Get Off the Runway
For a lot of ADHD women in midlife, we’re managing the air traffic for everyone else’s lives.
The kids’ planes.
The aging parents’ planes.
The work planes.
The clients’ planes.
The household planes.
All while trying to remember where the hell we parked our own plane.
And here’s the problem.
We’re not safely sitting in the control tower with a nice cup of tea and a radar screen.
We’re standing on the runway waving our arms while six planes are trying to land at once.
No wonder we’re exhausted.
Maybe you don’t need to try harder
When there’s too much coming at us, our instinct is often to double down.
Get more organized.
Make a better list.
Find a better planner.
Get up earlier.
Push through; hello Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder uphill
Surely if we could just get our act together, we could manage all of those planes.
But sometimes the answer isn’t to get better at directing the traffic.
It’s to get off the runway.
To draw back.
I love that phrase.
We tend to think of retreat as giving up or escaping. Or maybe something involving a lovely spa, fluffy robe, and cucumber water. Minus the cucumber water for me. Cucumbers aren’t my friend.
But to retreat also means to draw back.
And drawing back isn’t quitting.
Sometimes you draw back so you can see what you couldn’t see when you were standing in the middle of everything.
You need some distance to see the whole picture
This is especially hard when you have an ADHD brain.
When everything feels urgent, like our hair is on fire, we don’t know what’s important.
Add midlife to the mix and there are a whole lot more planes circling the runway.
And when they’re all circling at once, it’s really hard to know which one needs to land first.
And somewhere in there is the life we actually want to be living.
That’s why I’ve become such a believer in intentionally stepping away.
Not because I want to escape my life.
Because sometimes I need to step away to get perspective.
Your retreat doesn’t have to be a Retreat
You do not need to fly to Santa Fe.
Though I highly recommend Santa Fe.
You don’t need three days, a beautiful Airbnb or an elaborate agenda.
Your retreat might be two hours at a coffee shop with a notebook.
It might be an afternoon at the beach.
It might be a walk somewhere you can hear yourself think.
It might simply be closing the laptop, leaving your phone behind, and sitting somewhere nobody can find you for an hour.
The point isn’t where you go.
The point is that for a little while, you stop directing the planes.
You leave the airport of your life.
And from there, you can start asking different questions.
-
What am I carrying that isn’t mine?
-
What have I been doing simply because I’ve always done it?
-
What do I need more of?
-
What do I need less of?
