Unpolished Gold: Why Doing Less Can Transform Your Midlife Experience
Do Less... Be More... Really.
I mean it. Do less.
We do so much—far more than we need to. We exhaust ourselves trying to make everything look perfect, polished, edited, complete. But why? Why do we insist on packaging our lives into perfectly curated presentations?
The Perfectionism Trap in Midlife
The internet has amplified this compulsion, creating an endless gallery of beautifully edited, polished websites that present personas rather than people—packages rather than authentic humanity. These digital presentations aren't wild, natural, or truly real. Yet we (myself included) feel compelled to create these perfectly edited versions of everything we do.
Is it about completeness? Have we internalized some myth about "arriving" somewhere? Does finishing something and making it feel perfect give us the illusion that we've reached some destination? And then what? We immediately set off to create another perfectly polished package, trapped in an endless cycle of performance.
Learning from Nature's Wisdom
I watch nature outside my window, and she offers a different way. Trees don't edit themselves. A redwood doesn't pause mid-growth thinking, "Oops, I didn't really want a branch there—delete, undo, let's try that again."
Trees grow their branches in response to all the elements within and around them, continuing to grow and change until they die. Never edited, never perfect, never packaged. Yet they are breathtakingly beautiful. The redwood outside my window radiates majesty, power, and presence in her completely unedited state.
What if we lived our lives unedited? Unpolished?
The Art of Being Over Doing
If we embraced this approach, we could do significantly less. I observe my dog—he doesn't accomplish much by conventional standards. He chases skunks and squirrels, plays with his stuffed soccer ball, then simply rests and stays close to the people he loves.
I believe we can live this way too. If we released our insistence on polishing everything to perfection, we could do less and be more. This isn't naive optimism—I genuinely believe this shift would bring us more love, peace, ease, and joy.
A Practice for Busy Midlife Women
Try this today: Ask yourself if you really need to be doing what you're doing right now.
Pause. Breathe. Consider:
What if this task didn't need to be perfect?
What if I let this be "good enough"?
What would happen if I rested instead?
Try pausing for meditation in the middle of your day. I just did, and it inspired me to write this completely unedited post. It feels liberating.
Finding Your Center in Silence
Be in the silence and discover what arises from there.
During my recent meditation, this poem by Gunilla Norris emerged, speaking directly to what our culture has lost:
Sharing Silence
"Within each of us there is a silence—a silence as vast as a universe. We are afraid of it... and we long for it. When we experience that silence, we remember who we are: creatures of the stars, created from the cooling of this planet, created from dust and gas, created from the elements, created from time and space... created from silence.
In our present culture, silence is something like an endangered species... an endangered fundamental. The experience of silence is now so rare that we must cultivate it and treasure it. This is especially true for shared silence.
Sharing silence is, in fact, a political act. When we can stand aside from the usual and perceive the fundamental, change begins to happen. Our lives align with deeper values and the lives of others are touched and influenced.
Silence brings us back to basics, to our senses, to our selves. It locates us. Without that return we can go so far away from our true natures that we end up, quite literally, beside ourselves. We live blindly and act thoughtlessly. We endanger the delicate balance which sustains our lives, our communities, and our planet.
Each of us can make a difference. Politicians and visionaries will not return us to the sacredness of life. That will be done by ordinary men and women who together or alone can say, 'Remember to breathe, remember to feel, remember to care, let us do this for our children and ourselves and our children's children. Let us practice for life's sake.'"
— Gunilla Norris
Embracing Your Unpolished Truth
This is an invitation to embrace your unpolished gold—the raw, real, unedited version of yourself. In midlife, we have the wisdom to recognize that our authentic presence matters more than our polished performance.
Do Less... Be More...
This isn't about lowering standards—it's about raising our awareness of what truly matters. It's about choosing presence over productivity, authenticity over perfection, being over doing.
Are you ready to explore what it means to do less and be more? I work with women in midlife who are ready to embrace their authentic selves beyond perfectionism. Reach out if you'd like to discover what emerges when you stop editing your life and start living it fully.
