25 in ‘25: Magic and Meaning in the Productive 60s

I’ve read that a person’s sixties is their most productive decade, and I’m beginning to understand why. That’s supposedly from a New England Journal of Medicine study but I’ve not been able to find the original source, for whatever reason. Still, the productive 60s feels strangely right in a way that it couldn’t have in my forties and definitely not in my twenties.

I’m early in that “productive decade” yet, but I’m definitely feeling that mad dash to the end that some of my older friends have talked about. Other friends of mine, instead, prefer to be grandmothers leisurely rocking on their front porches, but not me. No matter how much I adore the little ones. I’ve always had this spark of creative activity that I could never tamp down, even when so many of my peers went home after a long day and sat in front of their TVs for the next six hours. Not me. I went home after a day of quarrelsome engineers and killed them off in my thrillers at night.

When I watch the busy thirty-somethings in my life, they look a lot like I did at their age. I look back now and honestly don’t know how I had the energy to manage it all. I used to look at people in their fifties and sixties and think that they simply weren’t motivated, but now I know that the motivation has never faded. If anything, at the upper end of midlife, you begin to understand how little time you have left in this body to accomplish the things that you wanted.

What does fade, though, is energy. I don’t think anyone ever fully explains that. You can spend 40 years raising a family, working double shifts, and surviving on four hours of sleep, but there comes a time when you begin to feel used up, whether it’s normal wear and tear, chronic illness, or the increasing weariness on the body that is directly proportional to the increasing lack of patience in the mind.

In our twenties and thirties, we’re told just to push harder—no pain, no gain, and all that. Pushing harder in your forties, fifties, and sixties—and I assume much older—is not a no pain, no gain scenario; rather, it is the gob smacked reality that you’ve overdone it. And instead of making that muscle stronger, you’ll be off your feet now for the next week, which will affect your intensity of movement, which will affect your blood sugar levels, which will—you get the picture.

I say this not to complain about the disappointments of getting older, especially when very dear friends of mine never had that opportunity. I say it to explain the mindset behind the motivation that drives a person to be super productive in their sixties. At this point, you have that niggling fear in the back of your mind that you may not physically be able to do the same things in your seventies or eighties. So you have a limited amount of time to wrap up everything you wanted to accomplish in this lifetime and put a bow on it.

“I should probably be thinking more about my mortality, but I’m too busy to be afraid of how I’ll die.” — Old Maeve in Turn of Earth

Maybe I’d feel different if I had been able to pursue my dreams by the time I was 40, like most of my partners were able to. But then my energy was spent on helping them achieve their dreams, something that was never reciprocated other than in lip service. So, this is my time to shine. My time to flourish. That’s my word for the next year: Flourish. Flourish, to me, means being able to thrive creatively. I chose it over the verb thrivebecause, again, to me, thrive means flourishing under harsh conditions. Honestly, I went back and forth on which word suits what I want for the next year better. I don’t want to just survive, and I don’t want to just thrive in spite of the environment or whatever changes may come—I want to flourish creatively.

That’s why my mantra for this next year is “joyful outputs, positive outcomes.” Anyone who’s worked with software developers will recognize the terms “output” and “outcome” as being very different things.

For me, those joyful outputs will be writing whatever I want, including going back to thrillers I wrote and proposals I wrote 30 years ago and never finished because they weren’t ideal for the market at the time and not where I needed to put my resources to feed my family. I’m not interested in being super productive at things I hate just to make money or to pay my bills. Outputs that bore me are no longer good enough, whether I’m talking about writing, consulting, or my work in federal acquisition. I’m interested only in the projects that I find fulfilling, and, well, you’ll see a lot from me in this next year.

You’ll see books that I published years ago and then unpublished under the very bad advice that I should stick to one niche.

You’ll see books that I finished the complete draft and shelved because the market wasn’t right at the time, even though I loved the book.

You’ll see new ideas from start to finish.

You’ll see storylines and characters that I created decades ago and put on the shelves but are ready to come out now with updated technology as the point of their concerns.

You’ll see older characters now as well as characters still in their teens and twenties, but with a better understanding of them now, with all their flaws and conflicts and motivations. All of them products of their traumas and all of them trying to figure it all out.

My aim is 25 in ‘25. Using as much automation as I can for the mundane things and making my own brand of magic with my words. Finishing things I’ve started, starting new things, and finishing those new things.  Creating every story in utter joy.

I used to be jealous of people who had that one great story in them and could publish it and go on to spend the rest of their lives watching TV in the evenings, and couldn’t summon a second story. Now I feel sorry for them because they don’t have a whole universe of stories waiting to be told. When I was in my thirties, I was a poster child of productivity. That’s what everyone who knew me said. And if you think that I was motivated then, just wait and see what I have planned for my sixties.

 

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