Name the Chapter You’re Already In.
A few days ago, Olivia and I were standing deep in the Arctic Circle waiting for the Northern Lights to appear. It wasn’t fully dark yet, and you could feel something was about to happen, but you couldn’t quite see it. The two of us were just standing there, looking up, waiting.
Then slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the sky started to move. The streaks of green light stretched across the horizon, shifting and reforming in a way that didn’t feel entirely real.
What struck me wasn’t just what I was seeing, but how present it made me. There was no distraction, no thinking about what came next, no sense of being anywhere else. Just the awareness that I was standing in a moment I would remember for the rest of my life while it was actually happening. I realized how rare it is, at this point in life, to experience something for the first time that completely stops you.
It made me think about how rarely we move through life that way.
Most of the time, we don’t miss the important moments because they don’t happen. We miss them because we’re not fully present when they do. The older we get, the more we find ourselves thinking ahead, comparing, or trying to interpret what something means before we’ve even allowed ourselves to fully experience it. We tend to think a new chapter begins when we decide it does… when we make a move, when we announce something, when there’s a clear before and after. But more often than not, the chapter has already started. We’re just not present enough to see it.
That was the realization standing there. Not just the rarity of what I was seeing, but the clarity that comes from being fully inside of a moment without trying to get ahead of it.
If you’ve been following along, this 50-week writing exercise has been about recentering and what I think of as the transition into a third career act. What I’m starting to understand is that this first phase -Realign- was never about having everything figured out. It was about creating enough space to become present again… to see clearly where you actually are, instead of where you assumed you would be.
And that’s where naming becomes powerful. Not as a way to define the future, but as a way to acknowledge what’s already true. When you can verbalize the chapter you’re in, even if it’s still unfolding, you start to move differently inside of it. You stop trying to apply the rules of a previous phase. You stop measuring yourself against a version of your life that no longer fits. Instead, you begin to act in alignment with where you actually are.
“Your 50” is a 50-week reflection series about realigning, activating, and expressing what comes next.