I had a chance encounter recently with a Hollywood television producer, and it turned into one of those conversations that stays with you long after you have gone your separate ways. We were talking about life, work and what comes next when they told me that they had lost their home in the terrible California fires of 2025. They had escaped with their passports, their phones and laptops, and the clothes they were wearing. Everything else that made up their home, the possessions gathered over years and all the ordinary physical reminders of a life lived there, was gone. The house had been razed to the ground.
As if losing the house itself wasn’t enough, there was another complication. The ground had been left toxic and rebuilding on the same spot was effectively off the agenda for three years. They could wait, of course, and try eventually to recreate what had been there before. But they were also on the cusp of retirement, and gradually a different possibility began to emerge. Rather than rebuilding the house, perhaps this was the point at which to reconsider the life that had surrounded it too.
What followed was a much bigger change than anyone could have anticipated. They left their job, relocated to another state and began looking afresh at life, at how their time was spent and at what they wanted from the years ahead. There had been an enormous and traumatic loss, and I don’t want to romanticise that for a moment. Losing your home and possessions in such circumstances isn’t some convenient route to enlightenment. But what struck me was their response to something they had never chosen. When returning to exactly what had gone before ceased to be an option, they allowed themselves to imagine something different.
In a very real sense, they had risen from the ashes.
I am conscious, too, that there is privilege in being able to respond to catastrophe by choosing a new place, a new direction and a different kind of life. For many people forced from their homes by poverty, oppression, abuse, war or other trauma, starting again is not an act of reinvention but a struggle for safety, security and survival. Their choices may be painfully limited, and it would be wrong to suggest that every loss contains an opportunity simply waiting to be embraced. This story stayed with me not because adversity is inherently transformative, but because it revealed what one person was able to do when some choice remained.
I found myself thinking about that conversation afterwards because it connected so strongly with the ideas behind Find Joy in the Middle. When we think about starting again, we often associate it with youth. We tell young people that their lives are ahead of them, that they can change direction, try things, make mistakes and begin again. Somewhere along the way, though, we can start to believe that those possibilities diminish with age. By the time we reach middle age, we have spent decades building a life. Careers have developed, homes have been created, relationships established and responsibilities accumulated. Without really noticing, the life we have built can begin to feel like the life we must continue to live.
Yet the middle of life can be precisely the moment when different questions become possible. We have enough experience behind us to know ourselves better, but hopefully enough time ahead of us to do something with that knowledge. The question is no longer simply, What can I achieve? It begins to become, What actually matters to me now? What do I want to keep? What might I let go of? And how do I want to spend the time I have ahead of me?
That last question feels particularly important. Time changes as we get older. When we are young it can seem almost unlimited, and it is easy to postpone things to some future moment when life will supposedly be quieter and more accommodating. We will travel when work settles down, see friends when the diary is less busy, pursue that neglected interest when we retire, or simply allow ourselves more space when all the important jobs have finally been completed. The trouble is that life rarely announces that the moment has arrived. There is always another job, another obligation and another reason to put ourselves somewhere further down the list.
Perhaps finding joy in the middle is partly about refusing to wait for life to force that reckoning upon us. Most of us will, thankfully, never experience anything remotely like losing our home in a wildfire. But we will all encounter turning points. Some will be imposed upon us through loss, illness, redundancy or relationships changing. Others will arrive more gently through birthdays, children leaving home, becoming grandparents, approaching retirement, finishing a major piece of work or simply noticing that something which once suited us no longer does. And sometimes there is no event at all, just the gradual realisation that we have reached a different part of our lives.
The temptation at those moments can be to restore the familiar as quickly as possible. We want to put everything back where it was because familiarity feels reassuring. But perhaps there is another possibility. Instead of asking how we recreate what has gone before, we might ask what is worth carrying with us into whatever comes next. That doesn’t have to mean giving up the job, selling the house or relocating to another state. For most of us, turning the page will be much less dramatic. It might mean working a little less, protecting time more carefully, reconnecting with someone, travelling somewhere we have always meant to visit, returning to something we once loved doing, or finally saying no to something we have continued doing simply because we always have.
This is one of the things I have come to understand about joy. We can easily imagine it as a reward waiting somewhere in the future, something we will reach once all the difficult or responsible things have been completed. But joy tends to be far less grand than that. It is found in people, places, conversations, laughter, curiosity, purpose and the feeling that we are properly present in our own lives. It is often sitting amongst the ordinary things we rush past while concentrating on getting somewhere else.
My chance encounter reminded me that our lives are chapters, rather than one continuous and unchangeable story. Sometimes we choose when to turn the page and sometimes life turns it for us. There can be sadness on the page we leave behind and uncertainty about what is written on the next one. Moving forward doesn’t require us to pretend that what was lost didn’t matter. Quite the opposite. Perhaps knowing what mattered is precisely what helps us decide what deserves a place in the next chapter.
There was something powerful about hearing from someone who had been forced by extraordinary circumstances to stop and look at life differently. A career was ending. A home was gone. A familiar future had disappeared with it. Yet amongst all that upheaval remained something enormously important: the ability to choose what came next. Not to rebuild everything exactly as it had been, but to ask whether another version of life might now fit better.
And perhaps we don’t need the ashes before we ask ourselves the same question. At this point in our lives, we have gathered enough experience to know that things change, whether we want them to or not. The opportunity is to become a little more deliberate about the things we can choose: where we put our energy, who receives our time, what we carry forward and what we finally give ourselves permission to leave behind.
That, for me, is the heart of Find Joy in the Middle. It isn’t about pretending that middle age is endlessly positive, or reinventing ourselves simply for the sake of it. It is about recognising that this part of life still contains choices, beginnings and possibilities. It is about occasionally looking at everything we have built and asking whether it still serves the person we have become.
My encounter began with a story about a house that burned down. I came away thinking much more about what remained after the flames had gone: life, time, relationships, choices and the beginning another chapter. Perhaps we shouldn’t wait until life turns the page for us to think about what we want written on the next one.
