Editorial work

I admit it. I can’t look away. The image of Joe Biden protesting that age doesn’t matter, which in itself demonstrates that it does, is so arresting. He’s much older than I am but in a place where one day I will go. Nothing teaches like example. I am to deep into trying to learn the lessons on display now.

Seeing the man struggle, reach out of the fog, is enough to make any of us start to shuffle. I’m the guy, he says ,who did so many good things. Well listen, I used to be a world champion breastfeeder, but that’s no good to me now.

I think Biden’s problem, apart from the self-serving crowd around him (who apparently advised an overdose of Botox), is to confuse will power with strength. The truth, as I have been able to observe it, is that strength is manifest in different ways at different life stages. The thing about tools, is knowing when you need new ones.

You don’t give up.

That’s essential, but you don’t, and shouldn’t, try to do it all as hard as you did all the time. Ageing is a process of distillation, done right it reduces to the best stuff. To try to spread it around all over the place is to waste what was so hard to learn.

My friends it is time to recognize that it’s not a marathon, it’s a sprint.

The word is strategic, of working to deploy your resources, in exactly the right way, at exactly the right time. Of living life as an art form and not a campaign.

It’s a huge challenge to do this. It requires everything you’ve got, know, and learned.

It requires not that you edit your life, but that you become its managing editor. This is the time to not just know your priorities but systematically cut and rephrase so you do nothing but. You are not letting go, you are focusing your attention on what your life means. You don’t have to perform as if no one is watching, because the truth is no one is.

What does this look like in practice?

That depends on what gives your life meaning and minimizing everything else to the essentials. If there is something I have to do, I ask myself now is there a more effortless way to do it? Because I want that time to learn something new.

I’l give you an example. An odd one. Years ago I worked with a fellow who used to bring only ingredients for lunch. He didn’t cook, or prepare, he put a representative of all food groups on a plate and just ate it, then went back to work. We used to laugh at him in the corporate lunch room, standing at the counter with his egg, a tomato and cracker and grapes before he went to his office. But now I think of him and do the same. How hard should it be?

We are a culture of push-ourselves, self-improvers, self-deniers and self-realizers. Nothing wrong with that. But what if ambition has a date stamp on it? What if perfectionism is not way of living but a stage to pass through. What if excellence, at some points in time, is not what you do, but what you don’t?

Or when.

Stephen King still terrifying many, writes every morning.

And naps every afternoon.

And no one will ever ask him to retire.