"I'm Too Old for An Adventure:" A Fabulous Life Lesson from Bilbo Baggins
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back
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Are you Too Old for a new adventure? Never, the way I see it
Sir Ian Holm, one of our greatest actors, left us for his next great adventure on June 19, 2020, just as Covid was scything its way around the world. He was 88.
Among many other roles, Holm gave us his immortal portrayal of Bilbo Baggins, hero of The Hobbit and Frodo’s uncle in Lord of the Rings. That was quite the contrast to the evil android Holm embodied when I first saw him in Alien back in 1979.
For the sake of this article, it’s his character’s final line as the elderly Bilbo that interests us. He spots his great friend Gandalf and the elves waiting for him to travel to The Undying Lands:
The 131-year-old Bilbo, the oldest Hobbit who ever lived, finds a new level of energy and takes off smartly into the sunset to… whatever is next.
There is always and forever the possibility of what’s next. The next adventure.
But not for those who decide far too soon that they’re Too Old.
One of my pet peeves is when I hear people half my age and younger claim they’re Too Old for another adventure.
I guess that can sound all sage and sad and September-ish, oh life has passed me by, woe is me.
Can we please unpack this?
This isn’t about depression; kindly that’s a whole other topic and not for this article. This about claiming we’re Too Old for life, to have another journey towards something brand new.
“Adventure” can mean all kinds of things. When I was sixty-five, I climbed Mt. Kenya, which is more technical than Kilimanjaro, which I’d done at sixty. That’s a very specific kind of adventure, for which you have to train and prepare for all kinds of contingencies.
Another friend of mine, in her late fifties, decided to ride a Harley. A Berkeley Ph.D, Marion is one of those incredibly smart, unstoppable women who just decides to do something amazing. The next thing you know she’s taking motorcycle safety lessons.
Typical of Marion, the last I knew of her she was globetrotting. She had just come back from camel riding in Mongolia. Marion was never one to let age define who she is or what she wants to do.
For others, an adventure has nothing to do with the physical. Another woman in Florida, a successful businesswoman and adventurer who had, in short order, gotten her pilot’s licenses (she’s now instrument qualified) and rescue scuba rating (at 68 thank you), turned to painting when an illness took flying charter planes off the menu.
For now, at least.
She’s very good at painting- another adventure, which is all about willingly going down the path less taken when the one we’re walking dead ends.
These are called pivots in some circles. They’re just new adventures in mine.
When you get old enough, which varies with each of us, you realize that a dead end is simply life’s way of redirecting us.
By remaining open, soft and curious, the end of one path is quite literally the start of another, often a better one than we could possibly have imagined.
Depending on what life has thrown in our path, be it forced retirement or illness or divorce, our next adventure depends primarily on our attitudes about aging. Such as, assuming that life is just over at any given point, because of that event or worse, because of a number.
Are you too old? Are your adventures over?
They are, as soon as you say they are.
They’re not, as soon as you say they’re not.
For reference, check out Dr. Becca Levy’s book, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and How Well You Live.
Here’s an example of what she writes:
“An example of the psychological pathway is the low self-esteem that develops among elderly people who have assimilated negative age beliefs. A letter I recently received from an older Englishwoman states in its opening: “Frankly I feel ashamed to be old. Why? Because society tells me it is shameful.” The behavioral pathway plays out as older people take in negative age beliefs and develop fatalistic attitudes about the inevitability of declining health in later life. They’ll sometimes then cut back on healthy behaviors, which in this grim light appear to be pointless.” (author bolded)
This book’s importance is profound if you and I are going push back against the societal lies that forty or fifty or any age is the End of All Things for a happy, healthy, active life. I’ll be drawing from books like this a lot, for there is so much that is incredibly hopeful in research around aging.
How do we even start a new adventure?
There are four areas which support lively lives most particularly as we age. By ensuring that we put time and effort into each so that they are robust, our chances of having more options and joy into our latest possible years go up exponentially.
At the risk of repeating what other health writers have said - kindly, because they’re right - here are the four primary categories, four legs to the aging vibrantly stool, if you will:
Lots of movement
Eating well for your body, age and activity level
Have a purpose
Have a healthy social community
Each of these has plenty of sub-categories, naturally, but for simplicity’s sake, four.
For this article, let’s explore the last, which in this case I believe has the most impact around getting started.
Part of the trick for changing our options is changing who we hang with. Speaker Jim Rohn is famous for saying that the five folks with whom we spend the most time define much of who we are.
Sort of true, but not quite. I’ll deal with that in another article. Still, this is true:
If you surround yourself with energetic, positive people who take care of their health, it’s going to rub off on you. You’ll have a posse to support your sports, get into better shape, and people who notice if you disappear or are slacking off.
Those folks are also out creating new lives and new adventures. One of my secrets to living and aging vibrantly is to know or at least know about people who, no matter what they’ve faced, continue to face forward and keep moving.
One woman I met early on here in Oregon, Chris, also climbed Kilimanjaro. She loves being outside and she loves being active. That means that at some point, it’s likely that body parts injure, wear down or both, as they most certainly have in my case.
The last time we spoke, Chris was recovering from a knee replacement. She told me she was working to get that last three degrees that her doctor wanted her to coax out of her healing knee.
I have no doubt she got it. Not long after that, Chris, who is a longtime Oregonian and member of The Obsidians active adult organization, disappeared back out into the wide world to hike, cross-country ski, lead trips and generally put a great many sedentary grey hairs to shame.
She’s had a very busy summer. She’s now spending time with her beloved dog and taking it easy for a while, no doubt already planning her next big adventures. It’s a different kind of recovery, the kind when you’re getting ready to pack up that backpack and head back out to the hinterlands.
Another new friend is off camping this week. He stays more local, but his excursions take him all over Oregon to places I’ve not yet seen. He hikes twice every day with his kids. In our neighborhood, that’s a lot of work, as we live on steep hills. His legs are good strong pistons, so he can hike or bike as he wishes. He also bike races.
Yes, been there, too, and itching to go back.
Another friend, Lisa, whose four-decade wait for a hip replacement finally was rewarded, had to give up running. Is her life over? Not at all. Lisa takes a nearly five-mile walk every day in her beloved neighborhood with her beloved dog, visits with other dog walkers and finds plenty of adventures afoot without the need for speed.
Which underscores something else: an adventure for you might be getting up the courage to drive across the state line to visit another city. Or take up a new hobby.
Or for the bravest of the brave, post a dating profile online.
An adventure is going where you’ve not gone before. In that regard, we can always be ready for a new adventure.
My father, who was in his seventies when computers were beginning to be widespread, told me flatly that he and my mother were “too old” to learn computers.
He wasn’t “too old” in his sixties to launch them both into years of exciting RV life all over the North American continent.
Ten years later, shortly after they’d moved into an old folks’ community, they’d already been infected with old people thinking.
All the people I’ve discussed above are well past 65. My buddy Melissa took a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Bhutan in her mid-sixties. It was life-changing, in that way that a dream trip can surpass all expectations. She was old enough to appreciate the country in ways that would have been impossible decades earlier.
I turned myself into an adventure athlete at sixty. I am at some of my happiest in mid-air, mid-gallop or mid-holy sh*t moments. That is most assuredly not for everyone.
Your adventure, the one you want for your reasons, is the only one that matters.
I want you to be able to get out of your chair and go do your dream, whatever your dream is.
As long as you are mobile enough, excuses are thin on the ground. Age isn’t one of them.
This story from The New York Times speaks to how age is NOT the sole determinant for a lively life. Two eighty-plus women took off to take on the world for eighty days, which would be enough adventures and stories for a lot of lifetimes.
They’re still at it. Why not?
That article is part of a series. If you need to graze on good news before you launch your own, have at it.
I get inspired by real people living out loud.
My very first big adventure in 1984, four years’ hitching and exploring Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, was inspired by Robyn Davidson’s book Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback.
I was just thirty at the time. Her adventure stirred me right to my soul. I was just about ready to leave for Australia myself. Tracks changed everything about what I did and why.
Here was this amazing woman, about the same age, who launched herself into this stunning adventure in the Australian Outback. Why not me?
I’d be close to the Great Barrier Reef, where, really, you should go diving. This was hard because I have always been, and still am, terrified of drowning.
I was not going to go Down Under and not dive the Barrier Reef.
So I took scuba lessons. Was utterly paralyzed in the shallow end of the pool, trying to mount the gumption to put my masked face underwater, and learn that my breathing apparatus did, indeed, work.
Twenty years later, that tiny bit of courage allowed me to not only scuba dive the Sardine Run with National Geographic crews, but also dive with Great Whites off the coast of South Africa.
At fifty I dove with Great Whites, hammerheads and bull sharks. Floated in forty-degree oceans in awe as some twenty-five thousand dolphins rushed by our tiny dinghy to chase the sardines.
Because one woman wrote a book about her adventure, I was inspired to launch my own.
This is how other’s true stories change lives.
How YOUR story could potentially change lives.
Plenty of stories exist which can inspire us to do something outside our comfort zone. You are never, ever Too Old to try something new, learn something new, explore something new, change something.
Including your mind. Most especially your mind.
So community, for my aging dollar, is the prime mover for all the other pieces: moving more, eating well, and having a reason to tie your sneakers every day.
If you hang out with happy, active people, it’s quite remarkable how swiftly you will find yourself swept up in an easy hike, a backyard potluck, a new romance, learning to salsa.
Or, folks can choose to grip their remote like a lifeline, puddle into the pillows of their couches until they slowly lose all their bone strength, and cripple themselves for life.
You can, like my once-active and energetic father, surround yourself with the living dying, and forfeit all the final years of your one and precious life.
The way I see it,
You and I were handed Paradise.
We’re way Too Old to believe the nonsense that we’re Too Old for the next adventure.
Bilbo was 131, and couldn’t wait. Neither can I.
Let’s play.
Thank you for the gift of your attention. You can’t get that time back and I hope it was well spent.
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