You Are Never Too Old
An Important Question
If I asked you to complete the following sentence, ‘You are never too old to [BLANK]’ what would your answer be?
Over the past few months I have been asking myself this question, and the list of answers I have come up with has grown surprisingly long. That is the beauty of such questions: They allows us to imagine what might otherwise have been impossible. If you do not dream it, you will not do it.
Let me give you a few examples:
A woman I met recently told me a story about her eighty year old father. Rather than resigning himself to age and infirmity as so many do at that age, this woman’s father instead chose to go in the opposite direction. This woman’s father had a goal in mind, but he did not tell anyone about this goal until he knew he could make it a reality. Inspired by his newfound purpose in life, he began walking every morning, short distances at first, and then a little farther each day until he was finally able to keep up with a group of men twenty years his junior. Only then did he tell his family what he had planned. “I want to hike the entirety of the Camino Portuguese,” he told them. For those that are unaware, the Camino Portuguese is a grueling pilgrimage that begins on the coast of Portugal and ends 250 kilometers later in the small village of Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
I can only imagine the reaction this man’s announcement must have garnered. Shock? Horror?
‘Are you crazy?’ his friends and family must have thought. ‘You’re an old man. You can’t possibly walk such a distance.’
And yet he did.
At the ripe old age of eighty this ‘old’ man walked half way across the Iberian peninsula and enjoyed every moment of the experience. When the woman told me this story (I could hear the pride in her voice as she did so), my first thought was, ‘I want to be just like your father when I grow up.’
And so should we all.
The Search for Meaning
For that matter, we should all strive to be like my own father. Like the man in the story above, he too decided late in life that age would not be an impediment to the things he wanted to do.
My father spent the bulk of his retirement years caring for an invalid wife. Because of her condition they rarely travelled and my father could not leave her alone for more than a few hours at a time. He did not complain about his situation, but I know he wanted more out of his life. He wanted to visit friends, family. He wanted to explore this great nation of ours.
Unfortunately, by the time his wife finally passed, my father was nearing eighty and was himself in failing health. He had recently been diagnosed with leukemia, and though he would never admit as much, I’m sure he must have known that this was the thing that would finally kill him.
It would have been easy for him to give up at that point, to simply sit and wait for the end to come. But my father was never one to be still for very long (a trait I must have inherited from him). Instead, he bought a small teardrop trailer and then made plans to travel the country. He had a cousin in Wisconsin he wanted to visit, and a friend of his from the Navy lived in New Orleans. But first, he planned to drive from Big Bear, California to Seattle, Washington where he had grown up. Once there, it was his goal to seek out all of the places he had ever lived. “I want to know if the houses are still standing,” he told me. “And if they are, to see if they are like I remember them.”
Sadly, my father was only able to complete the first leg of this journey, but when he told me the story of his trip, I could hear the joy in his voice. Many of the homes he had lived in had been torn down, but a few remained, and I think this gave him hope that something of his life would live on after he was gone.
My father’s adventure may not resonate with some of you, and that’s okay. Each of us must travel our own path in this world. The important thing is to find meaning in whatever path we do finally choose.
A Worthy Goal
When I first told my wife about the subject for this blog post, she suggested a news article I might want to read. This article told the story of a local man, Darrin Underwood who made it a goal to log 60,000 steps in a single day to celebrate his 60th birthday. To accomplish this goal, he would walk the Deschutes River Trail from Bend to Sunriver and back again, a total distance of 32 miles. By the time Darrin was done, he had logged not just 60,000 steps, but a grand total of 70,000. He was tired, but proud of what he had been ble to accomplish.
When asked if he experienced any difficulties during his outing Darrin deflected the question, and instead chose to accentuate the positives of his experience.
“(I felt) Lots and lots of joy,” he said. “I love seeing the wildlife. I probably saw six osprey nests and osprey. Bald eagles, snakes…A sandhill crane flew by as I walked into Dillon Falls,” he said.
Obviously, seventy thousand steps is not something that many of us are willing or even able to do. But it is not the number of steps that is important, or even the direction they take us. It is the joy those steps bring that matters most.
For myself, I am sixty-two years old now, retired and three years removed from my second full hip replacement, but I am not ready to trade my life of adventure for one spent indoors. Not yet, at any rate.
When I asked myself the question posed above I came up with a long list of things I still want to accomplish. Among them: I want to hike the Timberline Trail around Mount Hood and the Wonderland Trail around Mount Rainier. I want to photograph wildflowers in the Eagle Cap Wilderness, and visit as many National Parks as my health and finances will allow. And this is just the beginning of my list.
As we grow older, the world around us tends to become smaller, our walks shorter, but it does not have to be this way, at least not yet. As long as we are able to dream, the entire world is still within our grasp.
So when I ask you to complete the sentence, ‘You are never to old to [BLANK]’, what will your answer be?