59 Years Old and In the Spring of My Life

It’s never too late, but you gotta start

Maria Shimizu Christensen

Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash

I am in flux. In transition. In the beginning of reinvention. A friend calls it my “scheming, dreaming, and planning” phase. I like that.

But because we often know very little, next to nothing, of a person’s inner life, you would never know just looking at my outward face. It’s why we should show grace to difficult people and never assume things are actually fine when quiet people say it’s so. In my case, it would be safe to assume that what I’m doing now is probably not what I’ll be doing in a couple of years. Give or take an undetermined amount of time. Still working on that.

We like to use seasons as metaphors for our lives, as if winter doesn’t occur as often as summer, and like spring can’t be nearly eternal. In life, you get one spring, and when winter is over, you’re dead. How bleak.

What if, in life, spring can come after fall, sometimes winter lasts all year, and two seasons in a row of summer is an unexpected gift. That’s more like how it actually works.

My birthday is next week, and it will be the last one in my 50s. What do we call that now? Late fall? Early winter?

At the rate I’m going, I’ll never be able to retire with any sort of financial security, which is a…

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Maria Shimizu Christensen
Maria Shimizu Christensen

Written by Maria Shimizu Christensen

Writer. Maker. Featured in Medium’s 2021 list of Stories That Started Conversations. I write about life. https://www.mariashimizuchristensen.com

Responses (2)

What are your thoughts?

When I was your age, I knew I didn’t have enough to retire, so I kept working until COVID. At 72, enough or not, keeping working seemed too risky, so I stopped.
We don’t have the money we’d like to have, but we may have enough to live out our lives…...

I’m learning new things to put more tools in my toolbox. Toastmasters. I participated in my first podcast. I’m learning three languages. New crafts. Content creation. Graphic design. Ne...

Fellow '64 baby who can relate to much of what you're saying. And your growing toolbox is impressive!