It’s Never Too Late (or Too Soon)

I’ve really been enjoying an AARP article, 50 reasons to love being 50+. Corny title aside, the vignettes are based on personal experience or research. Here's my spin on the highlights :

You can care more: You’ve been through enough to really understand difficulties experienced by others, and they can tell. You realize that learning something new is as good (or probably better) than buying something new. Waking up reasonably healthy is something to cherish.

You can care less: You realize that what others think doesn’t really matter. You now know your mistakes really won’t matter six days, weeks, months or years from now. Who cares what my race time was [whether I had the perfect dress, whether I earned the highest score, etc] I did it!

You can do more: When you let yourself, you really can think outside the box. Research shows you’re better at detecting honesty in others. You can tell by the evidence who your real friends are. You can try new things with abandon.

You can do less: You know you don’t have to please everyone. Taking time to smell the roses is okay. Meditation is starting to make sense. Communing with the cat [dog, canary, ferret] is a good thing.

After all, life really is short. By the time you reach the big 5-0, isn’t it time to drop pretense and be yourself? Often you have to work hard to notice if you’re being true to yourself. Ask yourself the hard questions. Am I doing what I want to be doing? Is this what I want my legacy to be? How do I want to be remembered?

You can start now, even if you’ve only reached the big 2-0. And…

It's never too late to be who you might have been. - George Elliot