THEN AND NOW
Friday June 1, 2018
Many folks – fifties, sixties and beyond – don’t appear to be striving much.
Focused on health, knitting baby things, walking slower – seemingly focused on trying to survive, to stay alive, get retirement plans launched, and to get their affairs in order.
Hold it, WHOA!
I’m not ready for that stuff. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
What we’ll leave behind or how we’ll be remembered might have been important in younger days, but now it’s more about ‘what am I doing that is productive?’, and ‘am I spending appropriate time and energy on it?’
Lately, thinking focused on ‘having a productive and creative’ second half of life, I see ribbons of fresh smooth pavement and gentle rainy ahead but admit I’m in the second half. Working hard to made it to double over-time!
Second half is an interesting sports metaphor, after which half of our time remains.
In life, for many, by the time ‘second half’ thinking arrives, many are far closer to their final buzzer that their math or wishes indicate.
Yet most days don’t look or feel much different. Tiny, mostly deliberate, incremental changes. Shifts of direction, focusing more energy on fewer things – there is less about more and more about less.
What we do, what we accomplish – what we expect we’ll leave behind seems to shift as we move through life. What was important in teens and twenties is irrelevant now. What we strove for in our thirties and forties – not as important as they were then, don’t matter much now.
I think about this – not every day.
Every now and then.
