do we identify our path? How do we know which step is the right one, and which will lead us in the wrong direction?

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1. Identify what you need to give up. What are you willing to give up to follow your dream? Could your modest lifestyle be made even more modest? Examine which material ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ are less compelling to than your dream.

2. Do your homework. Let your fingers do the walking on the Internet. With the Web as one of the fastest and most resourceful research tools in town, you can soak up a lot of information fast. For example, if you’re hoping to launch a new business, you can quickly scope out competitors. Interested in eco-travel? Check out the travel Web sites. Everything you need to know is in front of you.

3. Start slow. Before you take the big leap, test-drive your idea. If you are launching a pie business, bake a few pies before you start mass market producing and trying to sell them. Looking to dive into a business in swim coaching? Reach out to athletes and health clubs in the area and experiment by holding a few coaching sessions.

4. Look for signposts. When you announce to the universe (and to yourself) that you want to move in another direction, small and subtle things and people will start appearing on your path. Lessons arrive when we are ready for them. Pay attention, follow your heart, and you will learn everything you need to know to move forward. Signposts lead us to some pretty unexpected  —  and wonderful  —  places.

5. Muster the will to achieve it. The distance to our next place, to reinventing ourselves, is usually much further than we think. But, remember, change is the result of our attitudes. Stay positive  —  where there is a will, there is a way.

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