I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
The Star Tarot card is a card of openness, wholeness, and healing. It shows a woman kneeling by a pool of water, holding pitchers in both hands. With the left chalice she pours water into the pool of water and with the right, she pours it onto the ground where it streams in multiple directions. A large eight-pointed star lights the sky and eight smaller such stars surround it. In the distance a far off hill rises.
What does it mean that she’s pouring water into a pond and out onto the ground? Is she being wasteful? In Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack writes that this represents the woman’s trust in the universe:
It is worth comparing the Star with Temperance, where we also see a figure pouring water and holding two cups, with one foot on land and one in water. Both cards come after a crisis, but where Temperance is controlled the Star is free. Not clothed, but naked. Not standing stiffly, but supple and relaxed. And finally, where Temperance pours the water back and forth, blending but at the same time conserving, the Star maiden pours it out freely, confident that life will continually supply her with new energy. The picture suggests all those mythical chalices could never be emptied.
The Star comes after the Tower, a card that can mean transformation and enlightenment but also suggests destruction and a tearing down of old ways of living. When I embarked on my first year-long blogging project in 2024 and then, almost a year ago, began this one, I was looking for transformation. I didn’t know what life might have in store for me. I wanted to reinvent myself — take control of who I was and make it better. Make me better.
And, the hope was, I think, that I would end up in a place like what the Star calls to mind — trusting in the universe, living fully as myself in the world (naked, without pretense), participating in the grand flow with waters that renewed themselves continuously.
Disintegrating, redux
My actual experience has been different than what I expected. I believed there was some way I could be in control of where my life went, even as I read books about change like Transitions by William Bridges and Working Identity by Herminia Ibarra that proposed that personal transformation can’t be directed explicitly; it always evolves.
Dabrowski’s idea of multilevel disintegration aptly describes what I’ve gone through. I started in unilevel disintegration: trying to swap out components of my life while leaving the overall framework largely the same. I talked with people about corporate technology jobs. I dated more than one potential partner. I considered building a midlife reinvention coaching business — a thought that now, from where I am, seems so silly given I had no idea what midlife transformation involved! But still — that was a potential path well grounded in the practices and demands of the achievement society. It would be a new way of ambitiously seeking more external recognition and more money as I continued as CEO and line-level employee of Me Myself & I, Inc.
Instead, Tower-style, I began questioning everything I thought my fifty-something year old life called for:
- Did I really need to find a new life partner, or had I learned through countless relationships that I was happier alone?
- Was my ongoing financial anxiety something I needed to act on, or could I, Star-like, trust in the flow of the universe that I would be financially more than fine in the future, as I always had been in the past, due to my privilege as well as my ability to make money?
- Was my abstract art practice meant to be a foundation for a business and a means to external reward, or could it become instead a source of meaning and craftfulness as well as a way of attending to the world?
- Could I help homeless dogs only because they needed help and not because it would turn into a new career?
I do realize that I can contemplate some of these questions only because I already have the financial wherewithal to make my life work without a job. I don’t think my situation is unique, however. I know there are many Gen Xers who could stop working but think I don’t have enough yet.
The question of money
Part of the questioning I’m going through is: how much is enough? Suze Orman says you should have $10 million to retire. To me this just indicates how out of touch she is. She calculates that you need $350,000 income a year, assuming that you will need full-time, in-home help in your house at some point.
This kind of rigid thinking is exactly where a Tower-style takedown needs to come in. She’s living in the unilevel world.
How can anyone take her seriously when to reach retirement with $10 million very few people can do? What kind of money advisor is she, when she suggests that the way to succeed at retirement is completely unrealistic for most people?
There are alternatives to expensive in-home care, although no easy ones.
One is: not needing it. Not everyone is going to need that at some point in their life! Can you plan on that? No, but it might happen. None of my four grandparents required in-home or expensive memory care at the end of their days.
A second option, more under your control is to choose an early end if you get diagnosed with something like Alzheimer’s — this would be a choice I would consider. There’s the Switzerland option, like Daniel Kahneman chose. There’s also VSED: voluntarily stopping eating and drinking, which you’d have to choose while you still have your wits about you.
My paternal aunt did need years of expensive memory care, but to me it was a shame she had to go through it. For the last few years she didn’t know what was going on. She had to be fed and bathed and helped with diapers. She didn’t recognize any of us. She was gone for all practical purposes but there were people devoted to her round the clock (in an institution, not at home). Does anyone think that’s a good use of resources, hers or anyone else’s? I do not. I do recognize the potential problems with assisted death, when family members might push for it, to save money and to shirk responsibility. But what I don’t understand is how people don’t take it upon themselves to consider options for themselves that would avoid this unhappy outcome. Who wants to live like that for years?
A third option is to have confidence in the future and trust that life will provide. My mother, who is quite religious, thinks that God will provide. I imagine that if she needs it, God will provide via the resources that her three financially secure daughters have. Many of us do have family who can step in like this, and I wouldn’t begrudge my mom at all any help she needs.
The Suze Orman plan is very achievement society esque. Yes, you can save up $10 million! Yes, you must be completely ready for the worst possible outcome in aging!
Plans for the week
My schedule is pretty wide open this week, leaving plenty of time for reading, writing, painting, options trading, and walking the dogs.
I have an appointment with the retinal specialist on Thursday. I imagine he will recommend surgery given the severe impairment I have from the macular pucker in my left eye. I’m practicing cultivating affirmation of the reality of my life, to include this and other challenges. I hate the idea of surgery on my eye!
I was pleased with my most recent newsletter article The Vita Negativa: Saying no to the demands of the achievement and acquisition society, in a quest for living the contemplative life. I have various ideas for a newsletter article for this week: rethinking the construct of midlife reinvention, how much is enough? for retirement contra Suze Orman, affirming the reality of your life eternal recurrence style.
Happy Mother’s Day today to all the mothers out there, including my own! 💐