I’m a senior?
Hey, what about me?!!! I’m so on top of it, I just won an AAU World Champion Powerlifting competition. Wow! In fact, I set 10 world records. In what category you ask? Old and little! So, what’s next? I’m only 59. What a shock, no info on 60 year olds. Well, I can set the bar! Why not? Well, I can still sing and dance and teach and do what I have always done. Why, What? I just turned 65…eegads I never expected to be this old….and how did it happen so fast? Who gets left out in this world? Those of us over 50 or is it 60? 70? 80? 90? Are we really over the hill or is it just possible we still have dreams and goals?
So how did my life change, again, in one afternoon now age 66 years?
It wasn’t even planned. So here I am singing and dancing and telling my age, which I had always said I would only do when it could make me money. Yes, I went to an audition…and 300 hundred people later, I got the part! I was to be a world famous “Showgirl”, and why not? After 66 years I certainly must have been prepared. Aren’t you? Didn’t you help mold this world? Haven’t you persisted and trained and raised children and ran companies..and..and….was that just perserverance or a belief in yourself? Well, after two years as a soloist with this prestigious company, I mustered up enough courage to go out on my own, once again, now 69.
Is it possible that I was actually growing up? Oh, I do hope not because this is where we go to the core of our beings. Where we give ourselves the permission to still have the desire to reach for accomplishments because we still can! Oh, I could certainly continue to mentor the 23-35 year olds. But at 71 yes, now 71 and still achieving, still winning awards, I want to motivate and set fires under those of us that still have credibility in this world.
That’s You!
Whether you own or can work a smart phone or not. You who just need to stand up straight and walk with strength and a vibrancy that propels you even more forward. I personally always thought a good scandal would have done that for me but none came along. So it was going to be up to me to blaze the trail. To learn how to use a computer because it means growth and learning.
What would stop me?
Disappointment, discouragement, embarrassed to say I still want my dream. So who changes the bar on what is appropriate or possible? YOU do, I do, they do, we all do…but it takes courage in a different way than it did when you first declared your major in college, or thought about writing your first book ….or started your own business…or held your first camera in your hands….long before digital, of course!!!
Because now we are filled with so much evidence as to why something won’t work. Well I suppose one of us has to stop this madness of only having stories of people over 50-60-70-80-whatever, with illnesses/divorces/and feeling guilty for not having been financially more savvy, no inheritances….or none left..a mortgage to pay that you can’t refinance….and the possible rich man who went and died on you: leaving you nothing but hormone replacement therapy. Add to this a world full of new high technology that can be so intimidating.
OK…come back at me with ..
Well I don’t know the troubles you have. How many problems you have to surmount. No I don’t, but I know of my financial disaster and losing everything including part of my left breast. Nothing seemed to slip by me! So…. Back to re-creating…re-inventing again!!! Yes, march yourselves to the nearest fitness facilities….instead of the nearest doctors office or hospital or testing labs…all that is fine…but where is your dream in here?
Well, I have to go now, because I need to get to the gym
before I have to teach and then get to a rehearsal. All this is for the sake of my script…my life…my struggle…to be…to do…to live…to make a difference…to give encouragement …motivation…permission…to continue to believe in something…to change thinking……Perhaps it’s a story that could defy the odds of “Life …Liberty…and the Pursuit of a Flat Stomach!