You're Too Old to Give Up on Life. You're Just Getting Started
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
Within every ending is seeded a brand new beginning. Why then do we stare backwards?
Dear Reader: A kind reminder that with this and all articles I am first and foremost addressing myself. I don’t have the conceit to have answers, but I hope to ask better questions. Sometimes I find pretty good resources, which I will share. But I don’t pretend to offer answers. Those are for each of us to discover on our own.
The comments have been rolling in on Netflix’s biopic Nyad, which I watched last week along with Sly. Both brought home some difficult truths about early trauma. A brutal, abusive, horribly childish father for Stallone, and for Nyad, a predatory coach and a lifetime of self-blame.
While Sly’s success from his career, the money, fame and all the accolades after a lifetime in cinema make cause some, especially his father, terrible jealousy, he hasn’t been able to escape the deep, traumatic furrows in his soul.
Nor has Nyad. However we the public respond to their coping mechanisms very differently. Many of the comments about Annette Bening’s terrific, unapologetic portrayal of this determined athlete paint her as she is: obtuse, demanding, self-absorbed.
So is Stallone. As a woman, Nyad suffers at the hands of those who would berate her for her excellence, rather than extend a little grace to a person whose only means of coping with an abuser is to become, well… Nyad.
Just as Stallone became Sly, in part and perhaps even largely because of his abusive father.
So very often, early trauma can lead to extreme achievement, but without resolution or peace. Sure was the case in my life, possibly so many others.
No amount of fame, accolades or fan love makes up for what we needed from our parents. But by the same token, at what point do we allow those experiences to leach the life out of us as we age into our Third Act?
Pasts do inform our futures, but the present can, too. Stay with me here.
We often look backward to understand today. Sometimes this helps us look with greater wisdom at our own hero’s journey.
Sometimes we stare backwards and moan about our youth when in truth, that youth was often pretty shitty when we were living it.
We love to rewrite history when we aren’t happy with the present.
There’s value in review, as long as you and I can use our pasts to support our futures, rather than undermine and/or excuse them.
So the real question, especially if you’re at mid-life, is
now what?
Holy cow, what a question.
Right now, though, let’s just dance with this one:
What are we to do with the rest of our lives?
Stallone is 77. Nyad is 74. I’m 70. We’re in our final third. What are we going to do with it?
What now?
You and I are Way Too Old to be spending our time looking backwards when it’s time to restart our lives.
Too many of us spend far too much time focusing on what haunts us rather than the hope ahead of us. I’ve done my fair share. I most assuredly have tried hard to come to terms with my past so that it could help fuel a better future. Not always successful.
That burden for me has been like adding extra weight to my ruck sack to help strengthen my legs. But not always. Sometimes I just eat sand.
Our past can be a land mine or a launch pad. Part of aging, part of wisdom is learning how and when we are choosing to wallow vs. choosing to be a warrior.
Yet so often right about the time we’ve built the very skills which will allow us that life we always wanted, we say,
We’re just Too Old.
Them’s fightin’ words at my house.
Part of learning to be a warrior is recognizing that wallowing is part of that journey. Deep despair, loss, grief, all of it are part of the work we do to become fully ourselves.
If and when we anesthetize ourselves, and boy have I done that with donuts, we avoid the work. If we avoid the Deep Work, we rob ourselves of the warrior and the strength we need to draw upon as we age.
The way I see it, and it doesn’t make me right, we can choose to be a warrior for ourselves. The scars we bear, the lessons life has laid upon us, make us stronger. A true warrior learns deep and abiding vulnerability, self-love and self-regard.
A true warrior understands that pain is part of life. It’s a teacher, not to be misconstrued with speaking to our lack of value. Just the opposite, in fact. I think that when we are given seemingly insurmountable odds, that is the Universe’s way of saying,
You’ve got this.
One of my favorite films, The Woman King, does a superb job of speaking to the warrior as well as the tender woman within.
It’s the vulnerability which makes Nanisca even stronger as a leader. Can we do that? Don’t you and I deserve that self-care?
Ten years ago this very night I would get up at 11:30 pm, eat a massive meal heavy with rice and proteins, and then gear up for the summit of Kilimanjaro under the full moon of November 17, 2013. I had trained seven hard months for this night.
By five am or thereabouts, my guides, climbing partner and I reached Gilman’s Point. There we stopped for food and water, and to watch the dawn rise over the clouds hugging the Tanzanian horizon.
Two brutally hard hours later I would stand, exhausted, under the iconic sign. At that moment, sixty years old and giddy with the lack of oxygen, I realized that I could do much of anything I set my sights on.
So I launched into a career of adventure travel, taking on all kinds of new sports and challenges all over the world. Not too many people my vintage do that. Most assuredly most women my vintage don’t.
Two years ago I committed to doing Kilimanjaro again, on this anniversary, to celebrate the last decade of adventure travel which began with 2013’s remarkable year.
It took me a while to figure out why I wanted to do it. My reasons were understandable, but they were the wrong reasons.
Another summit this year wasn’t even remotely possible. The injuries and need for major reconstructive surgeries on multiple body parts made training and hiking out of the question.
If I wanted a new challenge, the first challenge was to fix my busted body. Besides, I was looking backwards. Why did I need to do Kili again? What was I trying to re-create?
To forge ahead to what’s next, we have to start where we are. Kilimanjaro 2.0 wasn’t going to fix that. This is how we can sometimes fool ourselves into thinking that if we repeat a previous success, life will get better.
In summer of 2022 my body was in serious need of repairs if I ever wished to hike, bike, ride horses again. My new “Kilimanjaro” was to embark on that journey first: go through the surgeries, heal, do the PT for each one and put the yeoman’s work into retraining.
Going through seven surgeries in one year has been vastly harder than prepping for Kili the first time. I lost fitness, power, muscle. I gained weight. Lost my waistline. I lost the ability to grip, my dexterity was shot, and my balance was a joke.
I still can’t feel my feet, which is how I broke my hip last July.
At times I felt like a broke-down ol’ lady. At times I couldn’t see any way forward. At times I was so alone and depressed I really did feel like giving up. The pain was constant, the road ahead full of potholes.
What the hell, right? But this hell is what it takes to create that new beginning. The seeds of the next chapter are in the ground. We water those seeds with faith, determination, humor, patience. Of course it’s hard.
This is what it looks like when it’s working.
That’s what it takes to make a warrior.
It would have been a lot easier to give up, peruse the thousands upon thousands of photos from all my adventures from the last twelve years and say fuggit, I’m done. I’ll never do any of that again.
It was tempting to wield the remote rather than plan to go remote again. Forfeit my future by reliving the past.
You and I are way Too Old to believe it’s over.
If you’re past fifty, sixty, you’ve already had to start over so many times. You already know deep in your marrow that the seeds for the next chapter are already sprouting.
What’s in the way is doubting.
Doubting is part of the process of remaking ourselves.
Far too many people around us would have us be out to pasture by forty, fifty, whatever. The research isn’t behind them. It’s behind us, as we rev up for the next set of laps, the next Big Thing, the next us.
Don’t let the “old wo/man in.”
My next chapter will be even better. With twelve years of adventure experience, knowledge and know-how under my belt, I’m unlikely to make the same kinds of rookie mistakes.
I’ll make worse ones. Where else will I get comedy material?
I don’t mind making rookie mistakes. The beginner’s mind allows us to be that kid unafraid to fall, even if falling at seventy is a lot more painful. What softens the landing is our sense of humor. Perspective.
Aging gives us the gift- if we’re willing to exercise it- of being willing to know nothing. To be a blank slate, to find humor in our silly hubris, joy in jumping into new things, a high regard for the needs of our body and brain and a newfound respect for what they can give us.
I didn’t promise answers. I did promise questions.
What’s next in your biopic? What’s next in your hero’s journey? We are all on the Joseph Campbell mythical but very real hero’s journey. What will you write next?
Wherever you are, there seeds already germinating in you for your next chapter. Are you watering them? Or are you moping over a younger you that you will never be again?
Can you and I release the desire to be young, and embrace the reality of older, wiser, better, more powerful, and able?
You can be better. You can be stronger. You can do more. What you could be next is already inside you.
Everything we ever were once is our foundation for what we can be next.
You and I are just getting started.
My next chapter is already underway. My Kilimanajaro 2.0 is nearing an end as I put in the time and effort to train, build strength and endurance, drop the extra pounds and watch the muscles return.
I’m investing in different coaches and trainers and therapists in a way I never did before. This is what age gifts us: asking for what we really need, and delivering it to our sacred selves.
Trusting that we already have, already are everything we need to step into what’s next.
The rest of the work is all attitude, joy, grit, humor, patience and anticipation.
We’re just getting started.
Let’s play.
Thank you most sincerely for hanging with me for a few minutes today. If this was worth you while, kindly consider
If there are folks in your life, in midlife or late in life who might need a kind reminder that it ain’t over yet, please also consider
Either way, please find joy in your steps, a lightness in your heart and find the hope that is always and forever on the horizon. We just have to see it.
This is an essay to come back to again and again when I need reminding that, as you say, "of course it's hard." But regarding myself as a warrior as I age feels soooo much better than seeing myself as a discard. Deep thanks for this, and I'm cheering you along on your Kilimanjaro 2.0.
Great piece. I think the hardest part is that there’s no roadmap for our third act, as there was with the first two. But THEN, you realize WAIT! There is no roadmap! Woo-hoo! Once you realize that, you’re liberated!