Lorie Sheffer provides us with much “food for thought” today as we journey through our Mid Life Celebration. Ladies and gentlemen, Lorie Sheffer:
What time frame do we put on reaching our dreams? How high do we aim? It’s fine if your dream is more of a whim, and it’s fine if you don’t have complete success. Sometimes getting there is half the fun. But sometimes we hit highs that we never imagined. For the following two ladies, life didn’t begin at 40; life began after 50.
Julia Child was not one to be rushed. She stood 6 feet 2 inches tall, came from a privileged background, was college educated and had jobs as an editor, as well as working for the Office of Strategic Forces during WWII. She married at age 34, which was unheard of in the 1940s, when most young women married right out of high school. Julia loved food, and she wanted something fun to do while living in Paris with her husband, so she took classes at Le Cordon Bleu. She wanted to teach American housewives how to cook the amazing foods she had mastered, and decided to translate recipes from French into English. It took her and her collaborators a decade to write Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and they were dismayed when their first manuscript was rejected. The legendary cookbook was finally published when Child was 49 years old. Julia’s television show, The French Chef, aired its first episode in 1963, when Julia was 51 years old.
Paula Hiers was a 4 year old growing up in Albany Georgia when Julia’s show aired. While Julia was teaching American cooks to “be fearless” in preparing dishes such as Boeuf a la Bourguignonne, Paula was learning how to make her Grandma Paul’s fried chicken. Paula grew up in much more humble surroundings. She married at a young age, lost both of her parents by the time she was 19, and raised her younger brother as well as her own two sons. Her husband, Jimmy Deen, drank heavily and Paula cracked under the stress. She started having severe panic attacks, which soon developed into agoraphobia. She would, at times, be unable to leave her home without having an incapacitating attack of severe anxiety.
Paula would find solace in cooking those wonderful comfort foods from her childhood. She later found the strength to take a job as a teller at a bank near her home, and save enough money to leave her abusive husband. To supplement her income, she made bag lunches for her young sons to sell to area business people. Out of that was born her catering business, The Bag Lady. From there, Paula opened her first restaurant, The Lady, in a tiny rented space at a local Best Western Hotel. Paula put in so much time at The Lady that some nights she slept in a booth for a few hours before starting a new day. She was not making much money, and she longed for a day when she could open a bigger restaurant for herself and her sons. After receiving a loan from her aunt, Paula opened The Lady and Sons in downtown Savannah Georgia. A food critic, who was passing through town, stopped on the suggestion of an innkeeper, and the rest is history.
Gordon Elliott got wind of Paula and featured her on Door Knock Dinners and Ready Set Cook. Paula’s warm presence and down home personality did the rest. Paula’s Home Cooking made its Food Network debut in 2002, when Paula was 55 years old. A star was born. Paula has since written numerous best selling cookbooks, she has a total of three shows on Food Network and sells her own line of cookware. In 2004, she married her best friend, Michael Groover. Unlike Julia, Paula never set foot in a cooking school.
Don’t count yourself out of the game just because of age. Think what these ladies, and the rest of us, would have missed had Julia and Paula thought they were too old to dream.
Thank you for visiting Mid Life Celebration. I know most of you are insanely busy. How? Because I’m one of you. It’s also easy to predict that most of you will not have time to click on this video, especially if you’re reading from a handheld device.
So this is for the others. The few. The ones who know full well that life is hard and that carving out time has to be some one’s responsibility.
Did you watch the sunset last night? Or the sunrise this morning?
Time marches on. This is a beautiful story. Just like last night’s sunset. But you really have no idea do you?
How much is enough? A famous and sultry actress from yesteryear, Mae West once said, “Too much of a good thing is wonderful”.
We can assume she wasn’t talking about stuff. Anyway, the question still remains. And some collect stuff that defies logic, common sense, basic hygiene, and fundamental organizational skills for practical living.
Excessive collecting can complicate relationships and alienate people from the ones they love, just for starters.
Most of us certainly don’t have the answers, nor do we have any appetite for supporting this behavior. If we did, would that make us co-dependent? Like being co-dependent with an alcoholic in denial?
Click here to read “Why do we collect so much stuff?”
Each day, do you attempt to simplify? De-clutter? Detoxify? Purge? Reevaluate?
If anyone has anything to help my Family find peace and comfort as we say good bye to our beloved Canine Son, Carter, please know you may leave comments here or email them to jeff.noel@me.com , if you’d like to remain private.
Men of a certain age is the target audience for Mid Life Celebration. Baby Boomer men, and Gen X men over 40 years old.
All are welcome, of course. Yesterday’s Mid Life Celebration Guest Blogger, Lorie Sheffer, recommended “Men of a Certain Age” on TNT, tonight (Monday’s) at 10PM.
Click here to view Men of a Certain Age website. Viewing it will give you a quick idea whether or not you want to check it out. I’ll have to record it because 9:30PM is “lights out”.
Took a quick look yesterday. Really liked what I saw.
If you’ve seen it, and feel like it, share a quick comment about the show. Happy Monday.
Lists. Top ten lists. Mid life. Midlife lists. Midlife top ten lists.
Mind, Body, Spirit, Money.
Life’s Big Four. Life’s four big decision areas.
All day long we make decisions around these four very simple concepts of mind, body, spirit and money. Mostly unaware.
Having answers to critical questions empowers us with a peace that is unknown to people still searching.
What they are searching for and why they pass by the obvious, is understandable and it is also sad. Humans are conditioned to complicate life. Complicated does not get us closer to peace.
Only discernment, organization and finally, determination to be focused and disciplined.
I know well. It’s taken me 50 years to figure it out. Ok, I’m slow. But also determined.
There is hope for you and your dreams. If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a million times – there is no shortcut.
Happy Monday everyone. Hope you had a great weekend. I actually worked Saturday at my “real job” – yes, I’m a career employee at a large company.
This whole five daily blogs thing is like a hobby, like growing a garden or something. And as any avid gardener will tell you, “It’s a labor of love.”
Quite literally, a labor of love – for a child.
Anyway, back to the updates:
1. Erika Liodice’s Mid Life Celebration Guest Blogger post yesterday was a first here. Please check out her site, Beyond The Gray, if you want a midlife perspective from a not yet 30-year old. Erika gave me “my first big break” as a Guest Blogger.
2. The numbers thing the other day. (gulp) Well, that was sort of like a time capsule to look back on later.
3. February is about Peace. Peace to me means – tranquility, balance, solace, contentment, harmony, simplicity, acceptance.
Midlife heartbreak or midlife opportunity. Pretty simple. Two choices. You get to pick one.
If you and your spouse (and yes, want to acknowledge some readers will not be parents), worked hard all your life and played by the rules, and you gave birth to a child without eyes and never able to walk, which would you pick?
Mid Life heartache or mid life opportunity?
Well, there was a Family that had to make this choice. They were featured on ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition as well as numerous other media pieces, including a heartwarming You Tube Video feature, about 6 minutes long, available at the end of this post.
One of my “secrets” to unspeakable joy is the daily effort to read, listen, watch, experience, think, do and reflect on the countless blessings that surround my ordinary life.
You have all these blessings too. But in order to feel the Peace and Contentment that are the fruit of these blessings, you must become fully aware.
You must become willing to invest time everyday. Even if it’s only six minutes. Will today be another day to postpone your new beginning?
Hardly. I was 21. A senior in college, and a dreamer.
There was a movie that shaped the mid life celebration vision. A mother was videotaping herself while she spoke to her unborn child.
She was dying of cancer and would never meet her child.
She wanted her child to be able to see and hear, directly from the video tapes, what she wished for her child and what she thought her child might want to know about their mother.
It was in the following days, on the lazy, sunny, fall days in West Chester, Pennsylvania that I dreamt of writing a book for my children.
The book would contain all the secrets of life, learned through books, travels and experiences.
While the Mid Life Celebration website is two years old, the name and vision are the same, what’s morphed is Mid Life Celebration’s purpose.
And it’s more exciting than I could have ever imagined 30 years ago. Ever feel like that?
Do you have important dreams from long ago that are more exciting today than when you first dreamt them?
How did you go about keeping them alive all these years? Or, how did you go about reigniting the flames?
