Hi there
I always love NOON Circle week – it is the high point of my month to sit with all of you and hear your stories and witness the honesty, love and support you offer each other. I feel so proud of all the friendships NOON has created, the changes you are bravely making in your lives and the way that sitting in that circular web together co-creates a safe space of support and inspiration as well as a map of what our midlife futures might look like. Bravo all of you! Find your nearest Circle
I never cease to be amazed at your courage and fabulousness – flying planes, becoming stand-up comedians, launching businesses, leaving careers or marriages, coping with the empty nest or setting out into unknown futures alone but undaunted. This week we’ve published a piece by Bibi Lynch talking about what it’s like to be a single childless woman – and how she works through the feelings around it. Queenagers!
This Monday 8 September I’m running our Online Circle. You can join from anywhere – so why not register and join me tomorrow evening? I’d love to see you there.
Is this evidence that we can’t go back?
I’ve been doing a bit of writing for the newspapers this week – girl gotta’ pay rent – and one of the articles I wrote was about how depressed I feel about how much the countryside of the Cotswolds has changed since my childhood. It was triggered by going for a long-beloved walk there last weekend.
It’s a route I know well and which used to involve paddling in the stream and putting our toes (sometimes more) in the brook on a hot day. Not anymore! Barbed wire now kettles walkers in the footpath and the water is unreachable. The estate belongs to one of the UK’s richest men.
What the ‘new’ Cotswolds makes me realise
But what has happened there is a metaphor for the entire region: It’s the Look But Don’t Touch Cotswolds – great background for Instagram influencers but you can’t actually walk in most of it anymore. That is, unless you own a great whack of it!
It didn’t used to be like that – the Keep Out signs and electronic gates are all new. The shared understanding and sense of common ground where we could roam free has vanished, with rich ‘townie’ incomers who don’t understand the Country Code.
It made me realise how, at midlife, we cannot go back. That the world of our childhood and young adulthood has gone for good. Even if we go back to the same places, it is not the same.
I remember my grandmother talking about that, that sense of places overlaid with decades of memories, so we feel like we are walking into a time vortex. There’s that famous phrase about how the past is another country to which we have no passport. For the first time in my life, I viscerally felt that. Many others have too; the article has had loads of comments. I’ve put a version of it on NOON for all of you too.
- My piece – Then and now: Are the Cotswolds overrated?
The symbol of strength to think about
I mention it here because one of the big conversations at our Circle – which I hosted at beautiful Old Sessions House in the AllBright room on Monday night – was about how we move forward and make real change in our lives. It has been a subject I have ruminated on loads in the last 5 years and I shared with the group some ideas that have helped me. Those of you who have read my book Much More to Come will know that the heron I see most days at the pond where I swim has been a talisman in these times of transition.
The heron for me signifies stalwartness: The capacity to stand strong, on one leg if necessary, to hold our ground even when those around us would rather we didn’t.
Sometimes it helps to be like the heron
Change means doing something new in the familiar environs of our everyday lives. It is difficult. It takes courage to break old habits and patterns. Not bravery in the sense of jumping off a high bridge or charging into battle. No, more quotidien courage: to hold our course and stick to our guns when the temptation is to collapse, slide backwards, give in to people pleasing, or not putting our own needs front and centre and acknowledging them. Often for me it is the temptation to give into old emotional cravings.
We might know something isn’t good for us but stopping ourselves doing it involves resisting the temptation, in-the-moment, sticking with it.
The heron is my talisman for that sense of holding the line, holding the edge. It might take a bit of stubbornness and putting up with people not liking you; or behaving in a new way which those around you don’t expect. But wow, is it worth it!
How to be like the heron: 2 examples
Let me give you a couple of examples: One woman was talking about returning to work after an illness. Of course the demands of the job instantly rushed in and her colleagues expected her just to do what she used to. But she physically can’t, and she knows if she doesn’t listen to and respect her body, then it will shut down again.
So although emotionally she was screaming to just do what she used to, she didn’t. She left at 2pm, she prioritised her own needs. She stuck up for herself and her health. That is heron fortitude.
My own heron moment
I’ve had to dig into a bit of that myself.
We have been trying to sell our house. We’ve been here for 23 years – our family life has been spent exclusively here, I moved in when I was pregnant with my first daughter, we’ve raised the girls here. But the place is too big for us now; it’s like having all our financial Lego chips in one pile when we could spread them out and use them differently. I crave more pleasure and leisure, less financial pressure.
So we’re downsizing – it’s taken all year to sell and find a new flat. Fingers crossed we are nearly there. That has also taken “heron energy”: fortitude, sticking at it, knowing it is the right course although it has been difficult – emotionally and practically. I try to think of it as right-sizing not downsizing: a new base for a new chapter of life.
What ‘being more heron’ means for us
What I have learnt through the last 5 years of turbulent change is how crucial that heron energy is to us as Queenagers. “Being more heron” allows us to hold the edge. It’s like, by standing our ground, we become a pole which holds up the tunnel which allows us to burrow into new territory. Enforcing that new boundary, sticking with it when it feels tough, standing tall even when we want to bend and break, gives us the space, creates the tunnel which leads to the new chapter.
Being more heron is how we make change. By doing it, we are doing something new, holding the space on the edge for our new life to grow.
I know it is hard – but that’s where the NOON Circles and this amazing supportive community comes in. By sitting together in real life, or online. I am hosting a virtual Circle on this same topic of what change we are calling in this autumn tomorrow, Monday, details here.
We encourage each other. We see others also holding their ground, being more heron and witness the change that behaviour heralds. I am so inspired by the change you are all bringing into your lives.
In midlife we cannot go back – but if we have each other’s backs and support each other, we can move forward…
Much love
Eleanor
Events you can’t miss
NOON Book Club Sept 2025 – Amy Jordan
Lovers of true crime, don’t miss this: I’ll be chatting with Amy Jordan, author of the instant bestseller The Dark Hours. Her thriller has a Queenager heroine at the heart of it. Truly this is a NOON Book Club tailor made for lovers of crime, true crime and police procedurals!
Tuesday 16 Sept 2025
6:30 – 7:30pm
Online via Zoom
Managing our mothers in midlife
I’ve written before about my sometimes challenging relationship with my own mother. At our Queenagers and Mothers event on October 14th – venue tbc in central London –we will tackle the challenges of dealing with our mothers as we age. The event will also feature the NOON Advisory board member and brilliant therapist and author Julia Bueno.
Tues 14 October 2025
6:30 – 8:30pm
Central London venue – TBA soon
Sign up here
Much love to you all! I hope to see you this month.
(Pssst – we have ONE LAST PLACE left for our Wales Retreat. It’s the perfect way to make the end of the year not just a slow slide to Christmas but a moment of transformation, to create more happiness, to get a better sense of what you want and make some wonderful new friends.)
Eleanor
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