“Ask yourself how old would you be if you didn’t know the day you were born.”

Toby Keith

I feel extremely grateful for the time I had celebrating with “old” friends. 50 now feels like an initiation into something special rather than a crisis. I am enjoying the opportunity to write about my reflections. It is interesting to me that so much continues to show up after walking the Camino.

Turning 50 seems to lead into a discussion on age with alot of people. I’m not sure why, since as cliché as it sounds, every day is a gift. When I was turning 30, I was pregnant with Matthew and anticipating our growing family with excitement. When I turned 40, Charlie had arrived a few years earlier. I was in the thick of it with young kids and all the craziness that comes with the fun of living life through their eyes. However, I was becoming more sensitive to age and the passing of time as the kids got older. When Matthew turned ten, I realized that we were both turning corners. To help me process our new double digits, I wrote an essay about it that I will include in a separate post.

I am now rewriting this paragraph for the third time. The first time I exited out of the page and it didn’t autosave. Next, I was trying to start a new paragraph and accidentally deleted the second attempt. I growled with frustration, but I have also learned that there is a reason when this happens. My writing has “disppeared” before. I tend to think it’s not what I was supposed to write about. I’ve read something that talks about how opportunity will first whisper, then it will knock, and finally it will blow down the door. Here is what I learned when the door was blown down on the third try:

1) Pay attention! 2) Rely on myself to autosave, not an outside source 3) Look twice before deleting anything (or anyone!) 4) Embrace the opportunity, not the mistake. 5) Keep on walking

I think this is a good start for the next decade. I will walk the Camino again soon to live these life lessons more fully. I hope you will walk next to me. I’m not letting the Old Woman in!

Note: Back in March, Dad sent us an email with a video. It was a song written and sung by Toby Keith in honor of Clint Eastwood. He said his and Mom’s new philosophy is the line I used as the blog title. I didn’t watch it at the time and remembered it about halfway through the post. It meshed perfectly with my thoughts for the day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=SmlmrBwA98k

Note: How old I feel depends on the day! But most days, it is NOT 50! How old do you feel?