It can feel bewildering, at a time we hoped to reach some kind of safe harbour, to find ourselves more adrift than ever, perhaps becalmed in search of meaning, or thrown around by stormy conditions nobody taught us to navigate. 

This is a free 90-minute evening for anyone in that stretch — whatever is currently prompting it. A job that no longer fits. A relationship in transition. A quiet, persistent sense that something needs to change and no clear idea what. 

Author, midlife coach and real-life navigator Nick Thorpe has undergone his own disconcerting midlife mutinies, and will introduce four creatures he’s learned to use as playful guides: a crab, a jellyfish, an albatross, a salmon. 

Their energies - resistance, surrender, envisioning and striving - carry both shadows and superpowers and can either empower or sabotage us in midlife. They work best in balance but most of us major on one or two - and we’ll have a chance to explore that together. 

Drawing candidly on midlife struggles he's witnessed in himself and his clients, Nick will share some of the resources he’s discovered in the process, and offer a short guided visualisation so we can locate each energy in the body rather than just think about it.

You'll leave with a way of asking yourself, on any given difficult day, which of your four inner creatures the moment is actually calling for - and resources to assist you on the midlife journey towards wholeness.

It’s offered as a map, not a diagnosis: the psychoanalyst Carl Jung was clear that midlife is not a problem to be solved, but a potentially transformative gateway into a whole new stage of life.

NICK THORPE is an award-winning journalist and PCC-credentialed coach. He spent 25 years writing for the UK broadsheets and BBC and published three acclaimed travel memoirs. He now works with clients undergoing midlife and career transition, drawing on a lifelong fascination with navigation, both actual and existential. He lives by the sea in Edinburgh. More on Nick