At a crossroads: older folk help needed

Both of your roads include teaching (writting texts counts as teaching). Which of the two are you more qualified in? Is there something about journalism or massage that you can pass on that other teachers will not? Will your contribution to new writers be unique or redundant? Same question for massage. Which will be more fun for you?

Just some questions you might want to ponder.

Good Luck.

 

go the healing route.

 

I would say teaching journalism... that's what I would do in your situation and since you have experience, it would be very helpful to your students and much more enriching to have an experienced person teaching them.

 

An older thread I just came across - my $.02 - do with this what you will...

I've been a late bloomer in terms of "finding" myself. Ten years to finish my BA, some more fuzting around about grad school, finally got started in an MA program only to be derailed by a debilitating illness. I was bedbound for two years, had to drop out of grad school. I had terrible agonies about this; not only did I have to deal with the anger, frustration and desperation of being so ill, but I also had to struggle with the pressures of being derailed from the PhD academic path, which I've always felt myself groomed and conditioned to do. More than six years on (and a couple more diseases later), I'm still partially disabled. I've never been well enough to return to the high-energy pressures of grad school, although I have been able to do some intermittent, very part-time work as well as some light outside-the-home activities for pleasure. I've become a Tibetan Buddhist, and between what I've learned from the Dharma, my meditation practice, plus some good old-fashioned soul-searching, I find I'm no longer bothered about not returning to the PhD academic track. When I sat down and truly asked myself - TRULY asked - what I REALLY wanted to do with my life, the only thing I knew for certain was that I DID NOT want a career in the high-pressure, high-stakes, publish-or-perish academic hothouse. Of course that left the question of what I DID want from my life, and that's one I'm still trying to answer. But I do know a few things. Meditation has taught me to begin to open, to relax into my life and the situations I encounter, to follow where they lead. I've discovered how to begin to tap into my own deep inner reservoir of compassion, something I always have known was there but didn't really know how to reach. I'm feeling the immense urge to be a teacher, a writer, a healer - maybe teaching Buddhism or being a bodyworker, maybe even a doula... I'm also feeling the irresistable urge to be a mother, and despite the complications presented by my health, my husband and I are nonetheless going to try for a child sometime soon. If I do have a child, with my physical limitations, that's pretty much going to equate to a job as a stay-at-home mom - something I NEVER envisioned for myself in the past, but something I would glory in nowadays.

I think we all have the innate capacity to listen in and REALLY HEAR what's going on with our inner dialogue and to learn to open and trust the whole idea of following the pull. I think deep down we all know what's right for us, we've just got to slow down & still down enough to get in touch with it.

Best of luck to you!