Our time is running out
I can't remember a time when I haven't felt that everything was almost too late
I have a two-year-old, which means I’m regularly awake at odd hours of the night. Being abruptly dragged out of sleep can often make it hard to get back to sleep again. And lying awake at 2am with an exhausted but whirring, jump-started brain is pretty much the ideal conditions for cultivating existential dread.
In those dank and dark hours where no one knows if it’s late night or early morning, anxiety spreads like a fungus, creeping all over your body at lightning speed until you’re coated with a spongy, fuzzy, moss-like fear.
In those hours, my biggest worry, amongst many, is this: there is not enough time left.
In the more rational daylight hours, with sun illuminating the dark corners and showing the weird shadows to just be a coat thrown over a chair, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what there’s not enough time for. I can’t quite put my finger on exactly what I need to have achieved by this specific point in time, or by next year, or in the next decade, or before I shuffle off this mortal coil entirely. I just feel sure that I’m supposed to have done something.
Starseeds
Through the writer and mystic Rebecca Campbell, I discovered the concept of Starseeds. There are various definitions of what a “Starseed” could be, some of them more out there than others, and none of them ideas I can completely buy into myself, but I do like Rebecca’s concept:
“Starseeds are souls with a double mission: To raise their own consciousness and the consciousness of the planet. They are old souls who have incarnated elsewhere beyond this planet. … Once they’re awake, most Starseeds find it extremely hard to have meaningless conversations, jobs, and relationships. They know that they’re here for a reason and they can find how slow people and systems are to change, frustrating. Many Starseeds confess to feeling extremely different – as if they don’t fit into the world.”
Rebecca Campbell
So a Starseed is someone whose soul has been around the block a few times, maybe even incarnating on different planets altogether, and, after all that, has chosen to be here, in this place, at this particular moment in time, as a human being, because not only will that experience help them to evolve themselves, but their specific gifts will be of use to all of humanity. I mean, it sounds a little far-fetched, and I’m not totally on board. But I do know what it feels like to have the sensation that there is something urgent to be done, that everyone else is wasting time, that change is excruciatingly and enragingly slow, and that you’re somehow out of step with everyone else and that you just don’t fit in around here. I’m not sure I’ve been to any other planets before, but maybe there are people who simply feel more of an urge for change and growth than others.
I was struck, reading Rebecca’s blog, by this sentence:
“Many Starseeds arrive with a feeling that time is running out and that there is something that they came here to do or create or contribute.”
I mean, hello, ok, I am listening.
I realise that not all people feel this way. My husband is not a Starseed, whatever that might mean. He cannot wrap his head around what I’m in such a panic about. When I rant about not having done enough yet, not having achieved everything, not having yet done the mysterious thing that not even I know what it is, he looks at me blankly.
“You’ve bought a house you love in a place you love, you’ve built your own business, you’ve got a husband, you’ve had two children, you’ve got a great group of friends… that’s quite a lot, isn’t it?!”
And yes, it is. It is a lot. What comes next is that I usually mumble something semi-coherent about writing and building a name and … well, stuff, words… At which point he’ll remind me that I’ve had six pieces published in national newspapers this year and a short story published in a magazine, all as an aside to the aforementioned business, children, etc., and isn’t that pretty good? And then I’ll normally leave the room muttering about how he doesn’t understand while I go in search of chocolate biscuits.
Age is nothing but a pineapple
I’ll be turning 40 at the end of this year. Although I know that this change is entirely arbitrary, it feels like a major shift.
People always say “age is just a number”. For a neurodivergent person like me, with a sometimes painfully literal approach to language, this is a deeply irritating statement. Of course age is a number. It’s a system of counting. What else would age be, a fruit?!
I do get the point, though. Age isn’t, really, a thing. It is just keeping score of the number of times the Earth has whizzed round the sun since we arrived in the world. It’s easy to get fixated on those numbers, especially transitions into new blocks of ten. The change from 39 to 40 feels significant, but it’s not really any different to going from 38 to 39. It doesn’t really mean anything, and it doesn’t change the assessment of what you’ve achieved in life.
But still.
That ticking over on the clock of the first number is a big reminder of how fast time is passing. That life goes by very quickly. And it’s at those moments that we tend to evaluate where we are and where we’re going. Which rather exacerbates the panic about getting the thing done in time, and the need for chocolate biscuits.
What’s it all for?
Ultimately, whilst I’m not convinced about Starseeds coming from other planets, I do think some of us are born with, or rapidly grow into, a greater desire for purpose. A need to drive change, to have an impact on the world, to contribute something to the greater good. So maybe they are seeds, of a kind, dropped onto the Earth, with a drive to make something grow.
All of us want to feel purpose in our lives. We want to feel that we matter, that what we do with our hours, our days, our lives, is valuable, and that we’re truly seen. That sense of purpose and meaning is strongly correlated with happiness and emotional wellbeing. Some of us, however, get a bit more antsy about it than others.
I’ve written before about purpose and its connection to happiness, mental health and physical health. But it’s something that’s treated by society as a bit of an indulgence. If we talk about living with purpose, it tends to be greeted by eye-rolls and condescension. It’s childish, it’s not realistic, we’re told. Maybe that’s because the system that we live in benefits from a distinct lack of purpose. If we start being more considered and purposeful in the way we live our lives and make our choices, that’s going to be pretty bad news for capitalism and the patriarchy. If we start demanding better, the powers that be might actually have to start giving it to us.
We need purpose in our lives. We need it for ourselves, for the good that it does us, and we need it for our society, for how much we will benefit each other when we focus more on the contribution we really want to make that will lift everyone up.
So why doesn’t anyone tell us how to get there?
Finding your purpose and understanding how to integrate that into your daily life is a tricky path to navigate, but one we’re given no map for. Living with purpose doesn’t necessarily mean quitting your job to work as a guru and giving away all your possessions to live on a beach in Thailand. You can have a standard 9-to-5 job and a pretty run-of-the-mill lifestyle and still incorporate a sense of purpose. It’s all about finding the core of what matters most to you, and finding ways to include that in your day-to-day. What lights you up? What changes do you want to see in the world? What do you think deserves protecting, celebrating, elevating? Living with purpose can be as simple as smiling at strangers on the bus or keeping alive your grandmother’s stories or cataloguing your father’s recipes if it’s connected to your sense of meaning in the world.
We just need to work out what we want to see grow. What we want to create.
If you want to make purposeful creativity a habit in your life, check out my latest Creative Spark post for prompts to pump-up your practice.
Allegra, this was beautiful, and spoke so much to how I feel too. I am with you, not entirely on board with the whole star-seed thing, but I do think that as we become more 'awake' to our authenticity, our intention and our alignment, we get deeper and deeper senses of urgency - perhaps more so when it comes to us in midlife and later, as almost grief for not getting more of our purpose, our calling, our love (whatever you want to call it) done before now. I am 49, and this feeling has been so strong for me since leaving my full time day job 18 months ago (and indeed in the two year transition out of it) and becoming a creative full time. It is hard, but so worth it, though the sense of urgency can be overwhelming if I let it be. Thank you for sharing your beautiful words.
Allegra you just got into my head and wrote out my own thoughts! When I was in my 40's I also felt like time was going far too quickly and I had so much (unnamed stuff) to do. I was in a panic about it and my husband did not share my concern🤣. I too reached for the wine, oops I mean chocolate biscuits!
Everything you wrote resonated so deeply with me. Here is what I can tell you from the vantage point of being 57...
I still feel that way on some level but it's much less intense.
With years of intentional effort I have been able to find my way to the things I am here to do. What I mean by that is many stops and starts, failures and uncertainties, to arrive at a place where I feel I have arrived and it's good!
Life gets much easier than it is right now, with a 2 year old gorgeous child you wouldn't change for anything...but still...(yawn) sleep is helpful.
Lastly, there is surrender and acceptance of what is. I have found that has got easier with each year.