Life after 60

By Bobby Neal Winters

Death is an odd thing. Or, I should say, the knowledge of Death is an odd thing.  Death comes to all of us with mathematical certainty. I know that I am going to die. But the time of our demise is a mystery until it is a done thing. Even those who are known to be terminally ill will not know the moment of their death, but only a probable interval in which it will occur.

I turned 60 last year.

I’m feeling pretty good.  I am alert.  I still have my good mind.  While my energy isn’t as good as it was when I was 20, my thoughts are clearer and more grounded in reality.  That is to say, I am not nearly as stupid as I was then. I take better care of myself now than I did then. 

I have lost the sense of immortality that I had at that tender age.

I now *know* that one day I *will* die.

But...

But I also watch the news.  As I write this, Barbara Walters passed away a few days ago at the age of 93.  Benedict XVI passed away at the age of 95.  Queen Elizabeth and her husband both lived into their 90s. 

Clint Eastwood is still making movies at age 92.  He may be riding the High Plains in the sky by the time this hits print, but today he is still working.

Closer to home, I have friends who are in their 70s, 80s, and beyond who are still active. It is not unreasonable for me to be making plans for the next 10, 20, or even 30 years.  I begin to hear my old companion that poem by Tennyson in my head:

“Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.”

While I’ve not striven with Gods in the strictest sense, I’ve done my share of striving one way or the other.  Some of the folks I strove with thought they were Gods or knew as much.

Poetics aside, I am still productive and I still have an interval of time ahead of me in which I can be productive.   While I could have a stroke, be diagnosed with cancer, or even have a snowplow fall on me, it is not unreasonable to think that I have 10 productive years left. Given the examples above maybe more, though we all have our list of people who were taken from us before their time.

How to spend those years, eh?

There are numerous permutations to consider. I know retirees who wished they’d retired earlier; I know retirees who wish they’d stayed at work.  I know people working who I wish would retire; I know retired people I wish were still working.  (And there are those who have combined the two by retiring, but not letting anybody in HR know about it, but I best not put too fine a point on it.)

I’ve spent most of my life following the path of least resistance.  I’ve been blown like a leaf in the wind. In the spring, a thunderstorm can blow at a leaf and it will just flap in the gale, but in the autumn the gentlest breeze can take a leaf to the ground.

The leaf needs to become more intentional if it's not to spend the end of the year in a puddle of muddy slush in the street getting run over by snow plows going back and forth.

Just sayin’.

There have been times when I have been intentional. I remember vividly the day I walked over to ask the girl who later became my wife out on our first date.  I had to screw my courage to the sticking place.

I think that turned out well.

This leads to thinking about a couple of great Americans: Robert Frost and Yogi Berra.  Frost wrote his famous poem “The Road not Taken.”  In it, he says, 

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

This is interpreted by some to mean, the choice of road really didn’t make any difference.  

Yogi, no less poetically said, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”  Who could argue with that?  On my own, I interpret it to mean, to make a decision and own it. There ain’t no going back.

Whether you die at 27, 44, 60, or 95, life is too short to waste a minute of it.  Try to do something that makes you love every day.  Embrace life and the living of it.  And there is some living left to do even at 60.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )