I am a firm believer; an avid advocate. You might say I’m obnoxious about this truth: getting older is a privilege; getting old is a choice.
Maybe it’s the stage of life I’m in. But I seem to be hearing more and more people in their thirties, forties, and fifties talking way too much about retirement, or saying way too often that the life of their dreams has passed them by because they are “too old.”
Have you found that in life, you’re either too young, too old, or too tired? It’s almost as though people are planning to live the last years of their life in a nursing home, but they want to schedule a visit and make an appointment as soon as they possibly can. Not me.
I am going to live until I’m dead. I’m going to live all the way. I’m going to work, try, plan, aspire. I’m going to have a mission. I’m going to have a big vision. And I’m going to have goals that support it in every area of my life: relationally, spiritually, physically, and financially. You should too.
As Paula and I launch more and more into helping married people grow great, we’re discovering that people married 10, 15, 20, even 30 years feel that the dysfunction and the pain of their past has doomed them to a marriage that’s below average, or even terminal.
Let me just say this to you. It is never too late to aspire to amazing. It is never too late to have the marriage of your dreams. It is never too late to have the career that you’ve always wanted. Age has absolutely nothing to do with it. As a matter of fact, age works to your advantage because the older you are, the more experienced you are, the wiser you are and the more of the things you know you do not want. You have to focus on the things that really now matter.
Hey, cancel your subscription to AARP and all of those insurance programs that give you money for your house and whatever else it is these people are hawking these days to people in their advancing years. I’m talking about 35-plus. Haha. Stay alive. Stay young. Stay hopeful. Have fun. Be foolish. Dance, skip, run, dare to be a child all the way. Dare to contribute. Dare to make something amazing of your life in the second half!