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I’m convinced that midlife is one of the most stressful times we will ever navigate. I hear it from my friends, see it on their facebook posts, and watch it happening around me. Not only do we have our own changing issues to deal with, but also some of us have children still at home or we are adjusting to an empty house if they have flown the coup. Many of us have aging parents, which more often than not require more of our time and can be emotionally draining as well. It can easily become overwhelming, even for the alphas among us.

There was a morning this week when I was feeling the pressure more than usual. I felt like there was no end in sight for the enormity of everything for which I am expected to have the solution. I carried my mug of coffee to the end of my driveway, clad in what are admittedly ugly pajamas and well-worn slippers. My hair looked like I had been through a wind tunnel, and the circles under my eyes and puffiness of my face gave away the fact that I had not slept very well. When I bent to get the paper off of the sidewalk my back screamed in protest. The cherry on the sundae was that the paper was wet from an early morning shower. As I shuffled back to the house, a sudden breeze carried an unmistakable smell to my sniffling nose. It was the smell of lilacs. The bush at the side of my driveway had begun to bloom, and the buds were starting to open and release their scent.

There is nothing that smells like spring more than lilacs. I noticed that this bush, which I had planted the summer after my husband’s stroke, was now tall and full after having grown for more than 15 years. I planted it and many other flowers, shrubs and trees that summer. Digging in the dirt was a way for me to feel connected; it’s easy to take on that unmoored feeling when we’ve suddenly been thrust into the role of caregiver. Now this gorgeous flowering bush was grounding me again. I breathed in the scent and started to cry. What a release it was to smell something so wonderful and to have that little moment of beauty. The ocean is still my ultimate soul soother, but the nearest beach is a 4-hour drive from me. No matter where we live, there are sights that can sooth us and recharge us. Maybe that old saying about not being able to see the forest for the trees, or the one about taking time to stop and smell the roses, actually does have a valuable message for us. If we just stop and take time to look, there are things all around us that can give us a moment of peace. They may not be the dream vacation that we need, but even small moments of calm can see us through till the seas are a bit less rough and the navigation is not so challenging. We cannot control the direction of the wind, but we CAN adjust our sails.

Sometimes we have to be willing to step back and allow someone else to shoulder the burden. In order to do so, we must accept that they may not do things exactly the same way we would do them. This doesn’t make it wrong, it just means things may be done differently. If we want to be relieved of some of the stress and worry in our lives, we have got to learn how to turn over our troubles to someone else.

A friend of mine wonders why her adult daughter is so reluctant to help her. When her daughter does offer to help, the criticism of how she is doing things always stops her in her tracks. Yet my friend wants things done “the right way”, and cannot seem to give up control. This past week I had a difficult situation to deal with. Already trying to manage more stress then I can handle, I asked my husband to please take this one for me, which he agreed to do. People who are aware of the situation started to question me as to whether I felt he was doing what I wanted, and how I wanted it to be done. This amazed me; when you ask someone to handle a situation for you that you clearly don’t want to be dealing with, you need to step back and allow him or her to do it their way. If you micromanage every move someone makes when they are doing a favor that you asked of them, don’t be surprised if the next time you ask, the answer is “no”.

There are times when all of us need to ask someone else to step in and help us carry the load. Knowing when you need help is not a sign of a weak person; it is a sign of strength; of knowing your limits and having enough self-confidence to admit when you need assistance.

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This year Spring came early to the Susquehanna Valley. In some ways I feel as if this has given me a heads up on warm weather chores. I’ve started pulling weeds before they can produce seeds, and I have thrown open every window in the house. With that comes the annual ritual of Spring Cleaning.

This week found my husband and I digging into long forgotten boxes that were tucked away into the dark recesses of our basement. We had no clue what most of them contained until we opened them. I found a very horrible Halloween decoration that our daughter crafted when she was about 12 years old. I felt sad about getting rid of it, but when I showed it to her she laughed and asked why I had kept something so ugly for so long. My husband found athletic ware from not only college, but also high school. When our grandson saw a pair of “Grampy’s” old track shorts, he asked, “Were they yours when you were a baby?” We filled our dumpster and the garbage man hauled it away this morning. We are thrilled to have disposed of or donated so much stuff.

My parents are starting to watch their friends sell homes and move into retirement communities. Their new favorite thing to keep saying to my brother and me is, “Some day you’ll have a job cleaning out this house!”  They fret over adult children who hire professionals to do the job when parents pass away, and wonder what will happen to their stuff when they are gone. My father has always been so organized that he literally woke from a month long coma and was able to direct me to things in his house and garage from his hospital bed. It takes me an hour just to find a screwdriver in my own house. Yet he and my mother have lived in their home for almost 60 years and organized as it is, labeled and boxed and shelved, they have accumulated lots of stuff.

The new subject of Schedenfreude seems to be compulsive hoarding. There are TV shows and books on the subject, and it seems to be all the rage; the trend du jour. I have seen actual, severe hoarding close up and personal. In comparison, it makes my disorganized basement and garage look like a page from Martha Stewart Living. After the hoard was professionally cleaned and sorted and laid out in an auction house, I went to see it; rows and rows and rows of stuff. Not only the stuff from my own relatives’ hoard, but also the stuff of so many other people. There were collections that must have taken years to amass. There were rooms filled with furniture, appliances, toys, clothing, gadgets, artwork, dishes, silverware, glassware. Stuff that the owners “needed”. Stuff that held memories and emotions. And yet, it was now just stuff. We all have it. We all hang on to things that we feel holds some magical memory for us. If a famous person touched it then it is worth more, monetarily. If someone we loved once owned it or gave it to us, we sometimes find it irreplaceable.

One woman, who is a compulsive hoarder, said that her possessions help her to relive past events. And I wondered, isn’t that why all of us hang onto our stuff?