I Just Turned 80: Now What?

Yep, I'm no longer a member of the loud and proud women in their seventies; hence, the title of this blog no longer fits.

Now what?

Give me a second. Let me check to see if the name "Eighty and Me" has been taken. If so, I'm out of luck.

Well, after a cursory review, it seems that Eighty and Me may be available. Should I grab it?

I have just hired a graphic designer to help design a new website. Mine at janeleder.net is five years old and needs a complete overhaul. I'm considering adding my blogs onto the new site, so I can keep all in the same place, and you, dear readers & listeners, don't have to go searching.

Do I feel differently now that I've completed the decade of my seventies? What have I learned in those ten years? Well, for starters, I've become much more mindful of where I am physically and where I'm going. I've taken a few tumbles and, while nothing broke (Thank you, Prolia), I've had some nasty scrapes, sore muscles, and ugly black-and-blue marks. My balance is not anything to brag about. I used to be able to stand on my tiptoes in the middle of a room and stay aloft for what seemed like forever. Now, I'm lucky if I can manage a few seconds.

We are all in some kind of physical and psychological pain. So, it's of no value to list mine as anything special. A question: are those reminders of a body well-worn more pronounced now than a decade ago? That's a dumb question. Of course, they are.

One of the tools that works best for me when weathering the ups and downs of aging is humor. It's important to laugh at ourselves when we forget our phone number, lose our cell for the fifth time in one day, can't for the life of us remember the names of friends, athletes, film stars, or politicians who at one time were family or, in some strange way, felt like family.

(Hint: Alexa, Google, Siri are our friends.)

Part of aging is finding what are often called workarounds -- methods we develop to make getting through challenging situations easier. For me I bought a cell phone cord to wear over my shoulder. It has become my pal. Unless I forget to wear it (Egg on my face), I spend a lot less time and frustration looking for my phone.

There is so much we can do to keep our brains sharp. I've learned Spanish, for example. I play Scrabble online every night before I go to bed. I repeat links, authorization codes out loud to help me remember them and challenge myself with longer and longer strings of numbers. And I read. A lot. Fiction, nonfiction, magazine/newspaper articles. And I do my best to recall as much information as I can and recount what I've read to someone else. It's kinda' like giving a school report without notes.

What about "heavier" topics like leaving a legacy, healthcare and end-of-life decisions, wills, life insurance policies, and all that stuff? I can say that these issues are a lot weightier now than they were a decade ago. But I try not to obsess. What's the point? I'm focused on getting things in order and then staying healthy and happy for as long as I can. (Speaking of that, I must clean out my office closet and cabinets.)

When we're young, time slogs along. Now, we wish we could slow things down, way down. One day, it's Sunday, and just like that, it's the end of the week. I sometimes feel like I'm a hamster on one of those spinning wheels and am unable to get off. I'm being controlled by outside forces that pay no attention to me.

When my husband asked me what I wanted to do for my 80th, I said I wanted to throw a dance party in our backyard. A good friend is a jazz and blues diva with her own backup band. The end of July was hot and humid, and I mean humid. At the last minute, we decided to move the band into our living room. Sure, it was crowded, but a hell of a lot of fun. Yes, there is Pilates, yoga, the martial arts, pumping iron, riding bikes, running . . . But I gotta' dance.

Eighty is NOT the new sixty. Eighty is the new eighty. We're not getting younger, nor is that something we necessarily want. What we do want is to relish the self-confidence, independence, and joy that we've cultivated and earned, and all the ways we can share that wisdom with whomever is open to listening.

Please shoot me an email on this site and let me know if you're up for a new "EightynMe" blog.

Listen to the "Older Women & Friends" Podcast at janeleder.net.