I woke up exactly six hours and ten minutes into this new day of fall. Fall has always been my favorite time of year for a dozen reasons: the perfect temperatures in New England, foliage, long walks, hot apple cider, outdoor events, and sitting around with friends, dressed in layers, talking and laughing until nobody notices how late it has gotten. But there's something else I like about waking up on a fall morning. The darkness.It permits you to sleep a little longer, if you can.
This morning, at 61, I'm feeling a little metaphorical. I know I'm closer to the other end of life than I was at 31. I'm not pretending otherwise. But I've never been particularly good at looking at life as a countdown. I've always seen it more as an opportunity. That may be because of something I learned from my first wife's grandparents, Bert and Edna. We used to visit them in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where they lived in a condominium that, as I remember it, was approximately 125 degrees at all times.
Seriously, the condo was so hot that I occasionally wondered whether sitting there in my underwear would be considered socially acceptable.I decided it probably wasn't. The rest of the family would eventually surrender to the heat and head off to bed around 9:30 or 10. I stayed up. I loved sitting with Bert and Edna and listening to them tell stories. They were both remarkably lucid, and they could remember details about their lives that made you feel as though you were sitting inside the memory with them.
For example? Bert told me how he first met Edna. He had been getting coffee one morning when he saw her smiling from a streetcar. He apparently decided that the appropriate response was to chase the streetcar for several blocks so he could introduce himself.
Edna laughed when she told the story. She said she was intrigued by this tall, six-foot-two man in a suit lumbering behind the streetcar.
It sounds like something from a corny romantic comedy. But it was their life. I didn't have a name for it then, but I've thought about it many times since.
Some moments become Life-pins. I imagine them as moments we pin to a giant corkboard representing our lives—events, encounters, people, triumphs and losses that remain important long after the day itself has passed. Some are joyful. Some hurt. Some change the direction of our lives. But for whatever reason, we keep them in view because they became part of who we are.
That streetcar encounter was a Life-pin for Bert and Edna.
Bert also told me about how, when he was a young boy, he shared an ice cream cone before a game with Babe Ruth at Yankee Stadium. His dad had won some contest, and Bert benefitted.I told him I would have been horribly conflicted if I'd been in that position. As a lifelong Red Sox fan, I wouldn't have known whether my obligation was to hug Ruth and tell him that trading him was the worst thing that would ever happen in Red Sox history—or, as a Yankee, whether I had an obligation to stuff my ice cream cone in his face.
Bert laughed.
We had a lot of conversations like that.
Edna had stories of her own. One of her ancestors had participated in the Underground Railroad and had written letters to his family describing his experiences. Edna had found a way to preserve the old paper, and she would sometimes hand those letters to me. They were remarkably clear. I could hold something in my hands that had been written generations earlier and read the words as though they had been written yesterday.
Those nights taught me something I didn't fully understand at the time. People's lives are extraordinary when you actually take the time to listen to them. And yes, that's what old people supposedly do, right? Reminisce about their youth and bore the younger generations with stories they've already heard three times. Except Bert and Edna weren't finished living. They were still curious.
And that's the part of Bert's story that stayed with me. When Bert was 85 years old, he decided he needed to learn something about computers and the internet. So he bought himself a Dell computer. He had no idea what he was doing. My brother-in-law, Brad, who was considerably more technically inclined than the rest of us, and I helped him get started. And then we went home. Bert could have put that computer in a closet and forgotten about it. He didn't. He taught himself. He learned how to send emails so he could stay in touch with the family and tell us what was happening with him and Edna. He taught himself enough Excel to keep track of their budget. He learned how to watch videos online.
Was he a computer expert? No. That wasn't the point. The point was that at 85, Bert looked at something he didn't understand and decided to learn it anyway.I've never forgotten that.
So now I'm 61, and I'm going to try to carry a little bit of Bert's attitude with me. I'm going to learn about artificial intelligence and machine learning. I'm going to take courses. I'm going to experiment with things I don't understand yet. Some of it will probably intimidate the hell out of me. That's okay. Bert bought a Dell. I have AI. Different technology. Same challenge.
Learn something. Try something. Stay curious. And don't assume that because you've reached a certain age, you've reached the end of what you're capable of learning. Because I don't think the lesson Bert left me was really about computers at all. I think it was about refusing to stop being curious. And that's a lesson I intend to keep learning.
Here are the lessons Bert taught me through that purchase that I think apply to all of us. We need challenges to remain engaged with life. We need to push ourselves beyond what we may have accepted as the limit of what we're capable of. If you need an authority figure for credibility? I get it. You've probably seen the quote attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: “Do one thing every day that scares you.” As a certified peer-to-peer counselor leading online groups, I've talked about that sentence probably twenty times and given it just as many interpretations. The larger idea is simple: Challenge yourself.
You don't have to reinvent your entire life. You don't have to become an expert. You don't even have to impress anybody else. Sometimes you just have to look at something you don't understand and say, “Why not?" If you're like Bert was and simply want to explore new skills, there are plenty of familiar places to start. Sites such as Coursera https://www.coursera.org/, Udemy www.udemy.com/, and Google's career certificate programs https://learn.microsoft.com/are already well known and offer courses in a wide range of subjects. But I want to go a step further. There are specialized resources—many of them free or relatively inexpensive—that can help you explore specific interests, develop useful skills, and challenge yourself along the way.
Microsoft Learn https://learn.microsoft.com/— Training for Microsoft technologies, including areas such as Azure, security, and data.HubSpot Academy https://academy.
The point isn't to collect a bunch of digital badges and put them on LinkedIn. The point is to learn something you didn't know before. And that's where I use a concept I've talked about with startup companies for years: Is this an investment or an expense? Don't ask only what something costs. Ask what you might get back. What will you know after completing it? What will you be able to do? Can you demonstrate the skill? Could it help you professionally? Could it simply make you more capable or curious? What is the potential return on your investment in yourself?
That's a question worth asking at any age.