Different seasons, different blooms

Every morning, I write my pages from the same spot at my kitchen table with a view of the beach and a little ritual that feels even more alluring than pushing snooze. Using my grandma’s old water pitcher as a vase, I arrange flowers cut from whatever's growing so fast that week it needs pruning.

Yesterday, arranging my latest batch of clippings, it hit me: winter is coming, and these particular flowers won't be available much longer. I felt this pang of anticipatory grief, like I was already missing something that wasn't even gone yet. Then I caught myself and let that feeling shift into excitement for what would replace them. The deep burgundy of Japanese Maple and the silvery texture of Lamb's Ear are coming soon!

After interviewing women from every living generation, from their twenties to their nineties, I’ve come to believe that we all carry around some anticipatory grief about timing. This nagging sense that we're somehow off-schedule, that our season for certain dreams is passing or has already passed.

The thirty-something entrepreneur convinced she should have launched her business a decade ago. The fifty-year-old returning to art, wondering if she missed her creative window. The sixty-five-year-old falling in love again, feeling foolish for wanting romance "at her age."

But what if, like my garden flowers, each season is absolutely perfect for something?

I'm so freaking excited to share our Late Bloomers Series of interviews this month. You’re going to hear from women who discovered their perfect season for blooming, many of them long after the world told them their growing time had passed.

Women who started companies in their sixties, who found love in their seventies, who published their memoir at fifty-five, who discovered their artistic gifts after retirement, who completely reinvented their careers when their kids left home.

This series isn't actually about career pivots or creative breakthroughs (though we'll definitely cover those). We're diving deep into:

• How to separate your actual desires from cultural expectations about when things "should" happen

• The specific advantages of starting something later in life

• How to handle the voices (internal and external) that say you're "too late"

• The different kinds of courage required at different life stages

• Why some dreams actually get better with age

Every conversation is designed to help us all keep reshaping our beliefs about what's possible for this chapter of our lives.

To be honest, I need these conversations as much as anyone. Despite immersing myself in all of these reminders week after week, I still catch myself wondering if I've missed my moment for certain dreams. But every “late bloomer” I interview reminds me that there's beauty in every season if we stop trying to force the wrong flowers at the wrong time.

I can't wait to share these conversations with you.

Building courage capital together (at exactly the right time),

Aransas

P.S. If you know a late bloomer whose story needs to be heard, send me her name. This series is just the beginning of a much bigger conversation about rewriting the rules of when life gets to be extraordinary.

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