Do This If You Are Already Exhausted By 2026

It's the jumpstart every older woman needs.

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When my marriage broke up 19 years ago, I was so devastated, I could hardly sleep, and when I did, I was haunted by a recurring dream: 

I was driving a nondescript car through a graveyard that was covered in a foot of sand, and I had to navigate around all the tombstones to get out. My tires would spin in the sand, my gears would grind, and I was terrified I would get stuck. 

I had that dream so often, I consulted a dream expert about what it meant.

 “Your subconscious is trying to solve a problem,” she said. “The good news is that you are driving the car.."

If I had been a passenger, the dream would have been scarier. But my hands were on the wheel. My path was up to me. It would be slow going, and I’d be afraid, but I’d get through.

My dream teacher, Elaine Heroux, who lives in Jupiter, Florida, introduced me to the work of Irish poet David Whyte. A quote from him provided additional inspiration to plow through the sand:

“The antidote for exhaustion is not necessarily rest. The antidote for exhaustion is wholeheartedness.”

Aha, that was it. I needed to infuse my life with enthusiasm and a mission worthy of my whole heart.

Whyte’s search for his own wholeheartedness began with a question: “What do I care most about — in my vocation, in my family life, in my heart and mind?” he explained in an article for Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network. “This is a conversation that we all must have with ourselves at every stage of our lives, a conversation that we so often don't want to have.”

Because of fear, we often choose comfort over growth. Whyte found that most people are “living four or five years behind the curve of their own transformation.”

We’re stuck in that psychic sand. Are you wondering how to get unstuck and infuse your life with more enthusiasm in 2026? Ask yourself these five questions:

Am I doing what is right for me now, or am I on cruise control?

What we want at 70 might not be what we wanted at 40. To live with a whole heart, we must face the reality of where we are now.

“The temptation is to stay in a place where we were previously comfortable, making it difficult to move to the frontier that we're actually on now,” Whyte writes in his story for OWN. “People usually only come to this frontier when they have had a terrible loss in their life or they've been fired or some other trauma breaks open their story. Then they can't tell that story any more. But having spent so much time away from what is real, they hit present reality with such impact that they break apart on contact with the true circumstance. So the trick is to catch up with the conversation and stay with it — where am I now?”

Is my golden age being wasted on my old ideas?

Youth is wasted on the young, they say — but our third acts are also wasted if we refuse to learn from the first two.

“Being broken by life is one of the most difficult and transforming aspects of being human,” poet and philosopher Mark Nepo writes in his new book, “The Fifth Season: Creativity in the Second Half of Life.” “Over a lifetime, we are broken and repaired by great love and great suffering until we settle into an illumined ground of being that no one can take away.”

How was I going to illuminate my life from the wreckage of my divorce? Step one: I needed to face the truth.

Am I telling myself the truth? Or performing in someone else’s circus?

Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote her masterpiece, “Gift from the Sea,” in 1955, when she was 49 and in need of enthusiasm. The wife of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh escaped her everyday life and went to Captiva Island in Florida, where she luxuriated in the solitude of the sea and found a story in each seashell.

Her life had been full of trauma. She was an introvert in a public marriage. Her husband was domineering. She lost her oldest son in a highly publicized kidnapping and murder. 

“What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives,” she wrote in “Gift from the Sea.” “Look at us. We run a tightrope daily…”

Lindbergh writes of a revelation similar to Whyte’s: “The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.”

Do I exhibit the three traits shared by wholehearted people?

It took courage for Lindbergh to come out from her husband’s shadow. Courage is one of three traits author Brené Brown identifies as necessities for a wholehearted life.

In her bestseller “The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are,” she writes: “Wholehearted living is about engaging with our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion and connection to wake up in the morning and think, ‘No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough.’ It’s going to bed at night and thinking, ‘Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth: I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.’”

What makes me come alive?

The answer is your key to wholeheartedness. As Brené Brown says: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

I come alive when I “time travel” through old newspapers and genealogy records, digging for threads of history and weaving the threads together into stories.

That is how I emerged from the graveyard haunting my nightmares. I took on a job I knew would be formidable but also life-enhancing: editing the official history book of Palm Beach County, Florida, where I grew up. Little by little, my research and interviews infused me with enthusiasm.

I cleared the mental quicksand — and steered my way to my new frontier.

Jan Tuckwood is an award-winning journalist who was associate editor and revenue content director of The Palm Beach Post for 30 years. She’s also a former fashion editor of The Denver Post, and her work has appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and Glamour magazine, among other publications. She is the editor of five books, including the official history book of Palm Beach County, and she is the co-author of Too Young to Be Old, the 2022 memoir of Diane Gilman, HSN’s “Jean Queen.”