I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
There’s no good reason to think that 1000 days is enough for a midlife reinvention. I picked it because it’s a nice, round number and because I already figured out that one year is not long enough for a reinvention.
I find myself, one quarter of the way in, enervated (that means “without energy” even though it kind of sounds like its opposite, energized). I’ve tried too many things without them resulting in much. I am beginning to doubt whether I will ever escape this trying and then discarding activities and versions of myself.
Is that the way of a reinvention, tilling the soil, planting the seeds, watching seedlings grow, and then pulling them out? “These aren’t what I wanted!” I say as their little leaves push out through the ground.
In his classic book Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes, William Bridges calls this middle place, between an ending (when I left my technology career in 2024) and a new beginning (which seems no closer now?), the neutral zone. It is a time of rest and self-renewal:
In our age of stress, alienation, and burnout, this is surely a piece of wisdom that we need to recover. In keeping with our mechanistic bias, we have tried to make do with “recharging” and “repair,” imagining that renewal comes through fixing something defective or supplying something that is missing. But it is only by returning for at time to the formlessness of the primal energy that renewal can take place. The neutral zone is the only source of the self-renewal that we all seek. We need it, just the way that an apple tree needs the cold of winter. [emphasis mine]
I didn’t know that apple trees need the cold of winter, but I know that daffodil bulbs do. I planted some in pots last week and put them out on my front steps. They’ve been in my garage all winter so they were already in the cold. Had I put them in pots earlier they might have started pushing out leaves; it was that warm and sunny this winter here in Colorado. Next week I’m going to sow some purple coneflower seeds in my front bed. They need stratification (a cold moist period) to germinate.
Thinking of spring, and paintings inspired by spring colors
Looking forward to spring, I ordered new bedding from Garnet Hill yesterday. They were having a sale 30% off a purchase of $200 or more, and I jumped on it. I adore GH bedding and clothes but they are far too expensive unless on sale. I have an old voile quilt from there that I have loved, but it is falling apart, and its color scheme is subdued: medium blue, ochre yellow, grey. Plus the sheets I have to go with it are flannel — great for winter but not good for spring and summer.
I chose a sunny yellow quilt and floral printed percale sheets. I will hang my own artwork in the bedroom, but much of my art is too harsh to go with yellow and the colors of the sheets (pink, light blue, happy green). So I’m going to start a new series, inspired by Joan Mitchell’s work. Mitchell (1925 – 1992) was a participant in the New York School of artists in the 1950s and was associated with the American abstract expressionist movement, though she lived in France for much of her career. Her style was influenced by nineteenth-century post-impressionist painters, especially Henri Matisse. Matisse has always been one of my favorite painters, for his accessible subjects and happy colors. His Still Life with Sleeping Woman (1940) painting spoke to me at times in my life when I was so exhausted I could fall asleep sitting at a table. The color scheme is happy and the plant material almost magical in the way it dances over the canvas.
Matisse was a leader of the short-lived fauvist movement that emerged in France in the early 20th century. These artists used strong color and moved away from representationalism or realism in their paintings, laying the foundation for abstract art. Their work was painterly and sometimes seemingly crude in its abstractions.
I’ve experimented with my own Fauvist-inspired work, adding in inspiration from Cy Twombly, who used writing in his artwork regularly. I did the below painting as the representation of when I was in the hospital for many days with one of my daughters last year. I intended it to feel at once claustrophobic and chaotic. These colors are not happy and bright like those typically used by fauvists, but instead are rather loomingly threatening, I think.
Maybe I’ll do some fauvist inspired spring paintings? With a touch of Joan Mitchell and some writing a la Cy Twombly? Daffodils perhaps?
The perspective the neutral zone provides
Bridges continues:
The last reason for the emptiness between the stages of the life journey is the perspective it provides on the stages themselves. Viewed from the neutral-zone emptiness, the realities of the everyday world look transparent and insubstantial; we can see that everything we ordinarily think of as reality is now an “illusion.” Few of us can live in the harsh light of that wisdom continuously, but even when we return to the engagements and identifications of ordinary “reality,” we bring back with us an appreciation of the unknowable ground beyond every image. The neutral zone provides access to an angle of vision on life that one can get nowhere else. And it is a succession of such views over a lifetime that produces wisdom.
He advises the transitioner to “accept your need for time in this neutral zone.” Don’t try to fast forward to whoever you are becoming. And don’t try to reverse course and return to who you used to be.
That’s probably good advice for me today. Next week, I’ll paint and I’ll write and I’ll go to the doctor. That’s enough.