Recently a friend said he couldn’t believe I was sixty years old. Let’s be clear – this was not about whether I looked my age – I do. His astonishment was based on something different: when we speak I am usually standing next to my gyrocopter, an open-cockpit experimental aircraft that I have flown for the past few years. A sixty-year-old woman doesn’t do such things, is what his brain was telling him as we caught up in the hangar we both share. To make it even more confusing, my Onewheel – an electric skateboard – is usually at my feet.
There is so much messaging that tells both my friend (and me!) that as a woman ages she no longer wants exhilaration, exploration, a little bit of recklessness. Aging is instead a time to guard against breaking bones, accept our fading brain health, and adjust to being, well, boring. So many of my friends, disheartened by this time of their life, tell me: “I feel invisible.”
Yet while researching my latest book Tough Broad, From Boogie Boarding to Wing Walking, How Outdoor Adventure Improves Our Lives as We Age, I came upon a mindblowing statement: how we look at our own aging predicts how well we age. If we are sure our future is a quick downhill plummet into frailty and disease, studies show, we are more likely to endure cardiac issues and cognitive decline, and at an earlier age. If we instead believe that older age is a time of physical vitality and adventure we delay or even avoid significant health issues, like heart attacks and Alzheimers, and we live seven years longer.
Yet in the face of such downer messaging about older women, how do we fully embrace this vital positive perspective? I believe that the answer lies in the outdoors – yes, it could be learning to fly a gyrocopter, but it could also be hiking on a trail, or snorkeling in the ocean or birdwatching. This is because an outdoor activity offers all the exhilaration and exploration and vitality we’ve been told is no longer available to us. This is not just life affirming in itself, it is a direct rebuke to all the monitions about our own aging journey. The subliminal messages about our sad, sad future are pushed away, replaced in our very being by unimpeachable real-life experience.
In my own quest to understand fulfilling aging, I went scuba diving with 80-year-old Louise Wholey. I learned how to ride a BMX bicycle from 74-year-old Kittie “Miss Kittie” Weston-Knauer. I swam with Vijaya Svrivastava, 73. Many of the women I interviewed had little previous outdoor experience. Loraine Vaught, 62, explained that when she decided to get into the Pacific Ocean with the boogie boarding Wave Catchers, a group of mostly 60-, 70-, and 80-year-olds, she upended her own expectations of what she could and could not do. Suddenly so much seemed possible. She began to say yes to social outings. She tackled limitations in her life, like her fear of heights. She had a newfound confidence. “Boogie boarding changed my life,” she told me.
By the time I spoke to Loraine, I was no longer surprised by the transformative power of getting outside. Here’s something that also initially surprised me (but no longer does): the women I interviewed told me that their favorite decade was their sixties. Not the dewy twenties. Not the striving thirties, or the settled forties. The sixties. So here I am, happily 60 years old, my best years still ahead.
– Caroline
Caroline Paul is the author of Tough Broad: From Boogie Boarding to Wing Walking – How Outdoor Adventure Improves Our Lives as We Age, the New York Times bestseller The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure and Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology, which has been translated into fifteen languages. A longtime member of the Writers Grotto, she lives in San Francisco.