Most of you don’t know, but I was the self-identified Midlife Crisis Queen when I first started writing online around 2007. That was because I decided to write what I knew and that was what to do when your life goes to hell in your 40s and 50s. Now I find my ‘midlife crisis’ has become a national or perhaps even an international phenomenon. How so? The Covid-19 pandemic placed most of us in a circumstance similar to my own midlife crisis. We were all sitting at home through no choice of our own, with little to occupy our minds. It was forced isolation with much time to contemplate our lives.

The reason I believe America turned into a total midlife crisis zone is the results of the pandemic. What did it do to and for us? First it showed us the simple fact that “we could all die any day” (1999, thanks Prince!) and then it made us realize that we were probably stuck in a rut, lost in the day-to-day grind of life. We suddenly had time to sit and consider our future plans or even dream new dreams…

Now we are all beginning to work towards pursuing our fondest futures.

I see the results of this quiet time everywhere in the news today. Let’s go to Hawaii! Let’s take a cruise! Let’s buy some land and retreat to the woods! What I see now is Americans anxious to get out there and go, with new visions, ideas and plans. That’s what lots of quiet time alone can create. What means the most to you?

What do you really want to do before you die?

I especially saw this in my blog statistics. For example, my post from 2017 called “Is the Walsenburg area good for retirement?” went from far less than one hundred views per year to over 600 in 2020. People were ready to start thinking about retirement like never before and consider a big move like leaving the cities behind. They were asking questions about what it feels like to move somewhere very different and if they might like it. These were all questions I tried to answer in my memoir of our move here seven years ago, and sure enough, sales of my book, “A Memoir of Retirement: From Suburbia to Solar in Southern Colorado” increased dramatically. Newcomers and potential newcomers began contacting me as they considered a move to Spanish Peaks country. Greeting them as they came through here, and sharing our own real life experiences has been so much fun!