Marjorie Moore
Age 45-Belleville, IL
✨The Midlife Wisdom of Curiosity, Community, and the Life You Build After the Pause
The first thing that stands out about Marjorie is not just that she is thoughtful — it’s that she has the kind of perspective that only comes from paying close attention to life as it changes.
Some women arrive at midlife through career reinvention, caregiving, loss, health changes, or the slow realization that the life they built no longer fits the woman they are becoming.
For Marjorie, midlife seems to be shaped by something awakening to time, purpose, and the importance of building a life filled with people, meaning, and movement.
There was one turning point she immediately returned to when I asked her where her adult story really began.
At 34, after bringing home a new lab mix named Marcus, Marjorie was outside one winter morning doing something simple and ordinary — climbing the steep hill behind her house to throw the ball for her energetic puppy before work. There had only been a trace of snow, just enough moisture to make the ground slick. She slipped, broke her leg, and found herself stranded at the top of the hill, alone, badly injured, and unable to get herself back down.
A neighbor eventually came to help. But what followed was not just a broken leg. It was months of bed rest, years of recovery, surgeries, physical therapy, and a nerve injury that left her with drop foot — a condition that caused her foot to drag and forced her to relearn how to trust her own body.
It was, in every sense, a pause she did not choose.
And yet, like so many midlife turning points, what looked at first like disruption became revelation.
✨The Pause That Changed Everything
There are seasons in life that feel productive and active, and then there are the ones that strip everything down and force a woman to confront what is and is not working.
For Marjorie, that season was one of stillness, frustration, patience, and unexpected clarity.
She spent two months on bed rest while still trying to lead MindsEye, the nonprofit organization where she was serving as executive director at the time. She had to keep showing up mentally while her physical world had narrowed dramatically. And in that narrowing, she began to see things differently.
She realized how much of her life had become passive. How much time had been spent sitting still, letting the world move around her. How easily a person can drift into watching life instead of fully participating in it.
When mobility is taken away, even temporarily, it changes your relationship with freedom.
For Marjorie, that difficult chapter became an awakening — one that eventually opened the door to a larger, fuller life. After that period, she began traveling more, reconnecting with people, appreciating experiences differently, and making more intentional room for joy.
Marcus, the dog she was trying to wear out that morning, is still with her. In a strange way, he became part of the story of the life that followed.
Christmas with Marcus
It was an awakening time.
✨A Career Built Around Helping People Find Their Way
One of the clearest threads in Marjorie’s story is service.
She has spent her entire professional life in nonprofit work, though that was not originally the plan. In fact, she resisted it at first. She also did not expect to follow in the footsteps of her mother, who worked both in writing and nonprofit spaces. But life, as Marjorie now knows well, has a way of leading us somewhere different than we imagined.
Right out of college, after studying broadcasting, she found her way to MindsEye — an organization that provides audio services and programming for people who are blind or visually impaired. What began as a first job became something much deeper.
At MindsEye, she did a little of everything. She worked in volunteer coordination, marketing, administration, and eventually leadership. Over time, she became the organization’s executive director, helping guide it through an era that included recession, fundraising pressure, and growth. It was there that she says she truly fell in love with nonprofit administration — not simply the mission itself, but the structure underneath the mission.
She became deeply interested in the question of what allows an organization doing meaningful work to survive.
MindsEye Sioree 2016
“It is not enough to have a good cause. Not enough to care deeply. Not enough to want to help.”
For Marjorie, the real work was in making sure the people doing that work had what they needed — that the foundation was solid, the systems were functioning, and the mission could actually continue.
“That mindset carried through her later roles as executive director of the Asthma and Allergy Foundation, then at VOYCE, an advocacy organization tied to long-term care and ombudsman work in Missouri, and now in her current role as CEO of AgeSmart Community Resources, where she serves older adults, their caregivers, and the network of services that supports them across several Illinois counties.”
VOYCE's Project Holiday Cheer on Kelly Clarkson Show
Each role widened her understanding of people’s needs in a different way.
At MindsEye, she saw how restoring access to information and leisure could restore dignity and connection.
At the Asthma and Allergy Foundation, she gained a much deeper understanding of poverty — especially the impossible choices many families face when trying to afford the medicine that keeps their children alive.
At VOYCE, she stepped further into aging advocacy, long-term care, and the structural realities surrounding how older adults are treated and supported.
And now at AgeSmart, she works at the intersection of resources, policy, caregiving, and daily survival for older adults trying to navigate rising costs, benefit systems, housing concerns, utility bills, and the exhausting logistics of aging in America.
Presenting on Northview Village Nursing Home Disaster at Consumer Voice Conference
“You can have all the good intentions in the world and love a program so much, but if you don’t have a good foundation under it, none of it matters.”
✨What Working in Aging Has Taught Her About Midlife
There are some jobs that change the way you see the future simply because you are constantly witnessing what happens to people later in life.
Marjorie’s work with older adults has done exactly that.
She has seen many versions of aging. Independent women with wide social circles and active calendars. Men and women who stayed curious, stayed involved, and kept their world open. She has also seen the other side — the painful isolation that can come when people have no support system, no visitors, no built-in community, and no one regularly showing up for them.
That has changed the way she thinks about midlife now.
She does not believe a person necessarily has to have a spouse or children in order to age well. But she does believe you need people. You need connection. You need friendships. You need those who love you enough to show up and that you love enough to show up for.
That insight has become part of how she is intentionally living her own life.
She talks about reconnecting with old friends, including high school girlfriends she drifted from years ago, not because of any dramatic fallout but because life scattered everyone in different directions. Now, in midlife, there has been room to gather again.
High School Friends Reunion
That matters to her.
So does the reminder that friendship is not something to take for granted or assume will always remain intact without effort. It requires intention. It requires reaching out. It requires making room for people again after seasons of isolation or upheaval.
Marjorie spoke about reading that a person’s happiness later in life is closely tied to the number of friendships they have around age 50. Whether or not the exact study details stay with her, the point clearly has.
She is building a life now that values people, not just productivity.
St. Patricks Day in Dogtown with Kat, Nate, and David
“You don’t necessarily have to have a partner. You don’t necessarily have to have children. But you do have to have people around you who love and care for you.”
Curiosity Over Rigidity
One of the things I found most compelling about Marjorie is that her wisdom does not come across as rigid or prescriptive. She is not someone trying to force life into a neat formula.
If anything, she seems more interested in curiosity than control.
She was valedictorian of her high school. She went to college. She built a successful career. And yet one of the clearest lessons she carries is that what you plan and what actually unfolds are rarely the same thing.
That is not something she says with bitterness. She says it with freedom.
Midlife, for her, has deepened the belief that life opens up when you stop gripping it quite so tightly. When you leave room for surprise. When you feed your curiosity instead of over-identifying with the script you thought you were supposed to follow.
Dawn and Blaine in Vegas
That curiosity shows up everywhere in her life.
It shows up in her work, where she is especially fascinated by the overlap between disability and aging — specifically how people who grow older with a disability and people who age into disability often experience systems very differently, even when those systems are meant to serve both groups.
It shows up in her home, a historic house in downtown Belleville that dates back to 1900 and is full of the kind of imperfections and projects that require both patience and imagination.
It shows up in the way she talks about furniture restoration, old homes, universal design, accessibility, and how our environments shape our quality of life.
And it shows up most joyfully in travel.
✨A Woman Who Wants to See the World
If some women begin making bucket lists at midlife, Marjorie’s seems to be written largely in destinations.
Travel is not a decorative part of her story. It is part of how she expands.
With Mom in Ireland
After the injury that forced her world to shrink, travel became one of the ways she reclaimed it.
She has cruised, traveled to Ireland with her mother and boyfriend, explored Chicago and Madison, and developed a surprising love for Las Vegas — not because of gambling, but because she loves the energy of being at the center of things, watching people, noticing movement, and then slipping out to the quieter edges of a place.
She also loves water, beaches, and the possibility of seeing how other people live.
That may be one of the best ways to describe her overall approach to life: she wants to understand people, not just places.
With David and Parents fishing on Lake Michigan
Tahiti is still on her list. France and Italy are in the future. She scuba dives. She is interested in spontaneity more than over-planning now. She and her loved ones have even developed a phrase for traveling with a little more openness: letting the place decide what it wants them to do.
That feels very midlife in the best way.
Not reckless. Not passive. Just less determined to control every minute.
✨Family, Time, and What Matters More As You Age
Marjorie is close to her family — her mother, father, and younger brother — and she talks about them with both warmth and realism. Health issues have been part of her family experience, including caregiving, long-term illness, and witnessing how aging can change the rhythms of a household.
That reality has made her thoughtful about time.
Not time in the abstract, but time with people.
Time with parents while they are still here.
Time with the people you love that you never regret spending.
Time not just as something to optimize, but something to honor.
With Parents and brother at family reunion
It is one of those truths midlife teaches over and over: there comes a point when busyness starts to lose its glamour. Presence begins to matter more.
That awareness is part of what informs the advice Marjorie would give both her younger self and other women moving into midlife now.
She would tell them not to hold on so tightly.
To leave room for surprise.
To stay curious.
To cultivate friendships intentionally.
“What you plan on and what you end up doing are never going to be the same. So don’t hold on to things so tightly. Leave room for surprise.”
✨The Quiet Strength of a Woman Paying Attention
There is something deeply reassuring about talking to a woman like Marjorie.
Not because she pretends to have life solved, but because she doesn’t.
She is reflective without being dramatic. Wise without performing wisdom. Open to possibility without pretending that aging is easy or simple.
At 45, she is still in the active center of midlife — still building, still learning, still working, still restoring, still traveling, still making sense of what matters most.
And maybe that is the point.
Midlife is not a finished product. It is not the neat chapter after everything has been resolved. Sometimes it is the chapter where a woman becomes more intentional, more honest, and more curious about the life she is still shaping.
Marjorie Moore seems to understand that well.
She is not just moving through midlife.
She is paying attention to it.
David in Cabo San Lucas
AgeSmart:
AgeSmart Community Resources
7 Bronze Pointe South Suite B
Swansea, IL 62226
618-222-2561
Majorie Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marjorie-moore/
GlowInto Reflection
Marjorie’s story reminds us that midlife is not only shaped by the milestones people can easily see. Sometimes it is shaped by the quieter turning points — the injury that slows you down, the work that changes how you see the world, the friendships you learn to rebuild, the aging you witness in others that makes you think more carefully about your own future.
At 45, she carries a kind of practical wisdom that feels deeply relevant to this season of life. She understands that purpose is not always about reinvention. Sometimes it is about refinement. It is about becoming more intentional with your time, your relationships, your work, and your sense of wonder.
What stands out most is her openness. Marjorie does not seem interested in forcing life into a rigid shape. She leaves room for surprise, room for curiosity, room for people, and room for joy. And maybe that is one of the clearest signs of midlife strength — not having every answer, but knowing what is worth holding onto and what is better left loose in your hands.
That is the kind of wisdom GlowInto is always looking for: women growing wiser, softer, stronger, and more fully themselves with every chapter.
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