I’m 56 years old. Really. It seems like yesterday I was bopping down the streets of Manhattan with my buddies and today I’m in bed by 10 pm. And whose body is this? Not to mention the fact that now that I’m in my 50’s, what do I want to do with the rest of my life, what’s left of it that is!

I think that as a Baby Boomer, especially one who reveled in the excitement and rebellion of the late 60’s and 70’s, this major life transition is even more wrenching… especially when my mind and body seem to exist on two separate planes! I still love the latest rock and roll music. I am a campus activist at heart. I love going out with friends in the City and staying out late but it gets harder and harder to get up the next day.

Aside from the physical aspects of aging, the over-riding transition I am experiencing right now is the realization that time is finite. Of all the things I still long to do, I’ll need to do them soon or give them up. The future doesn’t stretch out infinitely like it used to. Given the fact that I have lived for over half a century, a stretch of another 20 years doesn’t seem like a great deal of time anymore.

In our twenties and thirties, even our forties for that matter, we did things mainly out of necessity. We got jobs so we could pay the rent or mortgage and then to support a family. Our careers may not have been everything that we had dreamed of or even expected but they paid the bills, no small feat. Some of us were lucky enough to have work that we loved, which really is a blessing. But we certainly put many of our dreams or yearnings on a back-burner.

So now, for many of us, as our children have grown and will soon head off into lives of their own, we start to really consider what our future looks like in our second half of life. We may be living a single life, because of divorce, death or simply the fact that that’s the way we like it. We look at this second half of life with a very different perspective than we did the first half. We find ourselves asking questions that we hadn’t given much weight to before.

Questions like: If I only have another 20 or 30 years left, what do I want to do with them? Do I want to do something meaningful with my work versus just earning a living? What legacy will I leave behind for friends and family? Legacy? The truth is staring us in the eyes. Death is not something just relegated to our grandparents anymore. For many of us, we are the grandparents!

What about my passions and the things that I really love? When am I going to see Europe, something I always told myself I would do? How about the fact that I was such a great artist in high school? I always wanted to take singing lessons. Is it too late? Actually, is it too late to recreate myself, to do all the things I want to do, to be all the things I want to be? The fact is - it is too late when we say it’s too late. But guess what? It’s never too late. As a matter of fact, much of what we want to do now is what we couldn’t have done back then. And guess what else? Some of the best known people in the world didn’t see success or find themselves until after their fortieth birthday. Who? Well, Paul Gauguin, the artist, worked in a bank and was 43 when he finally moved to Tahiti to become a full-time artist. Raymond Chandler, the highly successful writer, didn’t get published until he was 45! Julia Child didn’t learn to cook until she was 37. Who else? Ed Sullivan, President Harry Truman, Coco Chanel, Paul Cezanne and Buckminster Fuller to name but a few. So go for it! If these guys can be successful late in life, we certainly can muster up the courage and energy to do the things we’ve always dreamed of doing.

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