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Josh and I often go on reading retreats as described in this article. The whole point of the trip is to go somewhere other than our home and read. 95% of the time, we’re going to the beach (even in winter).

But I kind of love the idea of reconnecting with friends or family once a year on a reading retreat. My cousin — a voracious reader — would be the perfect person to plonk down in a cozy place with the sole goal of reading and snacking and napping and talking. Or my sister — we read so many of the same books. And most of my friends are readers. I kind of like the idea of going off-season somewhere so the whole place is quiet and then getting through two or three books.

My Sweet Dumb Brain had a profound thought that made me sad. She told the story about a cake that upset her father, joking about his age when he turned 40. She wrote: “He passed away in 2013, at just 58 years old. If life is a hill, he was already well on the other side when he turned 40. Maybe he knew that. No wonder he got mad.”

It’s such a strange idea. I think I’m middle-aged, but how can I know what the middle is if I don’t know the end? Perhaps my twenties were middle age, or I could still be a decade away from middle age if technology advances in such a way that the lifespan pushes on to 120.

It’s a lovely essay about what it means to age, gain wisdom, and change with time.

With the exception of situations like this, or the one Hank Green highlights in the video, we don’t know when we don’t die. We don’t know all of the times when we didn’t get measles because we received the vaccination or we didn’t die of a foodborne pathogen due to food safety laws.

I love this quote about prevention: “When it works, nothing happens.”

Many years ago — before COVID — an author ChickieNob loved was holding an event in a nearby town and signing copies of her books. After ChickieNob had her books signed, we were standing in the back, speaking with another author who had organized the event. The woman told me both writers were both part of a writing group.

Later that summer, we were at one of our favourite bookstores, and the writing group came up again. The owner was a member of the group, too, and she encouraged me to join. She had so many positive things to say, and I wrote the group down on my to-do list, but I mostly forgot about it.

Over the years, she would bring it up when I was in the bookstore. She let me know that it didn’t matter if I wasn’t writing; I was reading, and readers were welcome, too. I kept copying “join the group” over from one to-do list to another, talking to Josh about joining but never following through.

Until I made a note to call the bookstore to ask them to hold the new Anthony Horowitz for me, and I decided to join. I would join the group one weekend and then visit the bookstore the next weekend and talk to the owner about the group.

I signed up and was added to the listserv. But when I looked at the top message on the listserv archive, it was the invite for the celebration of life for my bookstore owner. She had died weeks earlier, and I hadn’t known. I was too late.

I don’t know if I believe that the two things are connected. I just know that I cried deeply when I thought about how silly it was that I waited over five years to do something that I was always interested in doing but felt like maybe I didn’t deserve to do it. That I wouldn’t belong. I was sad that I wouldn’t have her book recommendations anymore, and she would never know that she brought another member into the group. The lesson learned is not to wait on things.

There was a line in an interview with Judith Voirst that caught my eye and stayed with me. When asked if she associated herself with a different age in her mind, she responded, “I feel neither younger nor older than 94, but 94 now feels younger than I’d expected.”

When I read that line, I was still 50, and I felt the same way. 50 (or 51) feels younger than I expected when I thought about the age as recently as 40. Meaning, I’m not talking about thinking that 50 would feel old when I was 20. I’m saying that I thought 50 would feel old when I was just a few years away from turning 50. Now, 50 feels young, and I don’t really have an age that feels old. It’s weird how that mindset has sort of floated away with time.

I also thought this was a solid philosophy:

My friends and I love celebrating birthdays—ours and each other’s, and more than once, and not only on the actual birthday. When someone says they’re sorry they missed my birthday because it’s a month later, I say, “No you didn’t. We can still celebrate.”

What age do you think of as “old,” if any?