I'm Still Becoming Someone New At 81

Here's how it happened

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What if a psychic told you that you were going to move to a new country and have transformative, unexpected adventures at 65?

You might get excited.

What if the new country was old age? And the unexpected adventures involved swollen ankles, slower walking, bad hearing, worn-out knees, deteriorating eyesight, reduced sex drive, and ageism.

You might get scared.

Old age is an undiscovered country. And we can name it exciting, or we can be miserable. It’s our choice. But let’s not choose miserable and live the last 30 years of our lives in a cold, grey dictatorship of hopelessness.

One person’s problem is another’s solution. Sixty-five is not the beginning of the end. It’s when new vistas open up, and the slower pace of life reveals new opportunities if we can get out of our heads, open our eyes, and see.

If we can ignore all the old age stereotypes our culture has spoon-fed us since we were children, we will be open to the hidden opportunities old age brings. I am growing and doing new things at 81, and I know many of you are too.

I started when I hit 76.

In the first weeks of the pandemic lockdown in February 2020, I began changing my life. If it hadn’t been for COVID-19, I don’t think the changes would have been possible.

The worldwide pandemic that killed millions was a blessing to me. It seemed like the world was meditating. The city was almost deserted, and people dressed like bank robbers in masks darted here and there on the San Francisco streets. People were scared, but I was hopeful.

Time had stopped, and it was the perfect time for me to get some things done that I had been avoiding all my life. I wanted to become a writer, but I was afraid.

I was afraid of what people would say about me. My whole life up to that time had been about me and what people would say about me if I poked my head up and spoke my words from my heart. If I did that, Internet snipers would shoot me down, I thought. It’s no exaggeration to say I was terrified of writing in public.

Something else I had been wanting to do for years was to meditate daily. To establish a seven-day-a-week meditation practice at home. I was sure something good would happen, and my life would change for the better if I did that. I had certainty that meditation was the right path, but I had been unable to do it daily up to then.

Years before, I took a year-long course called Establishing the Path of Practice, aimed at helping people develop a home meditation practice, and I loved it — but I did not successfully establish a home meditation practice, even though I had been studying Zen for 25 years.

It seemed impossible.

I decided to meditate daily during the 2020 lockdown. I had the time. I had a generous, government-subsidized unemployment income and a pandemic loan. If I were ever to become a meditator, now was the time.

Come hell or high water, I would become a meditator, and I would become a writer! I felt 100 percent committed. And mind you, this was the time of life when I was supposed to go gently into that good night of retirement, like a good little senior. Move to a retirement community and play pickleball, I guess.

No way I was going to do that.

Meditation and writing are deeply connected; I didn’t realize how my daily meditation would help me overcome my fear of writing. I wanted to write, and I wanted to meditate, and I thought writing and meditation were separate things, but I found out they are deeply entangled.

One of the most important things I learned from meditation is that my thoughts are not me. And I don’t necessarily have to believe them. One thought that had me in its grip was “I am afraid to write.” I accepted and believed that thought wholeheartedly. It played me like a violin.

Meditation teaches us, while we are meditating, to not attach to our thoughts, to let them float on by like clouds in the sky. And after months of meditation practice, we begin to put this “letting go of thoughts” practice to use in our everyday life.

Meditation practice taught me that “I’m afraid to write” was not true for me at all— it was just a thought, and I could let it go. And meditation works to eliminate other self-limiting thoughts like, I can’t do algebra, I’m afraid of flying, I’m angry, I can’t remember names, I’ll never succeed at anything, I’m not a likable person, and on and on.

All those things are just thoughts in my head.

So that’s how meditation eliminated my fear of writing, reduced my anger, and increased my attention span and concentration. And made me a kinder person. I realized that one of the most important things we need to do in life is to quiet our minds.

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So, that’s my story, but how can you live a happy, satisfying life in old age? There is no way I can tell you what you should do; we are all different, and my answers will not work for you. But you could start with this.

Just Begin

Choose something you would love to do and begin doing it. Jump in. Watch YouTube videos about it. Invest time and money in it and do it at least a little every day.

And most importantly, hold the thought of what you want to do in your mind every day and don’t let go of it. Wholesome thoughts are just as powerful as harmful ones. Your subconscious will give you the most powerful one.

If you want to do something, set your internal GPS to the thing you want to do and start moving toward it. If you hold that idea in your mind every day, you’ll find yourself doing things that will make it happen.

The power of your mind will give you what you concentrate on the most: fear of writing, or becoming a writer — it works both ways. Concentrate fiercely on what you want to do, and I’m convinced you will do it.

I’d love to know what you think about this.

Gary
June 2026