It was January 2026. For six weeks, I suffered with icepick headaches, a sore jaw, fatigue, and a feeling that I was revisiting my autoimmune disease from 2017. It felt the same–lack of appetite, the feeling I was sick, rapid weight loss–but I couldn't account for a cough, my very sore neck, and those headaches that felt like ice picks were targeting my head in sharp jabs every few minutes.

Sashka drills down and says Gen Xers are "reframing menopause as a life stage (not a medical condition)." If I may borrow the concept, like Gen Xers, some Boomers are going through a life stage instead of into a retirement home.

Realizing I hadn’t captured the depth of my changes so readers could “feel” along with me, not just read, I’m editing my book one more time replacing descriptions of how I feel with sensations and action. It's called “showing” not “telling”. It feels peculiar because I’m reliving the book as I edit and spending more time in those singular moments of awareness that preceded all the changes I made.

In that "ah-ha" instant, I embodied the virtue of compassion like I'd never felt compassion before. It pierced my heart and changed me.

Everyone experiences pain, but not everyone learns from it. Everyone has "ah-ha" moments but don't translate them into life-changing growth.

In an instant, time, space, and a change followed words as I sensed the meeting of the Divine and my soul.