My friend Chip Conley wrote a line in Learning to Love Midlife that I have repeated more than any other.
“Just as I got comfortable in my own skin, it started to sag.”
I laughed out loud the first time I read it. Then I got to the work at the end of that chapter and I stopped laughing.
If you don’t know Chip, he wrote the book, and I had the joy of helping build the workbook that goes with it. The chapter is called “I’m Relieved My Body No Longer Defines Me.” When we turned it into an exercise, we asked for something simple. Make a list of everything you do to invest in your body. The physical things, the dietary things, the medical things. Then write one word beside each item. The reason you do it.
Health. Or vanity.
What My List Said
I have been the active one my whole life. I started running in my twenties. I did triathlons in my forties. I have had a personal trainer for sixteen years. If you had asked me whether I took care of my health, I would have pointed at my calendar and said obviously.
Then I wrote the reason beside each line. Nearly every one of them said vanity.
The running. The training. The way I ate. I was not doing any of it so my heart would be strong at eighty. I was doing it because I wanted to look good. I had assumed the two went hand in hand, and I had never once stopped to check.
That exercise hit me between the eyes.
Here is the part I want to say plainly, because it matters. Wanting to look good is not a character flaw. It is human, and it got me out the door for fifty years. Vanity is a perfectly good motivator. It kept me moving on mornings when nothing else would have.
It is just a motivator with a short shelf life.
Vanity asks how you compare to the photograph. Health asks what you will still be able to do in twenty years. One of those questions gets harder to answer every birthday. The other one gets more interesting.
More Road Than I Thought
The chapter right before it is called “I Have More Life Left Than I Thought,” and it is the reason my question changed.
In the workbook we ask you to take a longevity quiz. Mine told me I could live to 106. I laughed at that too, until I thought about my mother, who is 102 and still going strong.
Sit with a number like that for a minute and everything reorganizes itself. I was not in the last stretch of anything. I was somewhere near the start of a long fourth act with decades still to spend in it.
And I had been training that body for a photograph.
There is research behind this that Chip points to, and it stopped me when I read it. Becca Levy at Yale followed 660 people for more than twenty years. The ones who saw their own aging in a positive light lived about seven and a half years longer than the ones who didn’t. Seven and a half years, from how a person thinks about getting older.
So how you see this stage is not just an attitude. It is a health practice.
From Youthful to Useful
Here is the shift the whole terrain turns on, and it is Chip’s, not mine. There is a half trillion dollar industry built on keeping us youthful. What actually matters as we age is being useful.
Youthful is about the surface, and the surface keeps changing no matter what any of us do about it. Useful is about capacity. Can you get down on the floor with a grandchild and get back up. Can you carry your own bag through the airport. Can you say yes to the trip, the class, the volunteer shift, the long walk with a friend who needs to talk.
Somewhere in midlife the playing field moves from the body to the heart and the soul. Your body stops being the thing you display and becomes the thing that carries you to everything that matters. Chip calls it a rental vehicle you were issued at birth, and most of us have more miles ahead than we think.
That is not settling. That is a promotion.
The Question, and Who You Ask It With
So here is the work, and it takes about ten minutes.
Write down what you do for your body. All of it. The walk, the weights, the vitamins, the doctor you have been meaning to call. Then write beside each one why you do it. Be honest. Nobody is grading this.
Then ask the better question. What is the most important thing you do for your body now, what actually motivates you, and what do you want to do differently going forward.
And then one more, which is the one most of us skip. Who will you let hold you to it?
Because this is the part I keep learning. I could see my own list clearly enough. What I could not do on my own was change the reason behind it. That took someone asking me the question I would not have thought to ask myself.
A sherpa does not carry you and does not pretend to know your summit. A sherpa has crossed this ground enough times to know which stretch people quit on, and to be standing there when you get to it.
You are not behind and you are not broken. You have more road ahead than you think, and a body that has been carrying you this whole time, waiting to be asked what it is actually for.
Go write the list. Then go find out what your body could do if you started caring for it on purpose.
With you on the journey,
Holly
PS — Sign up for your free 30-minute clarity call here. No pressure to enroll on the call. We’ll just talk about where you are and whether this is your moment.
PPS — The chapters behind this one are “I Have More Life Left Than I Thought” and “I’m Relieved My Body No Longer Defines Me” in Chip Conley’s Learning to Love Midlife. If you want the number that started all of this for me, his Reasons Quiz is here.