Mary Anne Evans, the 19th Century novelist who wrote under the pen name "George Eliot," once said: "It's never too late to be what you might have been." With all due respect for her admirable body of work, that quote is not entirely true. You can't, for example, become a gold medal gymnast or a prima ballerina as a ThirdAger even if those were possible dreams for you as a girl.
That said, however, there are plenty of pursuits that are possible dreams for people in the later decades of life. I can't resist trotting out the most famous example of a late bloomer, Grandma Moses, the renowned American folk artist who started painting at 75 and continued until she died at 101. I've never been at all surprised that she took so long to get started, given the fact that she gave birth to 10 children, 5 of whom survived, and also worked with her husband on their farm. No wonder she didn't have time to pursue her love of painting until her seventh decade!
Still, what's important to note is that in her autobiography she writes that she painted pictures as a little girl using fruit juices and that during her wife-and-mother years, with house paint as her medium, she decorated the interior of her home with images. She also created scenes with embroidery. In fact the reason she eventually turned to oil painting was that arthritis in her hands caused wielding an embroidery needle to be too painful. In other words, although she made her name as an artist late in life, she didn't pluck the dream of being an artist out of thin air. It had been a part of her in some way since childhood. What she did, as a ThirdAger, was activate it.
I'm pointing all of this out because I think the notion of "reinventing" oneself has been over-hyped. The truth is that when people go after "encore careers" or develop "second acts," they are usually happiest and most successful if they are picking up on threads that have been running through their life stories all along. For example, Laura Ingalls Wilder published the first of her "Little House" books when she was 65, but she had been writing farming articles long before that for the "Missouri Realist."
What about you? Is there an activity or interest you've been involved in either vocationally or avocationally that you'd love to take to another level? Do you now have more time than you did back when you were a juggler with young kids and a job? If so, this may be the perfect time to dust off your dream and make it come true. What's important, though, is that you need to have a concrete plan. As the old adage goes, goals are dreams with deadlines. Just noodling about how you want to write a novel or start a catering business or travel the world teaching English as a foreign language won't get you anywhere – not even if you have a head start in those areas as, say, a blogger or an accomplished cook or a high school teacher.
In order to get where you want to go, you need to push yourself beyond wishful thinking. Maybe you could take a fiction writing course or a business course at your local community college or explore options for earning a TOEFL certificate. Specific actions like those will make your commitment to achieving your dream clear not only to you but to everyone in your life. As a result you'll be much more likely to figure out what the next step should be and follow through with it.
Why not sit back for a minute and let your dream form in your mind? As the song "Happy Talk" says: You gotta have a dream/If you don’t have a dream/How you gonna make a dream come true?” And then there’s Mama Rose in “Gypsy,” singing: “Some people sit on their butts/ Got the dream, yeah, but not the guts.”
You've got the guts, right? Good! Now go for it!
Sondra Forsyth is a Senior Editor at ThirdAge.com
