Edel Coffey: How do we go forward in life if we feel we don’t have things to look forward to?
Author Edel Coffey. Picture: Bríd O'Donovan
I have a friend whose motto is ‘don’t look back.’ He’s been through a lot and when people ask him, ‘how did you survive?’ he always brushes them off with the same answer: ‘I just don’t look back.’
In my ongoing obsession with Arnold Schwarzenegger, I read another interview with him last week that reminded me of my friend.
Arnold said, ‘looking forward is more inspiring and motivating than looking at the past…to create a future is creative. It’s not creative to repaint the canvas of the past.’
Suddenly my friend’s words, which I had always seen as a little blunt-force in terms of dealing with a difficult past, made sense. The past is fixed, the future is still unpainted and we can still influence our future.
Coincidentally, over the last week, much of what I heard on the radio or read in newspapers or magazines seemed to be circling around the same thing — being in the second half of your life, getting older, not giving up (I think the algorithm is gaslighting me and my fear of time running out).
Later in the week, I came across an article by a longevity doctor, for there are such things now (I presume they used to be called gerontologists). He was writing about how important looking forward is to having an independent and enjoyable old age.
If we want to be well in our later years, we have to put in the work now. This doctor presents his patients with a list of things they would still like to be able to do in their ‘marginal’ decade, aka the last years of their lives.
These things include being able to pick up a young child from the floor, carry your shopping home from the supermarket, climb four flights of stairs, and have sex. He says, if we want to be able to do these things when we are 80 or 90, we should be focusing on those goals in our 40s and 50s.
So instead of doing 70km on our bikes, we should do combinations of exercises that will keep us agile enough to lift our cabin luggage into an overhead cabin or open a jar or get up from the floor with no assistance.
It might all sound a bit grim, but if you flip the perspective it could also be optimistic and inspiring. What could be more inspiring and motivating than the idea of living a free and independent life in your old age?
I have noticed at certain points since turning 40, I’ve experienced an inner voice that was not there before that point. Up until that point, I felt the world was my oyster if only I could be bothered to do something about that oyster. But after 40 came around I started to hear another voice that suggested I was too old, the oyster was now for other people to go out and claim.
At times I’ve believed the voice, while at other times I’ve chosen to ignore it. Sometimes it can feel like a given that the best years are behind us but our ideas of life, old age, gender, and sexuality change all the time, so why not our ideas about what we are capable of after a certain age?
There will always be days when we will feel like our best years are behind us, whether that’s because of our chronological age, or changes in circumstance or heartbreak or whatever it may be.
It’s great to have had great experiences, great loves, great successes, but many of us will not have experienced any of those things before we start to experience the voice in our head that tells us it’s too late. And what are we supposed to do then?
Standing in the kitchen last weekend, making pancakes for my children I caught myself daydreaming about how one day in a not-too-far-off future, I will move to Paris and live there for a year, improving my French and enjoying a second act.
I know, I’m a walking cliché but these are the things I think about when plastering Nutella on shop-bought pancakes for my children.
I briefly heard the voice telling me that my chance to spend a year in Paris was actually when I was 22, but then at the same moment, another stronger voice pointed out that spending a year in Paris in the future was an eminently achievable goal.
As I served up the pancakes for my children with a theatrical voilá! I realised this was something to really look forward to.
I’m really enjoying the present, but I am also looking forward to what is to come in middle age and indeed in old age. As Arnie says, it’s much more creative to create a future.
Or as my friend says, just don’t look back.
