How Women Can Make Over 60 Their Best Years Ever
Four of us sit on stools around a high table in our favorite craft beer café. We lift our frosted mugs and toast each other for our current cool lives. We’re not a bunch of millennials busting out into the world. We’re all over 60 and fresh from life-long, demanding professions and raising children to be productive citizens of the planet. We’re in our Third Act, in new positions and adventures, and we’ve never been so free.
Since I left the hard-hitting career scene four years ago and the last child moved out, I’ve come to four conclusions about how to make this juncture exhilarating for women.
1. Don’t care as much about men anymore. After considering everyone else for too long, women can be wildly happy during this time because we’ve reached what many call the “fuck it” stage. This may be our first time absolved from worrying about what men think of us or trying to attract a man. We can be who we are after years of catering to others.
2. Revel in the new-found female comradery of post-career life. We never really had what men had in the workplace. In the corporate world where I come from, I was often alone, the only woman in the conference room and the bathroom, while the men had a built-in social life of chatting around the coffee pot and peeing companionably side by side. We finally have time now for women friends: to linger over deeper conversations and deliciously suck up the strength we draw from each other.
3. Stroke your ego. We gained some self-esteem boosts from our jobs but nothing like what the men I saw who were surrounded by minion men and women fawning over them. We women had little power at work. We pushed when we could but were often relegated to the background and our voices were rarely heard. Now is the time to congratulate, celebrate, and feed our own egos so that we feel better about ourselves than we ever have.
4. Put housework and the kids on the back burner. Most of the women of our demographic were the primary caregivers of the home and children. We bolted from work to daycare pickup to homework help to vacuuming to dinner prep to lunch packing without a breath. Now that the kids are on their own and we don’t have to give a damn about the house, we have never had this much spare time. We love the kids and still strive to keep dust balls out of most of the corners, but are we not all heaving one giant sigh of relief?
For me, the end of my formal working marathon is not the finale but the beginning. I believe that we are not only in our Third Act, but that there’s actually a Fourth and a Fifth Act and we are just getting started. But to fully experience the joy of these life stages, it does take a little work. From my own experience, I recommend three key actions:
STEP ONE: Find emotional freedom. This is a very important first undertaking. You may need to sort out your issues. Do you know what might be holding you back from a full feeling of contentment and love of life? What is your hidden lesion inside? If you’re angry, sad, regretful, attached to your pain and your past unhealthy reality, this is the time to shove that aside. You may need to engage a therapist or write it all down or confide in a close friend. I turned my writing into a book. You may find, like I did, that it’s somehow easier at this age to face secrets you’ve kept hidden for a long time. At this stage of life, it doesn’t cut into your heart as much as when you were younger — your emotional baggage is more bearable, and therefore, resolvable.
STEP TWO: Leave your comfort zone. I suggest doing something a little crazy. Mix it up. Make a bold move. Our current lives can be warm and snug, but that’s part of the problem. This is a time to try something out of the ordinary to show yourself that you still have it in you. Start your own business. Trek the Pacific Coast Trail. Post-pandemic, how about a rock concert? The next Burning Man? What this step does is shake up your foundation and open you up to new possibilities. If you don’t try this step, you may stay stuck forever. I joined the Peace Corps at age 65 and went to Palau. That rattled my staid life.
STEP THREE: Repeat Step Two. Continue to leave your comfort zone. If the first wild thing didn’t work out, try something else. The Peace Corps was a bust for me, so I designed my own volunteer work in Mexico. You can try smaller things, but make them active and if they help others, all the better. Teach kids to jump rope, tutor math, build a chicken coop and raise eggs, get a surf instructor, try Stand Up Paddleboard, enroll in a new yoga class, train for a marathon. Keep going, it will keep you stimulated and healthy for the rest of your life. And it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. When is the last time you camped in the forest? Wrote a poem? Danced with your women friends? Try something you didn’t think you could still do. You can modify along the way if what you chose was too strenuous — but keep pushing the envelope and keep your mind rolling wide open.
Sometimes I’m so happy these days I can hardly stand it. I’m a bit dizzy. All I can say is, my wonderful women comrades: enjoy the euphoria. It’s like nothing else, over 60 is the best time to be a woman. We are empowered in our own lives to take risks and speak up. We are in recovery from repressed lives in the workplace and overwork at home. We are transforming from our former structured lives of jobs, children, and housework to our post-children, post-career lives of self-actualization. We’ve paid our price over many years. It’s time for us to savor the freedom years.
