Image by Ralf Kunze from Pixabay
This pandemic has prompted me to reflect a lot on the name of my business: Heyday Coaching. As some of you know, I drew the name from a quote from one of my role models from U.S. history, the women’s suffragist activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1885, the year she turned seventy, Stanton delivered a talk entitled “The Pleasures of Age.” In it, she wrote, “Fifty, not fifteen, is the heyday of woman’s life.” She went on to say that in earlier years of a woman’s life, she expended her energy on finding a mate and raising a family, but once the children were grown, women could direct their energy to intellectual pursuits, friendships, and creative activities.
Stanton used the phrase again in 1892 when she gave a speech at her alma mater, the Emma Willard School. She said, “the hey-day of woman's life is on the shady side of fifty, when the vital forces heretofore expended in other ways are garnered in the brain.”
“Heyday / ˈhāˌdā/ noun
the period of a person’s greatest success, happiness, and vigor.
synonyms: prime, peak, height, pinnacle, summit, apex, acme, zenith, high point
”
Stanton was, of course, speaking about a small subset of women, white married middle class women in the nineteenth century. Most American women of her time did not have the means or the freedom to direct most of their energy to their chosen pursuits, not even after their children were grown. And of course, the lives of men and women today unfold in diverse trajectories and on different timelines than they did in Stanton’s day.
Still, Stanton’s phrase captured my imagination. I don’t apply her idea about a heyday after 50 literally, but as a woman in my fifties seeking to pursue a different path and one that involved helping others build more satisfying and meaningful lives for themselves, the phrase captured the essence of my new sense of mission. I mulled the choice of name almost as long as I mulled leaving college teaching and starting my own business, but in the end, I kept gravitating to the idea of helping clients of all ages achieve their own heydays.
Then we were hit by a global pandemic and the accompanying economic collapse. Like most everyone I knew, I felt (and sometimes still feel) mired in a state of limbo. What happens when a heyday is not possible? I realized that there are lots of time when achieving your “best life,” your ideal life, is impossible. For people navigating cancer treatment or a divorce, caring for an elderly loved one, struggling to survive a personal economic crisis, and lots of other challenges, I wonder if my language about helping someone achieve a personal heyday feels like one more impossible aspiration. Should I really be calling my business “Heyday”?
As I pondered this question over the summer, a new friend commented in an email that much of her life has been defined by what she has survived rather than the ways she has succeeded in achieving her fondest dreams. She’s not alone. That’s been the experience of a lot of people I know, and there have been more than a few times in my own life that were defined by what I overcame or moved past.
A few days after I received that email, I listened to an episode of Kate Bowler’s podcast “Everything Happens.” If you’re not familiar with it, Kate Bowler is a religion professor at Duke University who had a life she describes as “Instagram gold” until she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer at the age of 35. Bowler has written with wise, often funny, clarity about learning to live in a constant state of uncertainty, and her podcast includes conversations with all kinds of people about what they have learned from life’s dark times.
The episode I listened to on that steamy summer morning was a conversation with Heather Lanier, a writer whose daughter was born with a rare genetic condition. The question at the heart of their discussion was “what happens when your life doesn’t turn out the way you thought it would?”
Bowler said, “When our lives don’t follow the trajectory we had hoped, it feels like we’ve been handed a decline narrative.”
This pandemic has laid bare so many problems in American life: gaping holes in our national safety net and especially our healthcare system, enormous gaps between rich and poor, failures in leadership at all levels of government, our collective failure to ensure dignity and equal justice for all the humans who inhabit our nation. These past months have indeed felt like a decline narrative.
Bowler and Lanier wrestled with some of the same questions I had been wrestling with. If our lives can’t turn out according to our plans for ourselves, where do we find meaning? Should we give up on trying to live our best lives given how much of the world is beyond our control? Should I give up on helping people try to achieve a personal heyday in the midst of the new world being wrought by this pandemic?
For me, the a-ha moment in this conversation came when Bowler said, “Our humanity is not being mapped against some ideal.”
Victor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist and Holocaust survivor, understood better than most of us that our lives don’t turn out the way we anticipate and that our humanity is not measured by some ideal. Yet he understood that we can still achieve full lives in the face of loss, sorrow, and disappointment. In a series of lectures published as Yes to Life, In Spite of Everything, he said, “How human beings deal with the limitation of their possibilities regarding how it affects their actions and their ability to love, how they behave under these restrictions — the way in which they accept their suffering under such restrictions — in all of this they still remain capable of fulfilling human values.”
We are all facing a lot of limitations. That’s not new, though the obstacles seem greater right now. None of us are going to achieve ideal lives, and some of us are going to have more than our share of struggles. But not achieving our ideals doesn’t mean we can’t fulfill our human values. It doesn’t mean that we can’t strive for our greatest happiness and vigor—our personal heydays. A heyday is not an ideal life, it’s a full life. We can still have full lives even if they aren’t the lives we thought we’d live. As Heather Lanier put it, “Life is full beneath this cracked porcelain.”
