In one month, I’ll enter my seventh decade of life; that feels unreal. While I was snowed in this week, I worked on a submission for my writing group. I made a Big Goal ( see2025: One Big Goal )this year of finishing my sequel memoir to follow the initial work, He Heard My Voice that I published in 2019. Completing the sequel includes having my writing group critique every chapter — the first drafts and the rewrites. Yesterday I sent them my first draft of a chapter from 2015 — when I was on the threshold of turning 60.

At that time, I was in my fourteenth year as the school nurse for McDougle Middle in the Chapel Hill- Carrboro City School System. I read back over my diaries and looked at my old schedule books to reconstruct what life was like in those days, now ten years ago.

I was anticipating my retirement in March of 2017 and preparing for a potential business as a Life Coach. There was an increasing momentum in my life to learn and grow and that propelled me to enroll in the Wisdom of the Whole (WOW) Coaching Academy. I entered that program in January of 2015 and finished in November.

The course was by telephone and included nine participants and two full-time faculty from different parts of the U.S. Even though it was sometimes hard to attend a Thursday night class for two hours after a busy work week, I found the topics and practice sessions stimulating. Since my nursing specialty was Psych/Mental Health, the concepts were familiar yet foreign with the addition of Eastern Medicine concepts.

Each night of class I kept copious notes to help me focus and to remember our discussions and the feedback I received from my practice coaching sessions. When I wrote that chapter of my sequel, it helped to read my WOW notes and see the doodles that kept me engaged while I participated by phone in my living room. I saw ideas I’d recorded about working as a coach in the oncology practice where I’d been treated for breast cancer; that seemed like a perfect place to combine my personal experience with my coaching skill.

Two years later, when I retired at the end of March, I still thought I’d develop a coaching practice. I’d passed the certification exam and met all the requirements to hang out my Nurse Coach shingle. But what I couldn’t see when I started down that path toward that potential post-retirement business was how deeply tired I was; I was worn down from caregiving. I took on a part-time job six months after I left the school, but it was not in direct care and didn’t require all the energy of starting and maintaining a business. The next year, I became a grandmother and kept my grandson two days a week. I didn’t know that was coming when I looked to my future.

Likewise, I didn’t know I’d be going through a divorce in 2020 — five years after my WOW course and into my sixth decade. Suffice it to say, over this past decade life took me in directions that I didn’t anticipate.

When I was working in a psychiatric hospital and a co-leader in group therapy, our clinical supervisor would often say, “Trust the Process.” He was referring to how we allowed the patients to bring up their issues and would use their dynamic interactions, with the help of our therapy skills, to reveal the most crucial issues. That took patience and confidence, and comfort with silence — all of which required time and practice for me and other new clinicians.

Now, I look back at all that’s happened in my life over the last decade and I can see how you have to “Trust the Process.” I don’t know where this River of Life is going to carry me in the decade ahead. But as a person of faith, I know that I can trust that the One who created me will sustain me in the flow. Nothing that happened in the past decade of my life was wasted — even that coaching course that didn’t ultimately produce a coach. All is used to make me who I am.

How about you? What do you see when you look back over the past decade of your life? How have the things that happened shaped who you are?

Wishing you all the best,

Connie