I was driving to Boston’s Logan Airport recently when I made the wrong turn and ended up going the wrong way down a one-way street. I swear, it was not clearly marked. A woman walked towards me waving her arms, yelling to turn around. But it was the look on her face.
When you’re in your 20s and make a mistake like that, people look at you like you’re an idiot. In your 50’s, people look at you like you’re incompetent.
We spend the first half of our lives collecting, refining, improving our skills, and getting smarter. Then in the final decades, we start to lose a lot of these skills. Our thinking which had been fast and sharp may slow, we are not up on new trends, we hand that jar of spaghetti sauce to our adult son to open.
Like pruning a bush, though, we need to cut back on some of these efforts to replace them with the more important work of our final decades. This does not mean we are getting less smart but rather that like a teenager, we are developing in new and meaningful ways. And as we’re changing, it can be kind of awkward.
Where the teen is having a coming of age, we’re having a “coming of aging”.
One of these new developments is the rediscovery of our authentic selves, especially if this self has been packed away for some decades. This pruning creates more space for clarity about what matters most inside.
Like me, most of my friends are empty nesters. I see an emergence of interest in returning to a creative life that we had set aside 20 years ago when we had our children and they became our creative outlet.
Whether it’s painting again or writing that short story that’s been percolating, these seeds planted decades ago are finally taking root, watered with more time and space, and are finally breaking through the dirt and growing into the light to be seen.
If life is a circle and not a line, the journey we’re on starts by taking us away from our starting point but then as we follow the curve around, our steps start taking us back home. These impulses are the road signs that we’re on track.
Although we’re different now, and home — when we get there — will be different too, there’s nothing more important to do with the time we have left.
When we were young, we were in such a hurry to grow up, learn everything, taste everything, and try everything. And now, there’s a different kind of urgency. It’s slower but urgent just the same to learn who we are, to taste what matters most, to try what we haven’t had time yet to try, not in a rush but in our own slow, sweet time.
Come closer. Listen. You’re slowing down for a good reason. Maybe the gulps have turned to sips but the juice is still there.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: Geoffrey Smith on Unsplash