You and I Are Too Old To Ignore the Bird in Our Chest: When Will You Let It Sing?

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

Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

It’s always been there. What’s keeping it caged?

I believe everyone is born with a song to sing. Not all of us hear it. Not all of us are born into conditions which allow that song to be sung. The bird is always there, though, and sometimes it takes a lifetime before that bird finally gets heard.

I really, truly want your bird to sing before your plug gets pulled. Frankly, it doesn’t matter to me one bit how or when that happens, only that it does, and you give yourself permission to hear that song.

Sometimes it takes a very long time for us to let the bird in our chest sing.

I got that line from a magnificent writer, seeker, scientist and friend Dr. Carl Safina. Safina describes standing in the Alaskan bush, surrounded by forests and the wild, confronted by a grizzly pawprint.

The size of it defied description and belied belief.

Knowing that at any moment that creature might come tearing out of the bush and tear out his life, he confessed that such moments “put the bird in my chest.”

His words were seared into me forever. That is precisely how I have often felt standing at the edge of an airplane strut about to leap out, climbing aboard a spicy horse for a long trip, leaping off a cliff to paraglide.

I know my bird. It took me until I was sixty to allow her to sing. To fly. To soar.

In a culture which worships youth, where so much attention is afforded to wunderkinds, the late-in-life achiever usually doesn’t get much coverage. Maybe they’ve become an influencer, they were already famous in their youth or happen to enjoy some kind of flash-in-the pan notoriety because of a race won or some other achievement.

Many of us don’t even begin to rise into our true selves until quite late in life.

Here’s what I mean when I say “late in life.” Not your thirties or forties. Please.

Last year I read Late Bloomers: The Hidden Strengths of Learning and Succeeding at Your Own Pace by Rich Karlgaard. The idea was good but the book was ultimately disappointing. There was way too much attention put on people who didn’t become famous until forty, or thereabouts.

Will you just please stop, already. I have grave difficulty assigning gravitas to those people who claim to be, or are seen to be, “Late Bloomers” when their graves, if you will forgive the ongoing pun, are still decades away.

If you scan the midlife writers who crowd into the Substack space, a time which begins around mid-thirties and ends around sixty, there is one shitton of angst. Good reason for it, too.

Right at midlife in many cases we’re seeing the end of youth, the end of that youthful body. Great emphasis is put on trying to reclaim what can’t be reclaimed precisely at the moment when we might be better served to focus on what’s next. What did we table back in our twenties or so to have kids, work, raise kids, pay the mortgage, all that?

What got put aside? What wild dream makes that bird in our chest beat its wings against our ribcages, trying to get out?

That one.

Many of us deem fifty to be SO OLD, sixty to be one foot in the grave (that word again, and this sentiment was lifted from a party invite from my high school class eleven years ago), seventy to be the walking dead and hell, anything after that utter zombie land.

You can see why discussions of being SO OLD among those who have barely scratched mid-life strike me us both insulting and ludicrous to those not only firmly entrenched in midlife but especially those long, long past it.

Cue

Ramona Grigg

. Cue my older subscribers who are living this.

Given social media, we now see plenty of stories about much older people who are doing well. Given the emphasis on killing off aging- my choice of words- we now see more stories about high-achieving elder athletes, geezer jocks and the like.

They are still too often treated as outliers, when they aren’t.

You and I are WAY Too Old to end our days without hearing the bird in our chest sing full-throated.

The author in Kazakhstan, 2017

When I was sixty I threw myself into adventure travel, turned myself into an athlete and spent the next twelve years doing extreme sports all over the world. I wasn’t an outlier then and I’m not now. I’m not done yet, either.

The fastest-growing contingent of people doing adventure travel is women over forty. Just research Road Scholar and Adventure Women, among many others, who specialize in those experiences.

Granted, most of those women aren’t going to ride the horses I’ll ride, massage cheetahs or throw themselves off bridges. Didn’t say I was sane.

Forty isn’t old. Nor is fifty. Now that I’m past it, sixty wasn’t, either.

As you and I enter late middle-age, many doors swing wide open in direct relation to our utter unwillingness to buy the Too Old Trope.

Adventure travel, clearly, is a tiny chunk of life, not for everyone. What is for everyone is the chance, if the kids (and their kids) really ARE gone, to finally take on the skill or project or education we always wanted.

Even if the kids are still around…wait, sometimes because the kids are around, brand new opportunities abound.

Some of you may have listened to the NPR Morning Edition with Scott Simon featuring the delighftul Mandy Potemkin and his wife of 45 years and their son. Under Covid, Gideon began making impromptu recordings of his folks. That project has morphed into live stage performances.

Potemkin is 71. He’s remaking himself late in life along with his family.

Do you have to be famous to do this?

Not at all.

You just have to refuse to drink the collective KoolAid that if you’ve not made it or done that thing by (thirty, forty, whatever) then you are done as a burnt pot roast.

There are lots of stories about relative ancients, men and women in their eighties and beyond, who are doing really interesting things. Mostly physical, as the fascination with such people is used to sell this or that (SMOKE CIGARS, LIVE TO 100, DRINK MOUNTAIN DEW, LIVE TO 110) but also to sell headlines.

You and I are WAY Too Old to be sold down the river at midlife.

You and I are also WAY Too Old to be considered as so CUUUUUUUUUTE that we finally picked up paintbrushes- hell, Gene Hackman did it, okay?- and pivoted. Because we can.

That’s not cute. That’s just life, getting on with learning and loving and being curious and exploring and never ever stopping until our heart stops forever.

Sometimes it’s not until many of life’s demands have sloughed away that we have the time to let that bird in our chest sing. Then we can write, draw, run, hike, travel, run for office, any one of a thousand things which our previous responsibilities simply didn’t allow.

Deposit photos

You can find the above photo silly or funny or so CUUUUUUTE.

Bet you won’t say the same thing about this ancient:

Deposit photos

I don’t CARE how you feel about Mick Jagger. I care about what he’s done to keep himself at this level of fitness at eighty.

Sure he’s rich as Croesus. He still has to do the yoga, the workouts, the weights, the dance steps, the ballet, the hard damned work to stay on top of his game.

Money doesn’t do it. He does. So can most of us. That’s what I care about.

I care about your willingness to do the work so that when you are that age and beyond, you have options-including to start a new sport. Learn a new skill.

Take up racing- car or horse or go-kart. Does it matter?

I push fitness and nutrition very hard for damned good reason, mainly so that our final years allow us to play high and hard. Fitness in and of itself isn’t the point. For some it is, like the inimitable Joan MacDonald, who has become a “fitness fanatic.”

That term tells you why I am no longer a fan. We all need to grow out of fanaticism, recognize how fitness ALONE isn’t the goal, that a life well-lived is. I’m no longer a fan of extreme anything. The cost is too high and I’ve paid it.

Fitness is a key part of aging well. When we push ourselves too hard physically, not only do we age the body even faster but we damage it.

Tim Ebl

wrote recently that High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) isn’t the do-all, be-all magic cure any more than drinking bleach was for Covid.

There is none.

There is common sense about what works for YOU and YOUR body and YOUR abilities for right now.

So to Tim’s point, part of the grace of aging also means that we know when we’re going overboard. Then we have the strength to stop, and redirect.

We don’t just post popular memes, we’ve learned to live by them, and correct ourselves when we don’t.

Is that all older people? Hell no.

So no. I love to repeat: Age in and of itself only delivers age. Work delivers everything else. If we are fortunate, by the time you and I are truly ready to hear the bird in our chest, we have the wisdom to recognize and nurture it at last.

I stumbled onto this quote the other day and it charmed me thoroughly. For me, the green bough is a youthful attitude. Being open, soft and curious.

Being willing to let new things land, and grow, and above all, sing.

"If I keep a green bough in my heart the singing bird will come."
- Chinese proverb

There are days I hurt all over. There are days that my body has conversations with me in Icelandic (read: very rough language). There are days I really do just want to go back to bed. Days when I get up and go to the gym anyway.

These days, I know the difference between laziness and the genuine need to sleep in. The difference between one more rep to gain strength and the one more rep which rips something.

Now my bird can indeed sing. I can’t wait to hear the next notes, the next songs, the next trills and thrills. I can’t wait to find out the next adventure.

For me, it has a lot to do with more travel, writing, adventuring. Rebooting my speaking career.

That’s my bird. What about you?

Is there still a fast-beating heart, one that has purpled wings, bejeweled eyes and a bright song that is only yours?

Is it finally time for you to loose the bird in your chest?

Photo by Laya Clode on Unsplash

The above bird is for

Judith Kitzes

. She knows.

Finally, in an acknowledgement to

Poetic Outlaws

, I will end with a recent quote because it fits so well here:

Suppose that we said yes to a single moment, then we have not only said yes to ourselves, but to the whole of existence. For nothing stands alone, either in ourselves or in things; and if our soul did but once vibrate and resound with a chord of happiness, then all of eternity was necessary to bring forth this one occurrence—and in this single moment when we said yes, all of eternity was embraced, redeemed, justified and affirmed. (author bolded)

— Nietzsche

With heartfelt thanks to all the Substack writers whose words and thoughts are inspiration.

I see you.

Let’s play.

Photo by Sneha Cecil on Unsplash

Heartfelt thanks for reading this piece. I hope it touches that part of you which responds with a hearty HELL YES. If so please consider

If you know of someone who can use a gentle push towards a latent dream, please also consider

Either way, don’t just watch life. Life it. Be in it now.