I am of a certain age where, let me just say, people are starting to shut down. Mindsets are fixed. Physical prowess is slowly declining with age. Careers have reached an apparent limit. People use the “r” word: retirement.
Yet I feel as though I’m growing like a weed. My mindset has never been better, whether in clarity or optimism. Physically I feel better than I have in a couple of decades. (Thank you, 75 Hard). Horizons have never been broader and possibilities have never been so abundant.
My wife is at the same place. I’m so lucky to have her along for the Ride.
I am fairly sure I know why I am here and “they” are starting to crawl into retirement bunkers and get small. I know the actions I have taken, and have seen enough cause/effect to say there is causation and not mere correlation.
It’s so weird to have my brain keep yelling at me, gleefully, “Let’s fucking gooooooooo!” and have no comrades (except my wife). It’s even rare to get people 25 years younger than me to see the possibility that they, too, can “gooooo!”
I am thankful. Beyond grateful. I could die today and it would be a good life. But there is so much more to come, if I just LFG my life.
That picture came from Twitter somewhere. Sorry I can’t give attribution for it because I grabbed it and saved it to my phone a while ago. But that shows a tiny bit how I feel right now and the optimism I feel for the future.
Memo to self: come back here and read this the next time you’re discouraged. You were optimistic and energetic. You can be there again, within a single day. Yesterday I was mopey driving to work and I made a Deliberate Decision that changed my mindset in a day. I recovered the LFG mindset literally within hours. You can do it again, anytime you need to.
(Note to future self: the Deliberate Decision was to stop the “maintenance mode” 75 Hard routine, which is 1 workout a day and not being hardcore about the water, back to Full Tilt 75 Hard standards for everything. I am between Phase 1 and Phase 2 so I’m not technically trying to hit defined 75 Hard program benchmarks. My self-set standards dropped and so did my mindset. The change was instant. Decision in the car driving to work. By the third pint of water at the office, I was rocking. By lunchtime, I was wearing my anti-gravity boots again.)
(In other words, I stopped being half-assed and went all-in again, even though I don’t have to be running in full-ass mode and I don’t have anything to prove to anyone else or even myself.)