What Do You Want to Do for the Rest of Your Life?
What have you done these past two years to take care of yourself?
Has the uncertainty of the pandemic reshaped how you think about the rest of your life?
How will your life change when you can at last take off your mask?
Who will you be when you take off your mask?
Two years ago, I wrote a column about turning 70, titled: "If You Have the Privilege of Being Seventy, Don’t Waste It."
The column was focused on ways we can and should give back from this lofty decade of wisdom and experience. No question. Seventy is not the time to sit back and do nothing. It’s a golden age of giving back. A time to live a rich life by enriching the lives around us.
As I round the corner on 72, I feel the need not to revise but to expand on being in my seventies.
So much has happened in the last two years. For almost everyone, it has been a time of uncertainty, isolation, and frustration. We’ve been separated from our friends and families. Many of us have had to move our work lives into our homes, repurposing dining rooms along with clearing closets and basements in order to construct make-shift home offices. Some have had to become homeschool teachers while being home office workers, homemakers, and caretakers. We’ve all Zoomed holidays, birthdays, weddings, and even funerals.
We’ve given up traveling, dining out, shopping in stores, going to coffee shops, visiting museums, watching movies on the big screen, taking classes in person, going dancing, and spending time with friends and family. It’s been exhausting. Yeah, yeah, I know, thank goodness for Netflix and Zoom…I don’t know about you, but I’m about Netflix-Zoom-Roomed out.
I had a dream the other night that I had managed to go to law school during the pandemic. Hey, I had the time, why not? In any case, in my dream, I breezed through law school, aced the Bar Exam, and received a beautiful gold foil stamped certificate in the mail to prove it. I put it on my desk (always a bad choice…even before COVID, my desk was a disaster). I couldn’t wait to show it to my family and friends. When one of my doubly vaccinated friends dropped by, I told her all about law school, but when I went to my desk to get my certificate, the one I found did not say I passed the bar; instead, it said: Congratulations, you have lived a good life.
Had I? Had I made it a good life for those around me? Was it a good life for me? Had I done what I wanted? More importantly, what did I want to do for the rest of my life?
Good question.
Whether you’re turning 22, 42, 52, or 72 this year, one thing COVID has brought into clear focus for each of us is that no one really knows how much time they have to do what they want to do: to follow their dreams or their bliss or whatever it is that motivates them. Perhaps it's time to follow the sage advice of the airlines and put on our own oxygen mask and take care of ourselves first, so we will have the strength and grace we need to look after our children, our spouses, or our friends.
What’s your oxygen mask? Mine is time. Time and space. The two of them work together for me. Not more time necessarily, but quality time. Slow time. Unrushed time where I can have the space to think and dream. I have always been a doer and a helper, and it is hard for me to stop doing and helping others in order to take time to sit still and dream my own big dreams.
During this shutdown/pared-down time, I have been working on that sitting still thing. In fact, I’ve spent quite a bit of time being still, thinking about what I want to do for the rest of my life.
This brings me to being vaccinated and taking off the mask. We’re not to “normal” yet, whatever normal is going to be. But here’s the good news: We’ve still got time to think about what we want to do with the rest of our lives.
What do you want to do when you can at last take off the mask and live your big, beautiful life again?