I have a quick question for you, and please don’t do the math. Just give me a ballpark guess of how many weeks you think are in an average lifetime?

I was listening to the podcast, “We Can Do Hard Things” and learned the shocking answer. While one of the hosts guessed 100,000 weeks, I was conservative in guessing 90,000. It’s 4000 weeks. The average person lives Four. Thousand. Weeks. Immediately, I felt rushed. It’s my last quarter. I had no idea. Where did the time go?

The beginning of these last thousand weeks has proved to be very different from the previous ones. I have felt an unmooring, but it hasn’t been scary, just different. It feels as though I’m standing on a threshold, stepping into another period of life. I hesitate to call it a second adolescence but do sense a level of change on par with all the change of those teen years.

What meant so much to me before – the stuff, the events, finding something to put on that wall and what to wear, have all become afterthoughts. Now, my most pressing daily concern, aside from are my people okay, is when can I put my pajamas on, or more importantly, take my bra off. (Why don’t we have a ritual for this most sacred of moments, the removal of the bra? It deserves a candle being lit and maybe a bow at an altar, such is the relief.)

My wants are smaller now: do we have enough coffee in the house? When is Shrinking coming back with a new season? Palm Royale, The Morning Show and Big Little Lies are other favorites. Walking the dog, reading the newspaper on Sunday with Dale and getting together as a family are life’s highlights. (The picture above is from this past Sunday, Mother’s Day.)

Having just finished No Bad Parts, I am adrift without a book right now and happily accepting recommendations. The people I love, pajamas, good shows and good books are my jam these days. “What is happening to me?” I have wondered. Where is my FOMO? It has very quickly been replaced by JOMO.

Thankfully, I have some guides for these last thousand weeks. Richard Rohr, who is my morning companion as I read his meditations, is a brilliant sherpa for this period of life. Recently, he wrote about the spiritual path that first takes us away from home, as we develop our selves, and then points us home again, towards our true selves.

Rohr wrote, “The first going out from home we can say is the creation of the ego. While this is a necessary creating, it is also the creating of a separation. It’s taking myself as central. We probably need to do that, at least until we reach middle age. But then we need to allow what we’ve created to be uncreated. Maybe I was a great basketball player, but that’s gone now. Or maybe I was good-looking, but that’s gone now.”

I was walking my dog a couple days ago, and saw a group of white-haired men unloading their cars. They were in Pinehurst for a golf trip. I thought, “Look at these sweet old men still gathering together for an annual trip.” As I got closer, I saw these sweet old men were my age. I was reminded hair color was considered one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century.

Rohr goes on to say, “When we say yes to that uncreation and still be happy, we’ve done our work.” I don’t know that my work is done, but what used to make me happy – the stuff, the going places, the plans and events, has dimmed. The smaller things, the meaningful talk with a friend, a good book and planting flowers, has brightened. Time with my husband and sons have taken on a more treasured nuance.

My other favorite mentor for my last thousand weeks is Anne Lamott. She recently had a piece in The Washington Post (no paywall on Apple devices) that so brilliantly captured this laissez-faire relationship with life. “You get away with this manic, burdened way of living for the first two-thirds of life,” she writes, “but as you transition to the third third, you start to wonder whether this pattern argues a wasted life. You slow down. You start to actually be here for your life. What a concept.”

I read something about living an “if only” life. This is believing you could be happy “if only” you had the house or the boyfriend, or your daughter would listen to you or you lost ten pounds, or whatever seems just out of reach. That hurried feeling of being in your last thousand weeks obliterates “if only” thinking. There is only now, only this moment. Happiness is our choice. YOLO as the kids say.

For a good portion of my life, I did not agree to live on life’s terms. I wanted my terms and felt that when life agreed to meet them, I could be happy and fulfilled. Today, I understand each of us is writing our own story, and each morning leads us to the next scene. We have each written some lousy chapters that we deeply regret. Would we have gotten to the good parts without those terrible times? We can’t know, can we?

I don’t always like life’s terms and feel my ideas might be better sometimes (most times), but I have grown receptive to what is actually occurring instead of swimming against it like it’s a riptide. Eckhart Tolle says if you ask most people if they are, in this moment, okay, and if they aren’t in pain or danger, they would most likely say “Yes.” He then says that if you ask people about their life situation, they’ll tell you all their troubles. But in that very moment, they are okay. He encourages us to stay in each moment.

With spring here, I have been doing this really way-out meditation. I pick a tree and really look at it. I thank it for being there. Mind you, this is all in my mind. Don’t talk out loud to trees, at least in public spaces. People will worry about you.  I acknowledge what I really like about it. I might say I like its leaves or how tall it is or how beautiful its color is. I commune, for a few moments, with this living creature, from one being to another. I can’t even tell you how powerful this is. There are so many trees to thank.

Neal Allen, a Vipassana practitioner and husband to Anne Lamott, says you can’t walk ten minutes without seeing something beautiful. Why does it take 3000 weeks to learn this? When I am feeling out of sorts, worried or scared, I walk those ten minutes, acknowledging the trees and look forward to another week.