Three States: Growing, Atrophying, Dead
They’ll want you to quit. Do it anyway.
The same day I booked my backcountry avalanche training, a must-have for surviving backcountry skiing, I met a guy who told me his skiing days are over. He said he’s too old. He might hurt himself.
It gave me pause because, while you’d expect words like that to come out of an old person’s mouth, he looked like me. In fact, I found out later, he’s a year younger.
And I’m not old.
Damnit.
To be clear: Most of my skiing peers aren’t quite ready to hang up their skis. But I hear the possibility of it in their voices, along with talk about their slow Florida dreams. They’re fifty and are already counting down the days to embrace their slow decline.
When I talk about my plans, they smile and tell me I’m having a midlife crisis.
Maybe I am?
I did, after all, buy a motorcycle.
And a truck.
It makes me wonder if I should cancel my avalanche course.
Homeostasis is a lie.
I remember my dad talking about this, how his friends retired and then atrophied. They were fit one day and fused to a recliner with a remote in their hands the next.
We want to find an equilibrium in life, the steady line we can count on to ride out the years.
The reality of life is that homeostasis is a lie. There’s no way to avoid change. If you work out and then stop working out for a few weeks, then head back to the gym, your muscles and body will protest. There are three states in life: growing, atrophying, and dead.
Kids are forced to grow. If they don’t grow and learn, they die. That’s it. So we grow and learn, we aspire to new things, and we think prom is cool. Biology even drives us to procreate; our teens and twenties are all about learning, growth, and embracing change. And sex.
It’s a heady time.
Then the kids we created become obligations. Nobody realizes, as they celebrate conception, that the next 20 years are all ensuring our progeny’s growth, while we try to balance work and life, pay the bills, and carve out a few moments to feel young ourselves. We slip into jobs, perhaps by accident, perhaps on purpose, but they all seem to drive toward tedium regardless. Growth slows, and we learn to stay in our lanes, be respectable, pick up a remote, and begin the decline toward atrophy.
Choosing growth after bedtime
I remember listening to an author a few years ago talk about writing after he’d put the kids to bed. I was very impressed. Once I put the kids down, I was knackered. I’d really like to write after bedtime, I thought. Maybe I’ll start tomorrow… and I picked up the remote.
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My dad recently had back surgery. He’d been a runner until then, but then pain took over his life. He couldn’t stand sitting around, so he paid someone to shave the bones on the inside of his spine to release pressure on the spinal cord. It wasn’t fun. He did it so that he could walk. And, much to my consternation, continue to clear defensible space around the house.
He’s not stopping. He saw what happened to his friend and colleagues at a reunion… twenty years of atrophy aren’t kind.
The good news is that you don’t have to stop growing. Healthy brains remain malleable our entire lives. Age will slow us down a bit, but aside from dementia or injury, we can continue to grow. Age eventually becomes an excuse for not challenging ourselves and allowing our comfortable slide into atrophy. We stop skiing. We don’t write in the evenings.
Or we can choose growth.
The Cynthia Riggs story
Like Cynthia Riggs, who may well be my hero.
She’s 95ish, runs a bed and breakfast, and continues the writing career she started in her 60s after earning her MFA at 67.
She got married at 81. Her life meandered through Olympic fencing and multiple trips to the South Pole — the kind of resume that makes ‘taking up writing at 60’ sound almost like hanging up her skis.
She hasn’t stopped yet. She’s never chosen atrophy and continues to build on her extraordinary life. She even has a plan for her next career: horticulture.
As people age, the likelihood of their choosing growth becomes increasingly rare. It’s so rare that they often make the news: can you believe what this person did with their life? How could they possibly?
People even write about them in Substacks.
We tell each other to slow down, and when anybody does embrace an unexpected change, we call it a midlife crisis. But it could be nothing more than choosing growth.
Or maybe that’s what a midlife crisis is. People sit back on their porch watching me on my motorcycle, shaking their heads as they wonder just what has gotten into me. Then they shuffle inside to get the remote.
There is a challenge to pursuing growth, and it’s those life patterns, the ruts that we get stuck in. They can get deep enough that we only see the past and the inexorable linear future they suggest.
It’s that stuckness again.
So how do we overcome it?
The answer, according to Ms. Riggs, is to stay present. Focus on the now. She followed the path of her desires and passions without worrying about what was next. When she got married at 81, she and her husband didn’t focus on what would happen next or where they would go; they focused on the present moment. They focused on being together.
When I look back on my life, I see that I consistently got the most out of embracing the opportunities that presented themselves and choosing growth; the more outlandish, the better. Studying in Mexico, moving to Berlin, relocating the family to Johannesburg, and then New York — even becoming a Yoga instructor — were all decidedly out of my lane, but are now essential parts of my story that I would never trade away.
My nervousness today about reinvention and the need to plan it so carefully comes from the deep ruts and the expectation that I drift into comfort rather than take risks with the new.
But I’m not ready to hang up my skis or plot a comfortable decline in Florida. I’m going to do my best to stick to the Riggs path, continuing to learn, grow, and embrace the challenge of new things.
So I’m not canceling my avalanche course. And I’m not going to stop skiing until I physically can’t; even then, they may have to drag me off the mountain kicking and screaming.
This post is from my Substack, Seek North, where I write about living deliberately and reinvention. I’d love to have you join the conversation, so check it out and subscribe here.
