LIFE IN FULL – A BABYBOOMERS GUIDE TO THE NEXT 20 YEARS
By: Richard and Lynda Eyre
The New York Times Best Selling Authors
A BabyBoomers Guide to the Next 20 Years
Maximizing Your Longevity
Surrendering to getting old has no appeal. And the best way to rage against it is simply to push it back—way back. With a slight handicap here and a health enhancement there, we can do everything now that we could do twenty years ago . . . and so much that we couldn’t!
If you think about it hard enough and rationalize long enough, you can convince yourself that there are actually no drawbacks at all to a little aging! I (Richard) do it all the time with sports . . .
I was a 5.0-level tennis player in college and maintained that level for a few more years. But when everyone started beating me in the 5.0 divisions, I dropped down to 4.5, and for a while, I could win or hold my own again. A few years later, I opted down again to the 4.0 and was competitive again. It all works out!
I used to think waterskiing meant the sharpest cuts and the highest spray, and snowskiing meant the double black diamonds; now, I have the more enlightened view that smooth, aesthetic skiing where you see and appreciate the world around you is the best way to go on water or on snow.Golf’s an easy one; you just increase your handicap until you are as competitive as ever.
Scuba diving used to be about how deep and how dangerous; now, it’s about longer dives in shallower, warmer, more sunlit and fish-filled water. I enjoy it more!
Maybe biking is the best example or metaphor of all. I used to think of mountain biking as a combination of joy and torture. I loved the trails I could take, but I was so busy thinking about my muscle burn and getting enough air into my oxygen-starved lungs that I missed a lot of the scenery that was going by.
I still go on all the very same trails now, but I have this won-derful electrical pedal-assist bike where all I have to do is turn a handle switch to have a little help on the hills.
That’s a lot like aging in general—keep on your same trails but provide yourself with a little assist now and then. You know how to do that, and you’ve earned it.
The way life works now, early in this twenty-first century, there is virtually nothing you could do in your thirties or forties that you can’t still do now—with a little assist from an electrical switch, or a scoring or handicapping system, or a fresh attitude. Maybe getting out of the car takes a tad longer, and you can never find even one of the scores of reading glasses that you know are somewhere in the house, but you can do all you ever did and enjoy it now more than ever.
