Take the Time for Yourself NOW...Please Don't Wait Until You Really Are Too Old

Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Mika focusing on…I have no clue

The importance of taking …time for you NOW

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”- Gandalf, Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkein

Mika, my Husky mix rescue, understands play. It’s foundational to her, as it is to all puppies. She doesn’t get it when Mom doesn’t get it, and she has to whine often and loudly enough for me to drag myself up and take her for…sigh…ANOTHER walk on the Pacific Northwest Coast.

What a pain, right? To have your lively, happy, joyful puppy pull you bodily away from that seductive screen out into the brisk May air, the scudding clouds, the blinding silver sun glinting off the waves.

What. A. PAIN, right?

What an annoyance that my dog wants to go out and celebrate being ALIVE???

How dare she distract me from WORK!

I took a week to isolate Mika and myself on the coast in a sadly now-crummy motel (under new and lesser management) but which has some of the finest sunsets on the planet. I have seen sunsets all over the world, so I know about sunsets, at least a little.

Mid-May, late day on the coast

It has taken me years upon years to slowly release the knots tied by my family’s work values, that I had worth only if I were working. Society gains when we’re suckered into that lie. America is nothing if not Calvinist in its attitude about the terrible seduction of sloth.

Subsequent generations to mine as a Boomer have been excellent at calling out this nonsense, but were still suckered in by productivity hacks and side hustles. As though there were something glamorous about two hours of sleep a night, or none at all, all in the name of proving our worth through working ourselves to death.

Even with the pushback by younger generations, we are still terrified of boredom, as though it’s a character fault. That said, my best friend, who at 42 is a Millennial, was delighted when five years ago I swore I wouldn’t work 80 hours a week. For me that’s a slow week; that’s how bad the compulsion is.

I instituted Hump Day. Midweeks were for the Coast, ninety minutes away. With rare exception, I am on the coast weekly, driving the breathtaking scenic highway, reading in my car where the waves crash against the rocks.

That expanded into the occasional week on the Coast, most often at this little motel in a lively coastal town called Lincoln City. It’s perched prettily on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. When I was recovering from surgery this place was a haven.

Not long now. I’m in the middle building.

In geological time, all the million-dollar homes and this motel will collapse in a heartbeat. The cliff is steadily being eaten away by wind, rain and time, and the rising ocean. For now, though, at least for the next few years, as the cliff erodes and so does the motel (and so do we), I rent a shoddy room and watch million-dollar sunsets.

And take Mika for walks three times a day.

Or rather, she pulls me in all directions with force as I try to train some manners into her puppy brain.

My friend Melissa and I spoke today about our lives. She’s five years younger at 67, soon to be 68. After being laid off from her government job, she took a position assisting her insurance provider, doing sales and customer service.

Today, as I huffed in the deep sand and light rain with Mika dragging me around the driftwood, Melissa commented about the feeling- which I most emphatically share - that she’s marking time and doing little more than completing to-do lists.

Not living.

Melissa and I both love to travel. That is one of the great passions of our lives. The cost is an issue, of course, but worse, all too often life’s to-dos are obstacles to being in life fully.

This WAS my chair

I work too much. I even managed to turn my beloved adventure travel into a grind until it got to the point where work took over the experience. In some ways, I’m almost glad that I had so many things I needed to address with my body.

These five years, including this year, have been full of surgeries and mobility issues. They are slowly resolving, and as they do, I get to ask what I want to do with the time that is left to me. As Melissa ponders returning to Bhutan, and I plan for Alaska and Ecuador this fall, what’s possible?

What do you want to do with YOUR time? What’s getting in the way? As I commit to a life that isn’t driven exclusively by work, like Melissa I find myself driven by to-do lists which have the same effect.

The daily to-do list never ends, but grows longer by the hour, the same way Melissa’s lovely house constantly demands attention.

I’ve realized that the gorgeous house I bought back in 2020 is a massive, never-ending, expensive to-do list. After I finally got the place repaired, repainted, new wood flooring, new carpeting, you name it, I thought that would allow me a break so that I could focus on what really mattered.

Nope. If you’re a single homeowner and happen to live in the woods, maintenance is non-stop. It’s an older house, and while I’ve replaced the HVAC and the hot water heater and the roof and covered the windows in SPF film and and and AND, the utility bill for just one person is now over $400 despite the untold number of improvements to reduce that bill.

You get it, if you own.

Part of the reason I can’t stop working is the rapid rise of all the maintenance costs at the same time we still have inflation at the same time that the very income I count on to pay the bills may suddenly, overnight, disappear, along with my healthcare. Millions of us are in the same boat.

The problem is that the house eats up so much time and money that it’s hard to focus fully on work, even work I dearly love.

The house, what it demands, what it takes out of you in time and treasure, only works if you’re house-proud. I’m not. I want a home base, not a high-maintenance nagging husband in the form of a very pretty home.

If my idea of paradise was sitting in my house admiring my arty walls, it would be perfect.

Melissa’s point about the to-do list brought this up for me today, as I sit with Mika at the window. She’s snoozing for a while, the sun is out, and in about an hour we’re going to go exploring.

At least here at this (crummy) motel, someone else does, and pays for, the maintenance.

What are you and I going to do with the time we have left to us?

Are we going to be forever in a maintenance loop grip, or will we trade the space we love for a life we love better? Are we going to make time for a life we love, or let others make that decision for us?

Are you, can we, take time for us that doesn’t involve something that sucks the life out of us (see: phones).

Most of the time I’ve lived in this house there’s been construction. Now that the construction is done, it’s constant maintenance.

That’s not the life I envisioned when I bought the place.

Sue Fagalde Lick

published a piece this week which addresses an aspect of aging that can be both terrifying and freeing:

Author Shares the Inside Story of Life in a Senior Residence

Since I write articles for the Hawthorn Senior Living community, this hit home. My Millennial bestie is their marketing guy, so this is personal. It brings up key aspects of what happens as we age, and the decisions we get to make, and in some cases, are made for us, if we have adult kids.

All of these are quality of life questions. Quality of life invariably comes down to how we spend our time. It’s taken me seven decades to begin to release the stranglehold that work has always had on me, and the last thing I need right now is a great huge house creating endless work.

To say nothing of the immense cost, at the expense of every other thing I want to be able to afford to do.

When my friend interviews people to find out what the primary reasons were which helped them decide to move into Hawthorn, he reports that it’s much the same as I listed above.

“The guy is tired of painting his house. Doing repairs. The constant flow of work and money into a home, when he and his wife might rather have the option- and those funds- to go travel,” he reported.

Sure hits home for me.

Above all, it’s about time, and how we want to spend it. The more I chafe at the anchor that is that lovely house, the more I wonder about the next stopping point. The current plan is to love it for one more year and sell it next spring.

Is it time for a smaller place? Yes, but where? Up around here where I love the area, the weather and all that comes with it?

Is it time to find a community where so much of what annoys me is taken care of? Or a condo in Ecuador, most assuredly still on the list of potentials, where I lose the ocean access but gain in so many other ways?

I have no clue.

What are you doing with the time you have been given? My middle-aged years shot by, so ill-defined and fraught with compulsive eating disorders that most of it was simply not memorable.

At some point, we want our time to truly be memorable, if for no other reason than we have so little of it.

For those of us sixty and over, once we hit seventy, the end of the runway is a lot closer. Not just that, the closer we get to the end, we can’t count on vibrant health. We can’t always count on being as vital as we are/were in our sixties. Maybe we’re even better, but that takes serious work (as I write about), and that work takes time.

Photo by Sam Clarke on Unsplash

The more time (and money) sucked out of us for home maintenance and endless to-do lists, the less we live, the less time we have for life as we define it.

Self-care takes time, and time spent chasing contractors and day laborers is time we aren’t spending in Nature, or doing work we really truly love.

Or walking a happy, hyper pooch on the PNW Coast.

“Old folks’ homes” are a thing of the past in most places. That said, the good ones are far better designed because Boomers will not accept anything less.

Whether or not we can afford such a place is also a big question, one that I’m dealing with right now along with anyone else wise enough to be realistic about that shortening runway.

It’s up to us, no matter what, to protect the time we’re given, parce it out in ways that serve the life we wish to live, be deeply grateful for that life and be wise enough to let go of those things that we may love, but which don’t serve us.

Mika is staring a hole in me, eager to go. I’m eager to release what doesn’t work. I have no clue whether any of that will happen.

What I do know is the one of the great gifts of Substack is made up of other aging writers who address these issues, invite us to consider, offer perspectives and encouragement and invite us to live a life that is full.

To that, I’ll paraphrase something I read the other day. A neighbor in his nineties was known to someone as living an active, extraordinary life. The storyteller approached him one day and asked when he was going to write his memoir.

“I’m living it,” he said.

Bravo.

Let’s live our memoir.

Let’s play.

Thanks warmly to those who inspire me, to those whose work reminds me that this too is important, and for those who subscribe and those who support my work. Please consider: