I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
I received an email yesterday that felt like destiny. I learned that rottweiler mix Sally needs a new foster home. My daughter fostered Sally in my house after Sally’s arrival from Houston in late 2023. Sally was heartworm-positive, so she had to undergo extensive medical treatment and her activity level had to be limited.
We loved Sally so much and she loved us back. She was so affectionate, so good with the cats, so oriented towards people. The main difficulty was that she was reactive towards other dogs on walks. My daughter worked with a dog behavior specialist but Sally never really conquered that problem. I assume she still struggles with it.
A few months later, Sally was adopted by a nice man who was up for taking on her challenges. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out, as the nice man’s boyfriend couldn’t take Sally’s behavior.
Sally was returned to the foster organization and she’s been awaiting a new adopter for a couple months.
But apparently now the current foster household can’t keep her. My daughter and I have long wondered whether one of us should have adopted Sally. Now I have the chance to support her again. So I’ve volunteered to take her into my home, as a foster, not an adopter (at this point).
Life, like national histories, doesn’t always or only progress linearly. Sometimes it spirals and cycles. My daughter is moving back in with me in June after she completes her master’s degree, so I’ll be back to a multigenerational household and four cats instead of two. Sally’s return could be another spiral, bringing some love and affection back that I thought was lost to me.
There is progress in life, too. Although I thought I might eventually cycle back to a job in technology after leaving the field in April of 2024, now I’m pretty sure that part of my life is fully in the past.
Similarly, while I spent the 12 years after my divorce cycling through various romantic relationships, I’ve now moved forward, and I’m committed to permanent singlehood. I never did fully throw myself into any of those relationships because I discovered I enjoyed being alone and having total personal sovereignty too much. In fact, that may have been the true underlying cause of the divorce, beneath the noise of the events that led to it. When there was still a chance I could have saved my marriage, I moved out into an apartment. I thought the shock of living alone would force me to see that I really did want to be married, really didn’t want to be out on my own. Instead, what I found was that I thrived as a single. I felt a freedom and an autonomy that I had never had in my life. I had gone from college to living with roommates to living with my eventual husband to married by the time I was 26. I didn’t have a chance to build a life on my own until I was in my forties. I didn’t develop the skills I needed to live on my own until then.
I’ve read various stats and research showing that women at midlife and late life are more likely to choose singlehood than men, and that single older women are less lonely than single older men. Older women are more likely than older men to be single by choice vs because they can’t find a partner. I feel zero loneliness. I have strong relationships with my children, my sisters, and my parents. I have close friendships. And, most important, I truly enjoy my alone time.
I recently read about the concept of aloneliness, a feeling that you need more alone time (the opposite of loneliness). In relationships, I’ve found that I never get quite enough alone time. It’s only when I’m single that I can achieve my alone time needs. For me, aloneliness is a far bigger problem than loneliness.
What I do feel like I’m missing is a purpose. I’ve thought of various things I could focus on: showing and selling my abstract art, writing a book about succeeding with midlife romance (that’s off the table now that I failed), getting back to full time employment or consulting with artificial intelligence and machine learning.
I’ve also thought about doing more with companion animals, perhaps doing some dogwalking or dogsitting or dog behavior training. That’s what I’m going to explore next, starting with Sally’s needs. I have no idea where this will lead me or whether I’ll regret agreeing to foster her. But I feel excited about this future that’s coming into view, even as I worry I might be making a big mistake. I’m barely over my surgery and I’m taking on a 65-pound leash reactive dog, thinking I can help her?
In his most recent newsletter, Oliver Burkeman writes about letting go of worry:
The spiritual writer Michael Singer points out somewhere that reality doesn’t need you to help operate it. It gets along just fine without your worrying.
Who knew? Look, I don’t think of myself as an obscenely self-centered narcissist. And yet I have to admit that when I heard those words, I suddenly perceived the subtle sense in which my thoughts and actions – and especially the background muscular tension I instinctively bring to them – were indeed somehow premised on the notion that reality itself would be badly affected were I to relax my guard.
I’m talking here about something slightly more profound than the idea that I’m a catastrophist by nature, prone to worrying too much, although that’s definitely true. It’s more about the specific way in which I seem to imagine that my worrying is effective – that there’s something about the very act of fretting about the future that helps keep everything on track. This is, rather obviously, false. All I really need to do is to show up for what’s happening, appreciate the spectacle of it, and go with the flow. [emphasis mine]
That’s what I’m going to do.