You're Too Old to Believe You're "Too Old" to Start Over: On Late-in-Life Reboots
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back
A week ago I started my journey on Substack. It’s a reboot- something you and I can do anytime
Love new things? I do.
I love the feel and smell of a brand new white cotton blouse. At least til I drip spaghetti sauce on it, which invariably happens the first time I wear it. I love a new car, a new puppy, a new relationship, friend or otherwise. I love planting new ground cover, a new recipe, new movie, oh I could go on.
And I LOVE life do-overs.
Oh, but there’s this, right? The trill of fear when a really serious something new is afoot. Not like a new puppy with milk breath. This kind of big life new chapter carries with it a touch of terror because we’re about to step into unknown territory.
For anyone who has ever learned how to skydive, it’s that first time you do a free fall. Right?
That holy sh*t moment, followed by-at least in most cases- OHMIGOD THIS IS AMAZING WHY DID I WAIT SO LONG?
Big Life Reboots are like that. Late-in-life makeovers ask that we take a road we’ve never traveled, much less The Road Less Traveled, a la Robert Frost.
You and I are never, ever Too Old for a reboot.
In fact, one of the greatest gifts of aging is that by the time we’ve landed at the late-in-life stage- call it sixty, for the sake of argument-we’ve had plenty of practice.
If you and I have trained for our seventies, where I just landed, and our Eighties and beyond, then those late-in-life reboots aren’t so terrifying.
They can feel that way if our bodies seem frail and unbalanced. They can be if we feel utterly alone.
They can be if we have little faith in our ability to walk (limp, in my case) into a hazy and ill-defined future.
We can change many if not all of those things, too.
Let’s get some context here about do-overs and reboots:
The body reboots every night despite some of the insults we hurl at it. Okay, well, until we hurl too many, but that’s another article. We really do wake up renewed, as our cells are rebooting constantly and good sleep really does help us wake up ready to take on the day.
You probably rebooted when (if) you got married or partnered. Had a kid(s). Reboots with each kid, right? Maybe a reboot to go back to school, start a new career, get divorced, fall in love (or lust) and out again….we are constantly rebooting.
It’s life being life. We often barely mark such times, they seem so normal. But each one of those transitions requires an emotional reboot. Often major, in ways we don’t recognize until later.
Then, retirement, if that’s a choice you have made or are considering.
Retirement is the biggest one for all of us. The biggest opportunity. The very best time of our lives, if we’ve done this right.
Yet very few of us take that time seriously, the way our last Third deserves. Especially that last Third of our last Third, when the stats aren’t in our favor, and our bodies need all we can prepare it for as we age into our final years.
This is what most folks think about when they consider retiring:
Statistics are also unkind to those who do a full work stop when they hit a certain age, imposed upon us without any consideration for a future where many of us would live twenty, thirty years longer. This article fleshes out so many reasons why we in the US do so badly at retiring and the Japanese (especially blue-zone Okinawans) do so well.
Worthwhile read before you pull the plug on work.
Here’s what I did as I approached what many feel is close to retirement age.
I did pull the plug on my work at 58 but only to reboot to happier work. That’s what the above linked article discusses: doing something we love.
Back in 2012 I was working ninety-hour work weeks of corporate training and consulting. I had just published my first and second books. They both won prizes, but oh my, what a cost.
My consultancy ate up nearly every waking moment, especially because my market was the Fortune 100.
It bloody well WAS NOT FUN. Bet you can relate, too.
This superb video from Amine Kanzari speaks so eloquently to how too many of us live:
We give up our health for wealth, writes Peter Attia MD in Outlive.
I nearly spent my life very like the above, too.
While I was working out at the gym, I was also working myself to death. I’d taken two celebratory trips to Thailand and Ecuador after finishing my books, and was reminded of how I loved to travel.
Then at sixty, I threw myself into training to climb Kilimanjaro.
Lots of people far older, with greater challenges, have done Kili. While it’s a real challenge, it’s just not that big a deal. Not really, if you prepare properly.
With rare exception, most of those folks didn’t do what I did after my successful summit. I turned that Kilimanjaro climb into an athletic career, expanding my range worldwide and across multiple sports.
Twelve years I traveled the world and engaged in adventures that most people dream about. I’ll be writing about some of those stories coming up shortly, most of which are very very funny, because this:
I am by no means naturally athletic or graceful. If there’s a tree root I’ll trip on it. I’d stumble on a dung beetle if one rolled across my path.
So I’ve got twelve years of hilarity to report at my expense. And a lot more.
But those twelve years cost me physically, along with fifty years of lifting weights. I needed some reconstruction work for me to continue at a high level.
I’m in the middle of another major reboot at seventy.
Since 2018 I have had twelve big surgeries, mostly sports-related, seven of them just in the last thirteen months. Three rotator cuff, four hand, two feet, one ovaries bye-bye, a Star Wars kidney stone removal and a fractured hip.
This is from last winter:
For more than a year I’ve been off my workout game, put on some pounds, lost power and lean muscle mass. It can happen. I committed to get the PT and gym work done so that right about now I could be winging my way back to Mongolia.
Um, no.
I’d lost most of my Covid pounds, was feeling trim and strong, back walking and working out.
Just about that time, I did a header off my porch and snapped my left femur head.
Well, OW. That’s another story, so stay tuned.
Reboot.
The single most powerful muscle you and I possess is our sense of humor and our delight in life’s absurdity.
I had plans, those plans got hit with the Universal bowling ball. So now there’s yet another reboot underway. This one is a lot bigger.
Having screws in my hip, physical changes to my hands and feet as the result of all this surgery means that this new reboot has to take on some new directions.
Some extreme sports have to be ratcheted back, some sports released altogether and new sports beckon. Doors closed. Others are opening.
Some of this is scary.
I mean, who am I if I’m not The Badass Intrepid Adventure Girl?
Who am I if not the Fearless Female riding the spiciest horse in the stable?
See what I mean? We can get so identified with a way of being that when the do-over, the reboot, is required of us, we can freeze in place out of fear of what’s next.
We too often look backwards in grief instead of stride forward with curiosity and courage.
Late-in life do-overs and reboots ask, if not require of us, that we release ways of being and doing which simply don’t serve our last decade..or even last year.
This is where courage comes in. And humor, as we eyeball that sprouting chin hair, the sagging buttocks, or whatever age, Nature and the Great Pumpkin have laid at our door for us to handle.
So many brand new things in this reboot at seventy.
All that new stuff has got me terribly excited. As I work my way through the physical therapy and hit the gym again, those new horizons beckon like sweet treats to the mind and soul.
Today I drive to the coast to hike the Oregon sand dunes to train my healing hip and my healing feet. It’s what it takes and by god it’s fun.
Yet here’s the thing, and it’s why I’m doing this.
For so many of us, a single injury, like my hip fracture, a sideswipe from life late in life like Grey Divorce, can put an end to everything. We get depressed, we believe that life is all over, when all that really happened was a handshake.
A handshake that’s essentially a fond and respectful goodbye to a certain kind of being. A chapter which needs to be ended.
And another one, outstretched, for the next new thing.
You and I are never, ever Too Old for the next new thing, even if it’s changing our mind about being Too Old.
That’s where all hope, happiness, and a hale and hearty attitude begin: between our ears.
For this writer, for this newsletter, that is precisely what it’s all about: changing our lives for the better through changing our minds about what’s possible as we age.
That’s why you’re invited along. As I reboot, as I head off towards yet another horizon -that’s why I call myself a Horizon Huntress - I am hunting the next new iteration in this life.
I AM excited. And yes, I AM a little bit scared.
But it’s like that first skydive: one step and OMIGOD WHY DID I WAIT SO LONG????
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.
Sound good enough to support my work right away? My goodness (blushes). Thank you and here you go:
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Otherwise, please read on and see if anything else I write appeals.