What If Your Next Is Now?

My friend Elizabeth called me last week. She is one of those people I am lucky enough to have in my life who makes me smarter every time we talk. A mentor, a bridge builder, a bit older than I am, and someone I look up to in the way you look up to a person who has already walked through the door you are still standing in front of.

We were catching up and I was doing the thing I do, which is narrate my future out loud. I was talking about how our kids are getting older, how in a few years they will be graduating high school, and how my husband and I have started thinking about what comes after. Where will we spend time? What kind of additional work can I take on when our kids aren’t taking up so much brain space? What does flexibility actually look like for us?

I was mapping it all out like a producer blocking a show that hasn’t been written yet. Elizabeth, in the way that only Elizabeth can, waited for me to take a breath and then said six words that rearranged my entire train of thought. “What if your next chapter is now?” I went quiet, which, if you know me, does not happen often.

She was right. I had been so busy planning for the next act that I had completely glossed over the one I am standing in and it’s a really good one.

Right now, I get to travel with my kids, not someday, not when the schedule allows, now. I get to see them off to school most mornings and greet them when they walk through the door like red carpet VIPs, which, for the record, they pretend to hate and absolutely love. I am making home-cooked meals most nights, and I have to say, I have become a legitimately excellent cook in the last few years. I get to meet new people each week just because. I run outside with friends, play mahjong, volunteer my time, sit on boards, do coursework that interests me, advise friends and businesses, and build Pivot With Purpose in a way that lets me be present for all of it.

I want to acknowledge that this is a privileged position. The ability to choose how I spend my time, to be at a Tuesday afternoon track meet, to build work around life instead of the other way around, that is not available to everyone and I do not take it for granted. That awareness makes me want to be even more intentional about not wasting it.

Which is exactly what I was doing, not wasting the time itself, wasting my attention on it. I was so focused on the chapter I think is coming next that I was treating this one like a rough draft of something better.

I know I am not alone in this. If you are a high-achieving woman (and I know most of you reading this are), you were probably trained the same way I was: eyes forward, plan ahead, build the next thing before the current thing is even finished. It is the same instinct that made us successful and it is the same instinct that makes us skip over the chapter we are actually in.

I catch myself counting timelines in both directions. Looking back at the years when my kids were little and I was on the road producing shows and attending events, wondering if I was present enough. Looking ahead to when they leave for college, calculating how many family vacations we have left (maybe four or five where they are fully ours, fully available, fully willing to be seen in public with us). The math is real and it sits in my chest when I think about it too carefully.

Somewhere between the looking back and the looking forward, there is right now. Right now is not a rough draft of something better, it is the chapter.

If you read last week’s newsletter about the intermission, you might be thinking I am contradicting myself. Last week I said the pause matters. This week I am saying you might not be in a pause at all. Those are not opposing ideas. They are sequential ones. Last week was about giving yourself permission to stop. This week is about opening your eyes and realizing you are not between acts, maybe you are mid-performance.

Ahna Tessler Photography

This chapter does not look like what I expected it to. There is no arena, no touring schedule, no 55,000-person crowd. There is a mahjong table and a track meet and a newsletter I write from my apartment and a kitchen that smells significantly better than it did five years ago. For a long time I think I subconsciously treated those things as smaller, as placeholders for whatever the “real” next thing would be.

What if the flexibility, the presence, the ability to be there for a weeknight dinner I actually cooked and also do work that lights me up is not the intermission between two bigger acts? What if it is the act I will look back on as the one that mattered most?

I do not know exactly when this chapter ends or when the next one begins. I am not sure the chapters announce themselves that clearly. They might just turn like pages, gradually, one experience folding into the next until you look up and realize you have been somewhere new for a while.

My mom, when she reads a book, will at some point flip to the back and read the ending first. She just cannot help herself. I do not want to skip parts, skim pages, or cut to the end. I want the plot twists and the not knowing. I want to turn each page as it comes (with, okay fine, a little Type A planning in the margins).

My kids are still home. My body can still hike a mountain and keep up on a bike ride. I am building something meaningful with people I care about. The people in my life, like Elizabeth, keep saying things that make me reconsider everything I thought I had figured out.

That is not a transition, it is a chapter worth reading slowly.

So if you find yourself doing what I was doing, narrating your future so thoroughly that you forget to experience your present, maybe sit with Elizabeth’s question for a minute.

What if your next chapter is now?

What if you are already living in it?

From Your Biggest Champion,

Nicole