Still Becoming

At some point, somebody decided adulthood was supposed to come with a finished product.

You grow up. You figure out what you’re going to do. You become whatever it is you’re going to be. You build the career, raise the family, buy the house, collect some stories, and eventually settle comfortably into the person you have become.

Apparently there is supposed to be a deadline on becoming.

I would like to know who came up with that.

Because the older I get, the more convinced I am that some of the most interesting parts of a person’s life happen after the age when the world quietly assumes they should already have themselves figured out.

We change.

We discover things.

We lose things.

Life hands us responsibilities we never expected and takes away things we thought would always be there. We meet people who alter us. We survive things that rearrange our priorities. We stumble into talents we never knew we had.

Sometimes an entirely new version of ourselves has been sitting there all along, waiting for the right season to come out.

I think about Colonel Harland Sanders.

Everybody knows the white suit, the glasses, the little goatee and the bucket of chicken. He is one of those people whose image became so connected to the company he created that it is easy to forget there was an actual human life before the logo.

And that life was not some neat little entrepreneurial fairy tale where a brilliant twenty-two-year-old had an idea, raised venture capital and became rich by thirty.

Thank God.

Harland Sanders was forty years old when he began serving the chicken that would eventually make him famous from his roadside operation in Corbin, Kentucky.

Forty.

By modern standards, somebody probably would have already been asking him whether he had considered contributing more aggressively to his retirement account.

And even then, the empire we know today did not appear overnight.

The first franchise came years later.

His great franchising push came when he was around sixty-five—an age when society has traditionally started handing people brochures about slowing down.

He went the other direction.

He went on the road.

Think about that for a minute.

At an age when many people would have believed the biggest chapters of their working lives were behind them, this man was driving around trying to convince restaurant owners to make his chicken.

The thing that would eventually make him internationally recognizable had barely begun.

There is something wonderfully inconvenient about stories like his.

They mess up all our timelines.

We love timelines.

By this age, I should have accomplished this.

By that age, I should own that.

I should have known what I wanted at twenty-five.

I should have been established by thirty-five.

I should have figured everything out by forty.

At fifty, surely I should stop changing directions.

At sixty, isn’t it a little late to start something new?

Based on what?

That is the question I keep coming back to.

Based on whose schedule?

Some of us seem to walk around with an invisible clipboard, grading our lives against deadlines nobody actually gave us.

And the strangest part is that we often judge ourselves much more harshly than we would ever judge somebody else.

If a friend told us at fifty-five that she had decided to finally write the book she had carried around in her head for twenty years, we would probably tell her to do it.

If somebody we loved decided at sixty to learn piano, we would think it was wonderful.

If a seventy-year-old decided to paint for the first time, travel somewhere new, fall in love, start a business, go back to school or create something beautiful, most of us would cheer.

But when it is our dream?

Suddenly we produce a spreadsheet explaining why the timing is all wrong.

I know something about becoming somebody I did not see coming.

There are versions of my life I could never have predicted.

The little girl who started playing piano at eight years old could not have mapped everything music would eventually become in my life.

The woman I was years ago could not have predicted caregiving, or all the ways loving and caring for someone would change the way I see people.

And I certainly could not have handed some younger version of myself a business card reading Founder & Creative Director, Amplified Imagination Studios and expected her to know exactly how we were going to get here.

She would probably have had questions.

Honestly, I still have questions.

But that may be the point.

I am still becoming.

We all are.

There are things I can do now that I could not do ten years ago—not because I suddenly became more talented, but because ten years of living gave me something I did not have then.

Experience.

Perspective.

Patience.

Pain.

Confidence.

Better judgment in some areas and a spectacular collection of cautionary tales in others.

Age does not only take things from us.

It gives us things too.

That part does not get talked about nearly enough.

We spend so much time mourning youth that we forget youth did not know everything.

Youth could run on less sleep, I’ll give it that.

But youth had not survived anything yet.

Youth had not learned which opinions mattered and which ones could be thrown directly in the trash.

Youth had not figured out that embarrassment is temporary.

Youth had not learned how many supposed catastrophes eventually turn into funny stories.

Youth had not yet discovered that sometimes losing the plan is exactly how you find the life.

There are dreams that probably require being young.

If your lifelong ambition is to become an Olympic gymnast and you are currently seventy-two, I may have some logistical concerns.

But most dreams are not like that.

Most of the things people secretly want to do are still sitting there.

Write something.

Make something.

Teach something.

Build something.

Start the business.

Take the trip.

Learn the instrument.

Tell the story.

Go back to school.

Change direction.

Try again.

And sometimes the only thing standing between a person and that thing is an idea they absorbed somewhere along the way:

People my age don’t do that.

Maybe they should.

Imagine how much brilliance has been lost because someone decided they were too old to begin.

How many books were never written?

How many businesses never opened?

How many songs were never composed?

How many inventions stayed inside somebody’s head?

How many people remained in lives they had outgrown because starting over felt embarrassing?

We celebrate the people who begin young because youth makes a good story.

The prodigy.

The twenty-year-old entrepreneur.

The child genius.

And those stories are wonderful.

But there is another kind of story I love just as much.

The person who starts after life has already knocked them around a little.

The person who knows failure intimately and starts anyway.

The person who has responsibilities, scars, history and probably a lower tolerance for nonsense than they once did.

The person who walks into something new carrying everything they have learned from everything that came before.

There is power in that.

Maybe the first half of life gives us raw material.

And maybe later we finally understand what to make with it.

I think that is why reinvention fascinates me so much.

It does not always mean throwing away who you were.

Sometimes it means finally using all of who you were.

The jobs that seemed unrelated.

The hobbies you thought were pointless.

The heartbreak that taught you compassion.

The mistake that taught you judgment.

The person you cared for.

The thing you lost.

The skill you learned thirty years ago and forgot you knew.

The ridiculous detour that seemed to have nothing to do with anything.

Then one day, somehow, all those pieces meet.

And you realize your life was not as disconnected as it looked while you were living it.

I think a lot of people are sitting somewhere right now believing they missed their chance.

Maybe they waited too long.

Maybe life got in the way.

Maybe children came first.

Maybe illness came first.

Maybe survival came first.

Maybe they spent twenty years taking care of everybody else.

Maybe nobody ever encouraged the thing they were good at.

Maybe they chose one road and discovered much later that it was not the only road.

Maybe they simply did not know then what they know now.

None of that means the story is finished.

It means this is where the story is now.

There is a difference.

We are so accustomed to asking children what they want to be when they grow up.

Maybe we should start asking adults too.

What do you want to be next?

Not because what you have already been was wrong.

Not because your life until now was merely preparation.

But because being alive means there may still be something in you that has not had its turn yet.

A talent.

An idea.

A calling.

A ridiculous plan.

A dream you put away so long ago that you almost forgot it belonged to you.

Or maybe something completely new that the younger version of you could never have imagined.

Colonel Sanders could not have known at forty exactly what the roadside chicken would become.

He certainly was not finished becoming at sixty-five.

And neither are we.

There is no graduation ceremony for becoming yourself.

No diploma arrives announcing that your final form has been approved.

Thank goodness.

Because I don’t want to be finished.

I want to keep discovering things that surprise me.

I want to keep making things I did not know I could make.

I want to look back five years from now and recognize myself while also being amazed at how much has changed.

And if I am lucky enough to be eighty years old someday with some absurd new idea that excites me?

I hope somebody has the good sense not to tell me I’m too old.

Because I may have just gotten started.

~ Michelle Mullins ~
Founder & Creative Director
Amplified Imagination Studios

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