Things You Do When You Get Older
Now that I’ve reached my forties and the hyper-awareness that my life is more than half done, I have all new hobbies and interests. Some of these are activities that used to bewilder me, back when I was in my twenties and I’d see 40-somethings obsess over things I couldn’t possibly care about. Some of them I came to understand better when I reached my thirties. And some of them are completely unexpected, but make perfect sense now, now that I’m almost old.
Hobbies, Interests, and Goals I Have Now, That I Didn’t Have When I Was Young:
1. Trying to take care of this mortal husk before it’s too late and my joints are ground to powder
2. Trying to improve myself or my life, in one way or another, each day
3. Breaking goals into small chunks with ample rest time between, as opposed to plowing through pages of goals and getting upset at the length of time it took me to acheive them
4. Reassessing pending goals and discarding the ones based on outgrown neuroses
5. Thinking about bifocals
6. Doing that thing where you try to click on a word with your mouse, but you click on the word next to it, instead, and then remembering when I used to watch older people do that with their mouses and boggle at their inability to click the intended word and wonder what their deal was — Did they need glasses? Had they not played enough video games in their lives to develop normal eye/hand coordination? — and trying to forgive myself for my past lack of empathy as well as my current inability to click the damn word that’s right there on the screen in front of my face
7. Avoiding the emotional dramas presented to me by family and friends, without feeling guilty about it
8. Letting my kids make their own mistakes, instead of acting like a truck that drives ahead of them and salts the icy roads in order to keep them from ever slipping
9. Letting go of responsibility for situations that have nothing to do with me, like a volunteer fireman who only puts out fires at his own house
10. Trying to react to adversity with forthrightness instead of surpressed anger or uncontrolled anger
11. Buying good quality shoes that won’t hurt my feet
12. Ignoring lists about what women should do when they’re forty
04/10/2013 at 2:20 pm
You left one off:
13. Becoming Houston’s Poet Laureate.
CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!! 😉
04/11/2013 at 11:36 am
I have not been here in ages simply because I’ve been too busy to keep up with my old blog reading habit. But I saw the article about your appointment as Houston’s poet laureate, and I had to come and congratulate you. That is awesome, lady!
04/11/2013 at 12:11 pm
Oh, PS – I just turned 40, and I’m right there with you.
04/11/2013 at 12:16 pm
I know what you mean Gwen. I’ve just hit 58 and I think that the process you wrote about and I have flirted with is simply the process of growing into our own skin more with time.
By the way..huge congrats on making the front page of the Chron today ( 4/11/13) and being named Houston’s Poet Laureate..huzzah. I’ve been reading you since Gwens world..yep..it’s me..Boschka the crazy red head… still working in 2 Allen downtown.
have what ever kind of day that makes you happy
Jane aka Aunty Pol aka Boschka
04/13/2013 at 6:11 pm
As a new Houstonian, a writer and poet, I want to congratulate you on your recent appointment as poet laureate.
Looking forward, with interest, to what this will mean for poets and poetry lovers of Houston.