This is the year that I turn 60 and for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, I have been looking forward to this “event” for some time now. There is just something about this milestone that has me excited. I am in a mindset that is anticipating the future. I remember when I was about to turn 50 I did not feel the same way. Then, I saw the whole thing as somewhat negative. I actually remember thinking something like this, “I’ve lived 50 years, now the timeline is “somewhat less”.

All that seems to have changed for me. Now I am eager to get going into what I believe is my “third act”. Who says the timeline is “somewhat less”? Who knows, we might get more than a “third act”. We might even get a “fourth act”. I fully understand, of course, that we cannot peg any real certainly to what the future will hold, but as much as it is up to me, I plan to lean in and give it everything that I have.

At the centre of all my thinking around this topic, there is a set of words that I read shortly after I turned 50. I was browsing in the library (a favorite activity of mine) and serendipitously picked a book from the shelf. I wasn’t looking for any particular book, just allowing the randomness to guide me. The book was called: Running to the Mountain written by Jon Katz. It is a memoir of sorts, chronicling Jon’s journey through the “50 barrier”. Not too far into the book I read these words:

“I’m not nearly as afraid of dying as I am of the hinges inside my mind and soul rusting closed.  I am desperate to keep them open, because I think that if they close, that’s one’s first death, the loss of hope, curiosity and possibility, the spiritual death.  After that, it seems to me, the second one is just a formality.  I want to oil the hinges, force the doors to stay open”.

Those words stopped me dead in my tracks and I have carried them with me for almost a decade. They have inspired and haunted me. The imagery of “hinges rusting closed” is vivid and a bit frightening. I can almost hear the screeching sound that comes with trying to pry them open. More than once during the past decade, I have had to pause and ask myself if my hinges were beginning to rust closed.

I want to take these words intentionally into my third act. No matter what the future holds, at my core I just cannot (will not!) let the hinges inside my mind and soul rust closed. That is why I am setting some new goals for my third act; goals for all the different parts that make us human; physical, emotional, mental, social, spiritual.

And a big part of this whole thing is setting up this website and stepping into the river. I am certainly not the only person talking about this. There are lots of people who are eager to make their next act a great one. Call it “the third act”, “the third life”, “the third age”. It all points to the same outcomes – a fully engaged life no matter what the age. I want to be part of the story. I want to be someone who can be a catalyst that helps “redefine what it means to get older”. Why not after all? As Mary Oliver so poignantly states in her poem, The Summer Day – “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” A wild and precious life indeed.

Over the next months I plan to keep writing about my journey into “the third act”. I want to stay accountable to the process. And who knows, perhaps along the way, someone will be inspired by my story to step more fully into their own. Come, join the movement.

Onward…..