This is more or less a personal pep talk to myself as I navigate a few months of activity outside of the normal work week and I was feeling down as I was starting the second day of my vacation. Talking about it helped me so I started typing. Hope it helps you to realize we all go through this sometimes, no matter your age.

There are a lot of horrible things most everyone goes through when the later stages of aging take place. And the worst thing about that is you can’t predict much of it. It is a mishmash of heredity, and many other hard to follow through with factors.

However, from watching my parents and others, not to mention feeling it myself, you can certainly feel it as it approaches and the worst part is that we only have partial control over what happens and when.

I just want to talk about how aging can affect you from my perspective. What got me thinking of it was this constant stream of conferences and now vacation. I have to work hard to not say, “I am old, time to slow down, let’s just skip the next thing.” Most of the time I fight the urge and get in my car, a plane, or the seat on that roller coaster, but it gets harder all the time.

This is the problem

The only people who don’t have doctors recently telling them to drink more water, eat more vegetables, and get out/exercise more are the ones who are overworking their kidneys with gallons of water, have an unnatural skin color from too much chlorophyll or beta carotene, or have ran marathons with some form of congenital issue that means running farther than the average person gets tired commuting in a car might kill or debilitate them at any time. Well, and those who avoid doctors because as they note “no one dies until you see one.“

In other words, by my estimation, .00001 % of people in their 30s and .0001% of people in their 40s. It does go up sharply as the decades pass and bodies begin to fail, but to call it rare is a disservice to the word “rare”. I only know of one person I think might have been told this, and it was more like “stop running so many marathons” not, you need to sit down, grab a snack cake, and stop exercising. I mean, if it worked, who wouldn’t?

Aging seems to be equal parts mental and physical

Aging mentally is (at least for me), a dangerous barrier to reaching a higher plane. There is a Ford commercial (I can’t find a link) that uses a quote attributed to Henry Ford that says “whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.” My literal mind knows this to be very wrong.

Bonus life advice, if you disagree and think you can fly, it is best to try a takeoff from the ground first.

But it is 100% true for the negative side. When you say, “I can’t”, you probably never will, certainly not without convincing. An experience like that was how I became a roller coaster fan. I was terrified, and then convinced to try one, and as the nerves faded and the adrenaline started pumping, I was hooked.

The stuff your doctor actually tells you not to do, sometimes after following the directions on a piece of exercise equipment to “check with your doctor before starting any new exercise program”, these are physical limitations. Best to listen to that advice or you may wake up at the gym with someone pumping on your chest or worse yet, breathing for you soon after they had an Italian lunch.

Most other limitations are basically mental.

Mental barriers are hard

Anyone who has had physical barriers hopefully knows that they can actually be motivating. If it is hard to walk a block and you do it enough, it gets easier, then you can do two.

Mental barriers on the other hand, creep in and are very convincing. Some have physical starts and take work to get past. As you age, it is important to learn that every left arm pain isn’t a heart attack, and every time you feel short of breath isn’t either. Discerning muscle pain from tears and bone breaks is really difficult sometimes. I walked miles on a cracked foot until they finally saw it on an xray. There are too many good pains that can also be really really bad pains. If it scares you at all, get checked out!!!

The older you get, the day after you walk 10 miles at a conference, the more you will have to remind yourself that the pain you feel is good pain. Good pain makes you stronger over time. Sadly the concept of good pain versus bad pain gets harder and harder every year because recovery time does not decrease with years after your age ends in -teen.

Add to that when you hear people you thought would never stop start talking about slowing down, and it gets easy to justify. It hits me hard when friends say “this may be my last roller coaster ride.”

Of course, overestimating other people’s abilities while underestimating my own has always been easy. Starts with thinking your parents and teachers are superheroes and continues from there. And we never ever seem to learn even when we see those folks being mortal.

The biggest scam

However, the point here is that the biggest scam of them all is getting mentally old and saying “I can’t” for no other reason than people your age don’t. But there are so many who can.

And if you haven’t been explicitly told “no” and tried something, you may be able to, regardless of age (within reason, which is true at any age!)

One last try to convince you (and me)

If I haven’t convinced you, hopefully I have convinced myself. And whenever I need a pick me I remember this 88 year old person riding roller coasters at Dollywood.