Perpetual Stew

Have you ever heard of a perpetual stew?

Also called a hunter’s pot or forever soup, it’s an ancient cooking method where a pot is kept simmering continuously, with new ingredients added, while the base never fully empties. Medieval inns kept them going for years. Families passed them down through generations. With each addition, the leftover vegetables, scraps of meat, and herbs from the garden change the flavor and deepen the complexity.

The more ingredients are added, the richer it becomes.

Standing at my stove this weekend, adding roasted vegetables from the prior night’s dinner to my own version of perpetual stew, I realized it’s the perfect metaphor for the second half of life. Everything we’ve lived through, every experience we’ve thrown into the pot, has been simmering together, creating something far more complex and nourishing than any single ingredient could offer alone.

We’ve been told that life peaks somewhere around 35, that everything after 40 is leftovers. But what if we’ve got it completely backwards? What if all those years weren’t the main course, but just ingredients gathering, waiting for the real cooking to begin?

Our family survived the Great Depression as migrant farmers only because my great-grandma Malva learned to use what she had. Her daughter, my grandma Rosie, often said of her, “She’d use every part of a chicken, but it’s squawk, and if she’d had a recorder, she’d have used that too.” In her 50’s, while other women were winding down, Malva stirred together her resilience, her sewing skills, an extraordinary ability to make beauty out of scraps, and Barbie dolls to build an entrepreneurial empire as the “Doll Lady of Canton Trades Day,” in an era when banks wouldn’t even open checking accounts to women without their husbands’ permission.

My great-grandmother on the far left and grandmother on the far right, mixing up magic from kitchen scraps. Have you ever seen a better kitchen?

This Thursday on the podcast, I share the stories of Elaine Perkins, who at 60 packed up her entire life in Brooklyn and moved to a new state to chase her lifelong dream of homeownership; Adena Artali, who at 45 made a return to acting after a 20-year hiatus; and Tracy Keibler, who at age 50, founded Start Senior Solutions, a nonprofit that has now impacted over 8,000 lives. Though these women were starting fresh in the second half of life, they were not starting from scratch. On the contrary, they were starting with a powerfully rich base of experience.

I’ve seen this pattern over and over again as I’ve interviewed over 150 women who’ve done big, brave things after 40.

All of our years of adding ingredients to our proverbial pots, from failed relationships that taught us what we actually need, to career disappointments that clarified our values, caregiving challenges that developed our emotional intelligence, and financial struggles that sparked our resourcefulness. These weren’t setbacks. They were seasoning.

Recent research confirms what those of us living it already know: women’s growth mindset actually peaks in our 40s. While the world tells us to settle into smaller lives, science shows this is precisely when we’re neurologically primed for learning, growth, and bold action. Our brains are literally rewiring for wisdom, shifting from reactive thinking to integrated, big-picture understanding.

We’re not leftovers, friends. We’re the main course.

Huge welcome and thanks to our newest paid sponsor of The Uplifters Podcast, Tara Persson.

Three questions to explore this week: