Life’s a Party, Not a Race

[people on] Forbes 30 Under […] found their callings at a young age and were able to doggedly pursue them. That is amazing…and rare.

For a lot of us, clarity takes its sweet time […]

If everyone lived from zero to 100 and matured at the same rate, it would be fair to issue sweeping comparisons. But that’s not how it works. We don’t all have the same opportunities. We don’t all take the same paths. We don’t all get the same amount of time.

I love the list of “people who found success after 40 and/or did cool stuff later in life”. Take, for example, Harry Bernstein who published his first memoir at age 96. He wrote two more books and declared: “The 90s were the most productive years of my life.”

In the United States, if you are pregnant over age 35, it’s considered a “geriatric pregnancy.” This is an outdated term — the preferred terminology is “advanced maternal age” — but trust me, the former still makes the rounds.

In France, a pregnancy over age 40 is called a “grossesse tardive” — as a French friend explained, tardive means you’re a bit delayed for something, “like when you’re late for a plane, or late to the party.”

Like the author, I love this recasting of terminology from “you’re old doing this” to “you’re late doing this”.

My good friend recently decided to go back to school in her mid-forties, to pursue a path that always spoke to her, but took a backseat to the more “reasonable” choices she made early in her career. “There’s a part of me that thinks, f*ck, have I wasted the last twenty years?” she laughs. “But the answer is no. I wouldn’t have been as ready for it as I am now. In the end, everything has its time.”