Can You Be Still Heroic After Sixty?

Is retirement the end of your hero’s tale?

What on earth happens to you and me when age finally “catches up with us?” After the career arc of our journey, do you and I fade into vague memories of ourselves, only to match our heartbeats to the creak of the rocking chair? What’s left of life after, say, 55?

It depends, as with all things.

This is a lane I swim in pretty actively. Midway through my 67th year I’m about to embark on yet another Big Adventure, so I’m going to wade in on this one.

First, when age “catches up to me” I will be dead. Simple as that. I’m not racing my age. Too busy living. So the conceit that somehow Father Time, tricked out in his neon green Nike ZoomX Vaporflys, is about to tag my ass and slow me down is a joke.

Second, the idea of retirement is also a joke. More wisely put, given that most of us these days (ask any Millennial or Gen Zer) are going to work for a few years, leapfrog, rinse and repeat, long gone is the quaint notion of steady employment for forty years and a nice fat juicy pension. That died when I was in my teens. I’ve been a career re-inventer my entire life. Right now is a fine example, as my latest iteration has had to be grounded because planes are grounded.

Pivot. Redirect. Like a great many of us.

In fact, given the extraordinary diversity of humanity, some of us peak young and rest on our (sometimes)rotting laurels the rest of our lives. Others peak mid-life or very late, only to be faced with ageism later in life, right about the time they are just hitting their strides. The exceedingly outdated notion of a 9–5 work day (please see this story which explains the history) is predicated on manual labor, and completely ignores how work has shifted today. And how most of us work far more hours and often over the weekends, because computers allow us to do so.

Those same computers also allow people of any age or ability to make contributions, another idea that is being crushed by corporate addiction to an utterly outmoded idea of work (please see this about corporate spyware). An idea that hamstrings many who are other-abled, aging or in one way or another, not the picture-perfect poster child for the nine to five, utterly outmoded version of employment.

This internal discussion began for me with this article from The Atlantic:

On one hand we do let go of one journey, and enter another. That is, if we bothered to prepare for another journey. This means that we are forever training body, mind and spirit for the next hero’s journey.

The words hero and heroic are bandied around a bit too much. In this context, this is how I am using the word: brave.

You and I may not necessarily think of ourselves as brave, if our understanding of the word is limited to those uber athletes featured in Outside Magazine. The truth is the bravery wears a billion faces: the small challenging things you and I choose to do every day which others don’t.

People will avoid the hard things out of laziness or a victim mentality, or complaints that it’s just too hard, or it’s inconvenient. Over time those small things add up and give us strength to deal with difficult circumstances very differently than others choose to do. Or, if we avoid them, we undermine our future.

Can we be brave enough to rewrite our lives, change the narrative? As it relates to work, do we suddenly become incompetent at the ripe old age of forty (see this about IBM, and the wholesale dumping of folks over forty, as though that is now the beginning of dementia,) much less later in life?

It depends. Part of that is whether you’ve prepared to be present and accounted for later in life.

You and I are in training for our later years right now. Retirement is a ridiculous notion in the first place, utterly outmoded by the realities of work and how we live. The demand for competent contributors of any age, gender, color, culture, ability is greater than it’s ever been. Competency isn’t age-related. Competence is just competence. As we age, those abilities and gifts change, just as how we live shifts through life stages. The older we get, the more we have to offer, if we continue to grow, add skills and knowledge, stay current and engaged.

To shut off the spigot of our many gifts to the world at some arbitrary age not only robs us of our purpose but worse, also robs society of our contributions.

Yesterday I spoke with one of my closest friends, Lisa, who is in her early sixties. Her husband is 74, and is up to his ears in construction projects. Lisa is a tenured professor at a local Colorado college. She joked that in academia you can be around until “nobody wants you around any more.” Craig is incredibly busy. They’ve both been athletic and active , positive, happy, their whole lives. They’ve also been through plenty of hell, financial challenges and losses, no more or less than anyone else. They never considered retiring. They can’t afford to, either, like many Boomers, but they simply assumed they’d work until they couldn’t any more.

Me, too. Because I’ve prepared for it. I am hardly alone.

A speaking professional friend of mine, Dr. Janelle Barlow, is 77. She has already created a slew of YouTube videos, set aside work on her latest book to concentrate on creating content, while her husband, who is also in his seventies, is already up to some 70,000 subscribers on his YouTube content. They too have been physically active all their lives. Just saying.

My Medium peep Rosenna Bakari published this piece on how we prepare to age:

Rosenna is 57. I’ve got ten years on her. While I am no fourth-degree Black Belt, I did belt out 100 men’s pushups without stopping on my 67th birthday. She’ll be right back there herself if she wants to. She and I both like having upper body strength. Comes in handy.

Like this morning, when I watched another grey-haired woman heft bags of decorative river rocks into her cart at my local Home Goods, where I’m buying lock down straps for my move.

All it takes is practice. Will. Consistency. Determination. Focus. Choosing to do the many small brave things that add up over time to pay off when it really matters: later in life, when you and I may well want to fuel yet another hero’s journey of our own, starting in our sixties or seventies or eighties or nineties.

If any of us has the conceit to go striding powerfully into our later years, we might well want to do the hard labor of ensuring we’ve got the physical prowess to do just that, because the physical helps fuel everything else. It’s not helpful to have a Great Plan if we are too tired or ill to implement them.

From Dr. Bakari’s piece:

Taking care of our bodies is just as important as being financially secure and mentally stable. The body does not age according to a clock. It ages according to the mind. A timeless mind fosters an ageless body.

How long might I expect to live?

In 1935 America, a man typically expired around the age of 58. Smoking was common, so setting the retirement age around 65 was a good bet. These days, depending on where you live, life expectancy is considerably higher, particularly if you live in Hong Kong (women, 88, men 82.). The USA is 46th on this list, by the way, at 79 and 76, which says a great deal about our health habits and medical care.

Given our current Conditions, many of us can expect to have our expectancy cut far shorter for sheer stupidity (Please see this by fellow Medium writer Prickly Pam). If others don’t kill us off first, we might just make it to our later years.

If retirement age is arbitrarily set at, say, 66, what on earth are we supposed to be doing with ourselves during all those years? And while many of us have to continue to work because it’s so damned expensive to live, how then do we create a new hero’s journey arc when American society deems us addled after forty these days? What those years look like depends a great deal on the choices we make right now, especially in how we frame that time in our heads.

Are you ready for a new adventure?

The natural ending of any particular life arc is the automatic invitation to the next arc of adventure. At the end of Lord of the Rings, Bilbo, now 112 years old, inches like the ancient he is towards a dock, surrounded by his fellow hobbits. Then he says, upon seeing the ship that will take him to the far shores along with his Elven friends, Frodo and Gandalf,

“I think I’m ready for another adventure!”

Suddenly energized by the idea, his eyes light up, he shrugs off the burden of his years and moves forward with verve and delight. As might we all. Hope does that. Anticipation whets the appetite.

Not if we dread our aging process. Or hold the lie of swift, inevitable decay after fifty as an absolute truth.

Rewriting the script around what’s possible as we age takes changing the ridiculous assumptions that I see constantly echoed by my fellow Medium writers. They write “love letters” to themselves at 70, who is of course in a rocking chair on some future front porch.

There are few things worse, to my mind, than planning to be decrepit, when, as any Terminator fan can tell you, there is no fate but what we make.

For my part, if you’re writing a letter to your future self, it’s not a love letter if you Velcro your person to a picture of age and neglect. It’s a death sentence.

You’re in charge here

If you believe that you are- and science shows this- 70% in charge of your quality of life later in life, you’ve probably already been out for a walk today. Or, if you’re Rosenna, run like hell because she’s a marathoner. Or whatever. But you didn’t dine on donuts and skip your workout, most likely.

Here’s a challenge for you. Each time you hear yourself or someone else make the ageist statement, Well that just happens when you get older, try asking, based on what evidence? While I am not going into this in detail here, if you assume that dizziness and disorientation are normal, they’re not. We’re better made than that. We were built to last, last long, and last well, IF we commit to self-care. And IF we manage what we ingest carefully, not just food, but over-the-counter and prescription drugs which can cause a raft of symptoms attributed falsely to aging. Please see this article which outlines many of the issues.

When one kind of work ends, the opportunity is to redirect. You can choose to give up and spend all your time being pissed about how the Invisible Man in the Sky woke up this morning with the express purpose of making you unhappy.

Fine. If excuses and reasons work for you as a life plan.

Or, you and I can start training right here, right now. For it is never, ever, ever too late. Whenever you put the effort in, the body, mind, heart and spirit rise in response. When we develop functional fitness across all those spheres.

It’s brave to start. It’s even braver to keep it up. That’s the beginning of the hero’s journey late in life, and the best guarantee that there are plenty more adventures to be had at any age.