You and I Are Too Old to Avoid Adventure: Just Do It Anyway

You're Too Old to Spend the Rest of Your Life on the Couch: Let's Adventure!

Courtesy Scott Fulton

What on earth are you waiting for?

This past week I got some sobering news. At the recommendation of my primary care provider I got a CT scan which revealed some things I didn’t know I had. They aren’t serious, but they are important to be aware of as I age.

I won’t let the film scare me, nor will I allow the news to undermine my return to adventure travel, which begins in about a week.

Of course that’s hard. I like to think of myself as very healthy- I am- but there’s always that Joker in the deck which will show up, and demand that we deal with it. Being healthy as hell when it does show up is the best way to deal with it, and keep on with life as best we can.

My LinkedIn connection, fellow agesim fighter Scott Fulton, posted the above photo and article the other day. Both credited to Scott:

Every year, 80-year-old Jane Dotchin packs her saddlebags and sets off on an epic 600-mile journey from her home near Hexham, Northumberland, up to Inverness, Scotland.

Since 1972, Jane, 80, has been heading on this annual trip on her 13-year-old horse, Diamond, traveling 600 miles on horseback.

This time, she began her journey on August 31, with her disabled Jack Russell, Dinky, for company as she covers between 15 and 20 miles a day.

The trip sees Jane carrying everything she needs on her back, including her tent, food, and a few key belongings.

After that initial journey, she caught the taste for the open road, and traveled to visit friends near Fort Augustus, near Loch Ness, Highlands, every autumn since.

Her epic journey usually takes around seven weeks, depending on weather, and Jane uses it as a chance to pop in and say hi to people she has met over the years.

She sustains herself on porridge, oatcakes, and cheese, and doesn’t need much electricity as she has an old mobile phone with a battery that lasts six weeks.

(By the way, you’d be right to point out that she likely has had several horses, as they live, at best, to about 25. She may well be on her third horse, since Diamond, her current horse, is still in his early middle age and quite youthful.)

Scott’s acknowledgment of this aging woman’s choice to adventure no matter what is right up my alley. There’s a good chance her body is failing her right now in some ways. True for most of us, my guess, although that most assuredly depends.

What we choose to do with a body that is failing, as it must, speaks to our zest for life, at all stages.

The way I see it, would you rather go out in the company of your adventure buddies, in the middle of this kind of trip, or stuck full of tubes for months if not years while the medical community sucks every last cent out of you?

I know what I’d prefer.

I have post-sixty friends who have recently received health news which wasn’t the best, despite our heartfelt efforts. Most if not all of us committed some of the typical sins in our respective youths, whether it was drugs in the Sixties or alcohol which knows no decade, or obesity which was my sin along with four decades of eating disorders.

Or any one of a number of challenges including piling on too much stress, which was very much my journey these last four years.

Suffice it to say that many of us also made better choices, and did a fine job of transforming our health. The love letters our bodies are sending us now (a line from a lovely aging woman in Florida who knows whereof she speaks) are indicative of how we treated ourselves when we thought ourselves indestructible.

That said, a number of those friends also decided to radically change their lives. I did too, giving up stressful corporate work for adventure sports. I then managed to turn that into full-time work, as demanding as anything I’d done before. At least I loved what I was doing. Still do, when I take the pressure out of it.

The have-tos, the shoulds, the gottas.

It is remarkable how that pressure to PERFORM instead of just bloody well BE sidelines our best efforts. I was putting the same pressures on myself to perform as though someone would be handing me a gold star at day’s end. At life’s end, for that matter.

Nobody gives us hero medals. Nobody gives us gold stars. Somebody might be at our funeral, maybe, if we take time out to invest in friends.

What I did get were some physical warnings about over-training, over-working, and pushing as though I had an endless sea of open grass plains ahead of me, decades upon decades, to “someday” slow down and enjoy things more.

Nobody is guaranteed that endless sea of grass. Nobody.

A lovely woman whom I befriended last summer and whom I hadn’t seen since August was in a state yesterday. Her sister, not yet fifty, had died suddenly, leaving an eleven-year-old child. She’d had a brain bleed, apparently from a clot.

The bleed was treated with clotting medication. That medication caused more clots which had caused the problem in the first place.

You see the see-saw for the doctors.

Each medication caused a life-threatening issue, and they were both dangerous. She lost that battle. My friend was heartbroken. Her sister was gone at 49; the son was orphaned at eleven.

We are promised NOTHING. Yet we bull forward- and my hand is way up here- as though there is no end in sight.

You and I are Too Old to Believe that our ticket’s not going to get punched.

It’s taken a whole lot of mind-changing but slowly, I’ve found ways to negotiate terms with the idiot damning Calvinist values which dictate that I am worthless unless my nose is to the grindstone.

Now I notice the OCD sooner. I pull the reins in sooner. I’m 71 and I still battle the need to prove my worth by doing doing and doing. Achieving and achieving.

The more I slow down, the more I have time to truly enjoy the hard work I’ve put into this house. So many of us labor for life. Then when it’s our time, we simply expire from all the stress before we embrace the time that is finally ours.

I truly am running out of time. Like Jane, above, I want to keep adventuring. Some of that may have limitations after all my recent surgeries. But that doesn’t mean stop. It does mean learn your limitations and negotiate terms.

I have another friend who saw a film of her heart recently, which was covered in bright white patches of calcification. At 74, soon to be 75, this is another sobering moment, which asks of us not only when we’re going to stop working so hard, but when we do, what is it that we wish to BE? Her work is her calling, so it doesn’t go away. It does, however, morph.

That morphing allows us to deal not only with the changing body but also our changing desires to experience life as we get closer to its end.

Photo by Julia Kadel on Unsplash

I have some strong feelings about this woman, who terminated her life at 29:

She Was 29. And Doctors Helped Her Die.

I acknowledge anyone’s right to choose, as I have been close myself. But I chose life, over and over and over.

Choosing life doesn’t make me right. It did make me stronger. It won’t work for everyone so please do not read that judgment into my words. It worked for me. There may be a time close to the end of my life that I choose the same option. We never ever know until we’re there.

I want my “there” to be a long way off still, which is going to take work on my part. That means continue eating intelligently for this changing body, continue to exercise and eschew alcohol and sugar and ultra-processed foods and drugs. All those are the 75% over which you and I have considerable control, most especially our attitude and willingness to be in community.

Going through the hard stuff is what makes us strong. We are rarely born strong, and life offers us plenty of opportunities to build strength. You will need it when you start getting health news that doesn’t necessarily fit with your picture of being in perfect health, or that means that no, you cannot keep eating what you’re eating if you want to watch your grandkids grow up.

Jane chooses a tough trip every year. My guess is that she’s one hell of an interesting woman. Such people who choose hard typically are. In a week I return to adventure travel, granted, gentle, for I am still recovering from surgeries. But I’m going.

I’m with Jane Dotchin. The body ages, it withers, what beauty or body agency we may or may not have diminishes in its own way. No matter how hard I work, how well I eat, no matter what, I will eventually wither and I will die.

The news I got this past week was a notice: I have a due date. The body is sending me love letters:

Take care of me well. I’m not going to be here forever.

My news wasn’t bad news. Just a kind reminder. You and I aren’t indestructible. You and I will die. There are challenges ahead for which we all get to prepare, or not prepare at our peril.

I can work myself to death for the last two decades for an invisible task master who cares not a whit about my performative efforts. Or I can choose to live.

I choose life. I want to be like Jane.

Let’s play.

Deposit photos

Thanks as always for wandering down this path with me. If this made you think or inspired you, please consider

If you know someone who could use a boost, kindly also consider

Either way, we all have a due date. For some it’s an hour from now. That’s a truly sobering thought. Have you truly lived yet?