This morning I was sitting on my balcony with a cup of coffee when a friend walked by below.
I could have gotten dressed, gone downstairs, joined him. A year ago I probably would have — out of habit, out of politeness, out of the quiet anxiety of not wanting to miss something.
Instead I noticed something: I didn’t want to.
Not because anything was wrong. Not because I was being antisocial. I simply wanted to stay exactly where I was, in the morning quiet, with my coffee and my thoughts and the particular quality of light that only exists before the day gets loud.
So I stayed.
That may sound like a small thing. I’ve been thinking about it all day.
Tonight Mike and I sat down to talk about a question that has been rattling around in my head for months: do people over 60 actually have a future?
Not a retirement plan. Not a medical plan. Not a carefully managed financial strategy.
A future.
The conversation almost didn’t happen. Technology had other ideas — one device wouldn’t connect, another froze, the Wi-Fi developed strong opinions about the whole enterprise. At one point I was convinced the entire thing was going to collapse before we got started.
Which, now that I think about it, was the perfect way to begin a conversation about life after 60. Because nothing about this stage of life is as neat and orderly as we were promised. We were told: work hard, retire, relax, stay comfortable, enjoy the grandchildren, stay safe. And many of us arrived here to find something far messier and more interesting than that.
People who still have questions. People who still have dreams. People who are wondering whether the most interesting chapter might still be ahead of them.
I’m one of them.
Here’s what I keep coming back to. Baby Boomers collectively control more wealth than any generation in history. Many of us have the time. Many of us have the freedom. And yet culturally we’re often treated as though we’re fading gracefully into the background — as if the word future has an age limit nobody bothered to post.
I don’t buy it.
The future isn’t always found in dramatic reinventions. Sometimes it’s found in smaller recognitions — knowing yourself well enough to hear what brings you alive and what quietly deadens you. Knowing when to go downstairs and when to stay on the balcony. Knowing which questions still have the power to genuinely excite you.
At 70 I find myself curious about YouTube and storytelling and sculpting and whatever catches my attention next. That doesn’t sound like an ending to me. It sounds exactly like a beginning.
Mike and I didn’t just sit around agreeing that a future is possible. We talked about how to actually start finding yours.
It begins with becoming an observer of your own life. Not a critic. Not a judge. An observer.
Pay attention to the tingles.
That’s the word I kept coming back to tonight — tingles. That small physical signal when something catches your attention in a way that feels different from ordinary interest. A topic you can’t stop reading about. A skill you keep meaning to learn. A conversation that leaves you more energized than when it started. A YouTube video you watched at midnight and then watched again.
Those aren’t random. They’re information.
Every time you notice a tingle, write it down. Describe it. What were you doing? What specifically caught you? How did it feel in your body? Over time those notes become breadcrumbs — and breadcrumbs, followed carefully, become a trail. And a trail, if you’re willing to walk it, becomes a roadmap to the kind of future that actually fits who you are right now.
Not who you were at 40. Not who someone else thinks you should be at 70.
Who you actually are. Today. With everything you’ve survived and everything you’ve learned and everything you’re still quietly curious about.
That’s where your future lives.
Maybe that’s the real question. Not whether people over 60 have a future. But whether we’re willing to stop waiting for permission to imagine one.
The balcony this morning. The coffee going cold while I sat with my own thoughts. The friend who walked by while I chose, for the first time in a long time, exactly what I wanted.
That was a future too.
What does yours look like?
Thank you Susan, Gina Loiacono, and many others for tuning into my live video with Mike Searles! Join me for my next live video in the app.
If the tingle concept caught your attention — if something in you went yes, that — that’s your first breadcrumb.
Bring it to Tuesday.
Every week a small group of us gather on Zoom to do exactly this kind of work together — not as a class, not as a workshop, but as women who are done waiting for permission to want something. We follow the breadcrumbs. We compare notes. We remind each other that the trail is real.
The BREAKTHROUGH guide is waiting when you arrive. But so is the conversation.
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And if something in this piece made you pause, nod, or feel a little less alone — please give it a heart before you go. That one small tap tells the algorithm this conversation matters. It puts these words in front of another woman who needs to hear them today. She's out there. Help me find her.
