Why imagination is key to turning the mid-life 'meh-ness' into magic.

Turning the midlife ‘Meh’ into magic?

If you’re feeling a bit stuck and adrift in the midlife Doldrums and wondering where you’ve disappeared to and how on earth to get back your get up and go, I’d love to ask you something.

Do you believe in magic?

And what would you change IF you had a magic wand?

A friend of mine once said that she didn’t 'hold with all these namby-pamby coaching questions involving the mythical magic wand. And I grew to be cynical like this too, once.

But I want you to REALLY think about it, because I think it’s more than a shame that as we grow-up we lose that sense of wonder, delight and awe in things. We stop dreaming and allowing our imagination to take us places.

But for me, these feelings are what help to make life feel soulful, enriched and lived from the heart. And losing them means we also lose that feeling of possibility and ‘aliveness’. We lose some of our essence.

The master of imagination, Walt Disney, once said:

“Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination. But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it.”

And this is what had happened to me. And it eventually left me feeling like I was in a life that I had many things to feel grateful for, but which truthfully felt colourless, my heart and soul were sad and I felt adrift - like this life wasn’t really ‘mine’.

The magic of childhood

As a kid, I LOVED making potions, reading stories about witches, fairies, and imagining myself living ‘as one’ with the other animals and creatures in Nature. I adored the fairies in Disney’s Snow White. I believed with my heart and soul in the Flower Fairies, the Tooth Fairy, Father Christmas. I trusted that one day I would join a butterfly in flight for a while, riding on its back (which of course I did many times, in my imagination!).

My ABSOLUTE FAVOURITE children’s book was The Magic Faraway Tree (by Enid Blyton, a staple of my childhood reading), later replaced by The Phantom Tollbooth (by Norton Juster). I just adored being transported to these worlds, and I truly felt like I was there with all the characters when I visited.

It all felt so sparkly, and wonderful, colourful, exciting and, yes, ‘magical’.

And I LOVED those feelings.

Those feelings were a reflection of a faith in life being about more than hospital visits (I was very ill as a young child), school days and other less lovely ‘stuff’ - that there was ‘more’ and ‘better’ waiting for me.

Those feelings were a product of the power of my imagination to believe in something different, in new possibilities, in a world that warmed my heart, ignited my soul & that was filled with laughter, love and wonderment, and deep beauty and fun.

And this is the key.

Imagination is not just a thing for creatives and for children. It’s the thing that allows us to envisage and believe in change.

The magic fades

But the more life ‘happened’ and the more I was told that “real life isn’t like that”, the more I stopped believing that those feelings of fizzing delight and anticipation could live anywhere other than in my head.

REAL life, is messy, and dark and dreary and hard.

REAL life means hustle and slog, lots of admin, and just ‘getting on with it’ regardless.

I began to learn that there’s no such thing as magic.

I learned that for the most part, the way to go was to ‘use your head’ and stop listening so much to our heart and soul, because they’re ‘airy fairy’ and ‘soft’ and not grounded in evidence or ‘reality’ (whatever that means).

Feelings are inconvenient and no basis for making decisions and choices in life, logic and ‘hard evidence’ is the name of the game.

And even though this lead to decisions that were ‘logical’ and ‘sensible’ and ‘rational’ - those decisions often didn’t FEEL good.

They didn’t light up my soul or make my heart sing.

And I used to think that was just what it meant to be grown up.

So I lived in my head, and ignored my heart and my gut and slowly stopped feeding my soul.

There were, non-the-less many moments of joy and happiness.

But my LIFE didn’t feel magical.

Rediscovering the Magic

Then one day I noticed that the little sparkle within me, that love of fairies and daisy chains and potions, never quite left me.

And the belief that a different way was surely possible bubbled away inside, getting stronger and fizzier. I started connecting more with nature, and noticing little pockets of ‘magic’ every single day.

I started listening to what my heart and gut were telling me, and taking action accordingly - rather than ignoring the whispers until they went away.

And far from fanciful, this is science in action.

Our head is just ONE of the tools we have available to guide our decision making in life.

Our hearts and our guts are key biological contributors too - and ignore them at your peril!

Our emotions are SO important to connecting us to the truth of ourselves and our lives (and, FYI, our brains don’t always translate them very well for us).

Redefining the magic

Our human sensory system is so complex and gives us so much juicy information to help us navigate life, yet we actively use so few of our senses and most of us have no conscious clue what they are telling us.

Yet we often ‘know’ that they are trying to tell us ‘something’ because we instinctively know when things feel ‘off’ or just ‘not right’.

And there is a significant body of research that tells us to listen to our gut, to tune into our feelings, because the best decisions are made by people who listen. The most successful leaders are those who ignore the statistics if there’s a big feeling that there’s something about it that’s just not right, even if the numbers look AMAZING on paper.

And as for our souls - well, I don’t know how to define what I mean by ‘soul’.

I’m not religious. I don’t consider myself to be what I would call ‘spiritual’.

But I do believe that we have an inner ‘knowing’ about ourselves and that we sense when things are flowing in a way that is ‘just right’ for us and we have that inner sparkle and the energy to match.

The way that nourishes us on every level, that FEELS scrummy and sparkly and that just WORKS (even if it doesn’t make any sense in the logical/rational way).

And when we feel lit-up like this, when we have that that inner knowing that THIS is me, THIS is what I LOVE, THIS is IT - that’s when our head, gut, heart and soul are all on the same page, and our mind is telling us what our body is telling us too. We feel aligned.

THAT is magic.

And the BEST thing?

You can create this alignment on purpose.

It starts with you imagining, then believing. And then learning how to use your very own inner ‘magic wand’.

And this is what I LOVE to help you do.

To untangle all the old stories, thoughts and beliefs that are holding your imagination back, and to re-imagine and redefine your next phase, from the heart, so it not only makes sense, but it FEELS amazing!

So, how do you feel now - do you believe in magic?

Maybe it’s time to dust off your magic wand?

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