I'm Sharing 7 Gifts I've Given Myself Since I Turned 50

This is my birthday week! To celebrate, I'm gifting you with my most treasured life lessons that have helped me age positively.

I believe this and my life filled with joy and fulfillment is proof!

Every January, I exchange texts of birthday greetings with a guy I’ve been friends with since pre-school. We were born exactly three weeks apart (he’s older!) and grew up on the same street in our small midwestern town.

For about the past decade, our messages have shifted from complaining about being another year older, to gratitude to for growing another year older. As different as our personalities are, as different as our life experiences have been, we both went through a mindset shift in our 50s toward embracing the gift of aging.

For me, it started to really hit in my mid-50s that I really didn’t want to spend my days hating so much about life but constantly creating new possibilities. I credit learning about positive psychology and the science behind how we “retrain our brains” from the default programming of negativity and fear to curated thoughts that see opportunities instead of challenges.

My adoption of a growth mindset around seven years ago is the gift that keeps on giving to me, making each year I grow older more interesting and rewarding. So, for my birthday, I’ll share a few of my most valued gifts with you!

1. I’ve learned that it’s usually a sign of good things happening ahead when I feel like nothing’s working in my life.

It’s the periods in my life when I’ve felt low, disconnected, and very pessimistic about life that ended up kick starting my next, much happier phase of life. It’s happened several times over the 45 years I’ve lived as an adult “on paper.”

I notice now that to get through those periods when life was really hard, I just kept going. By taking just one step each day toward a solution for my situation, I gradually started to see different directions to make changes. Though it’s usually not an immediate resolve, those choices ultimately led me to my “next big thing.”

I’ve been lucky to have found the gifts of a lot of “big things” and the corresponding “prime of life” phase that went with it. That’s why I believe we can have many prime times, and I hope as I share bits of my story and lessons learned, you’ll believe it, too.

2. I seldom declare, “I’ll never…” because some of the most interesting things I’ve done in my life were those I never thought I’d do.

It’s kind of comical to me to look back at my views of what was “non-negotiable” two or three decades ago and count how many of the things I’ve now done that I said I’d never do.

My most recent example: my iron-clad statement that I never want a dog just melted as I am now caring for my son’s dog for a few months. And I’m really enjoying having the furry guy as a family member!

Lots of years lived allow me to realize that when I’m open to learning new things and expanding my comfort zone, I’m naturally going to evolve and change my views over time. I’m far less likely to categorically rule out experiences- I don’t know everything that my future self might need and want.

3. I’ve embraced that I don’t know what “it” means in the phrase, “Having it all figured out.”

When I was younger, I thought “it” meant “life.” I was confident that I would somehow learn all I needed to know about life and have “it” under my control by the time I was about 28 or, at the latest, 34.

I thought from then on, I’d never be surprised, overwhelmed, or not know exactly what to do. Well, that’s just now how life works, it it?

Three decades later, I feel that the experience of “having it all figured out” seems like being a passenger in on one of those self-driving cars. I’ve never sat back idly and watched as life passed me by, and that way of living hasn’t changed as I’ve passed 60. In fact, I like redefining what “it” means for me about every decade.

4. I give myself a break when I don’t meet my self-created deadlines.

There’s often a gap between what I think I can complete in a day or week and what I actually complete. I’ve learned to accept this as a byproduct of continuing to learn new skills and experiment with my life by adding new ingredients.

I gift myself some grace by reigning in the self-criticism and not being hard on myself if all of the learning, self-development, and experimentation doesn’t happen as quickly as I’d like it to.

5. I don’t need to be right, even when others are wrong.

I’ve let go of so much control of the need to be “right” in the last decade. And it feels great! I’ve become comfortable ignoring the person lobbing critical comments at me online and quickly forgetting the driver who cut me off in traffic.

Why waste my emotions on someone I don’t know, and will likely never know?

Even when I’m in the right, even when the other person is so clearly wrong, I rarely react and respond to either comments or actions that I would have in the past. It’s more powerful to retain control over my thoughts and keep them moving in a self-supporting direction.

My pickleball league surprised me with a birthday celebration this week. Thankfully I changed my views on pickleball, which I once said I would “never” want to play.

6. I don’t worry, I just take action

I no longer put myself through the damage I can cause with anxious emotions that go with worry. I know now most of what I used to attempt to worry into submission so I could control it is, in reality, out of my control.

Now, I give myself the time to notice my thoughts when I’m starting to get consumed by worry over a future outcome. I shut off the doomsday firehose of thoughts, get a pen and paper or the Notes app on my phone, and I start jotting down my worries and ask myself, “Is that really true? How likely is it that this will actually happen?”

I now know that when I get the thoughts out of my head and confront them, I can more clearly see they’re lying to me. Then it’s easier for me to direct actions only toward the real stuff, the things that I know I can influence positively.

7. I’m glad I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen every week of the rest of my life.

I had no idea I’d be doing the things I do in life now when I was younger. I mean, Substack didn’t exist, nor did the internet and prior to that, computers were big, huge banks of spinning tape loops and knobs, not file card-sized things we hold in our hands (remember file cards? Do people use those anymore when giving a speech?)

Here I am, writing a weekly column just as I dreamed of doing when I was a teenager, yet the way I’m delivering it to you and the ability for thousands of you have found me to read this, didn’t exist at one time.

To me, not knowing everything that is going to happen in the future is like a continuous gift. I know I’m far from finished learning and experiencing new things, and that makes life feel like an amazing adventure.

I keep this quote from the legendary actress, Dame Helen Mirren, right where I can see it every day because it sums up how I feel right now:

“Life keeps surprising us...that’s what makes it so rich with possibility. It wouldn’t be worth living if it was just a giant to-do list waiting to be crossed off. But nothing is written, everything is up for grabs.”