Five Cranes and a Threshold: On Midlife, Letting Go, and Becoming

This morning, I woke up feeling like my internal battery was in the red zone. You know, functioning… but not for long.

I almost didn’t go for my walk, and started to come up with a list of why I should stay in and sit in my rocking chair instead, drinking copious amounts of coffee, and dreaming about a lush forest that I am brought to in my journeys. The pull to stay in was strong, as I wanted to fully immerse myself in that forest, where I could get lost and not see another human. What I have is a beach community. Lovely, but still…people.

Still, I put on my shoes, and I reminded myself that a short walk is better than no walk, and that I always, always feel better after. And I did. The sun was out, genuinely out, not the pale winter kind, and the air was that perfect temperature where you don’t need a jacket, and your whole body exhales. Green leaves are unfurling on the trees, and birds everywhere. After weeks of rain and wind, this felt like a small gift.

I was listening to an interview with Sharon Blackie as I walked, and something she said pulled me into a thread of thought I’ve been circling for a while now: this midlife journey. This mid-life awakening, (I love this term, don’t you? So much better than a mid-life crisis). This beautiful, sometimes disorienting threshold we find ourselves standing at, and the deep soul-level question it keeps asking us. Who do I want to be in this next chapter? Not what do I want to do, but who do I want to be?

This isn’t a reflection that we need the whole path mapped out, but we can begin by turning inward and asking: what doesn’t feel right in my body anymore? What doesn’t feel right in the way I’m living in the world? What am I ready to release?

For me, this letting go has been happening slowly, over the years. Some of it has been obvious in hindsight. The hard-worker identity, always pushing, sometimes holding two jobs, needing to be the best, has quietly dissolved. There’s nothing in me anymore that wants to be in a soul-sucking environment, surrounded by complaints or gossip or disconnection. That energy belongs to the past chapter.

There is grief, too, and I think it’s important to name it honestly. There is a grief over my slimmer body, over the physical self I once inhabited. I don’t struggle with it every day, but it is present, especially when I’m trying on clothes and the fit is different. What has helped me is a simple reframe I keep returning to: I am in a woman’s body now. One that is doing exactly what bodies do: they grow, they change, and they continue to change until we leave them.

Something else that has faded: the people-pleasing. The nice-girl performance. The holding of my tongue so that someone else could remain comfortable while I quietly swallowed discomfort. That has gone, and I do not miss it.

What remains, the place where I still feel friction, is a whisper that sometimes rises up on walks like this one: Am I too late? I know the answer is no. But I understand why so many women at this threshold ask the same question. We’ve built an identity, and we have lived inside a story about who we are, which has been decades in the making. And stepping out of that story, choosing the unknown, choosing the call that is quietly, or not so quietly, asking us to walk a new path? That takes courage. It is a genuine threshold crossing.

And then, just as I was sitting with all of this, five white cranes flew directly over the house.

I’ve always thought of cranes as creatures of a particular grace: slow, deliberate, extraordinarily still when they need to be. Watching the cranes made me think of a Japanese folk story - the Crane Wife, which felt very synchronistic in the moment. A man saves a crane, and later a woman appears who becomes his wife. She weaves something beautiful and asks only one thing of him: do not watch me while I work. He agrees, until curiosity and fear override his trust, and he looks. In that moment, she is revealed as the crane, and because the boundary is broken, she must leave. What the story holds, I feel, is something true about the feminine inner life: the creative, intuitive, spiritual self cannot survive being controlled, scrutinised, or rushed. It needs to be trusted, and it needs room to weave.

Isn’t that exactly what this season is asking of us?

The softness I am learning to inhabit is not passivity, nor is it giving up. This is a stillness, and a refusal to rush, a choosing of slow living over hustle, of nature over noise, of genuine connection over performance. The city, the pace, the constant stimulation, I genuinely loved those things once, though I cannot imagine them now. Even my quiet lake community sometimes feels like too much. What I want is depth. Quiet. The rhythms of something larger than my own to-do list.

There is, I’ll admit, an impatience underneath the softness. A part of me that wants to be over the threshold already, and to have landed in the new version of my life rather than standing in the in-between. But I’m learning to recognise that impatience as its own kind of old pattern: the ego that always wanted to be the best, to have it figured out, to not be caught in the middle of becoming.

The middle of becoming is exactly where the soul work happens.

Our bodies are changing, energy levels shift, physical capacity shifts, and sleep changes. But something extraordinary is happening on the inside at the same time. The interior self, the emotional, spiritual, intuitive self, is growing, expanding…asking to be heard. And I think this is the part we are not paying nearly enough attention to. We are so focused on the outer body, the outer world, that we miss the real invitation: to align with who we are becoming, not who we were.

I don’t see enough conversation about aging peacefully. Not gracefully in the performance sense, but peacefully, with genuine acceptance. So many women in my age group are fighting it: trying to stay young, trying to look a certain way, resisting the tide. I totally understand the impulse, but there is a real beauty in moving through this phase of life as though holding its hand. Listening and respecting what the body is asking for. Trusting the weaving.

The cycle of life will do what it does. We are born, we live, we change, we flow, we grow, and we die.

Five cranes, flying slowly and white against the morning sky. I think they were the right messengers for this morning. Graceful, unhurried, and at home in the threshold between water and air, earth and sky. Maybe that’s all we are being asked to be.

A space for reflection

If this post stirred something in you, I’d love to invite you to sit with it for a moment, not to analyse or solve anything, but simply to notice.

We are often standing at a threshold long before we realise it. Sometimes it arrives as a restlessness we can’t name. Sometimes as a quiet grief. Sometimes, as five cranes flying overhead at just the right moment.

Our inner life, and often our dream life, knows about the threshold before our waking mind catches up. Dreams have a way of speaking in symbols, in images, in the language of the soul. If you’ve been dreaming of doorways, of birds, of leaving a house or arriving somewhere unfamiliar, pay attention. Something is being communicated to you from within.

Some questions to sit with:

• What are you being asked to release in this season, and where do you feel resistance to letting it go?

• Who is the woman you are becoming, not the role or the identity you’ve outgrown, but the one quietly emerging?

• What has your dream life been showing you lately? Are there images, symbols, or recurring themes that feel connected to this threshold?

• Where in your body do you feel the call of this new chapter, and where do you feel the old patterns holding on?

I’d love to hear what’s moving in you. Leave a comment below, or if something arises in your dreams or inner life that you’d like to explore, I’m always here for that conversation.