I Almost Let Winter Make Me Old
When winter arrived in last January, something shifted in me that I had never felt before.
The sidewalks were covered in snow. And for the first time in my life… I did not want to go outside.
I have always enjoyed snow. But not this time.
Not because I was tired. Not because I was busy.
Because I was afraid I might fall.
That thought stopped me cold.
I have walked through cities, raised children, and rebuilt my life more than once. And there I was — standing at the door of my own apartment, hesitating over a patch of snow like some fragile little bird who’d forgotten she had wings.
What unsettled me wasn’t the snow.
It was how fast the fear made sense.
I am 70. And somewhere along the way — without ever signing anything, without ever agreeing to it — I had absorbed a script.
Be careful. You are older now.
And I just… followed it.
For weeks I stayed inside while winter moved through the world without me. I watched it from the window and told myself it was temporary. Told myself it was reasonable.
But underneath all of that was a quieter, more uncomfortable truth.
This wasn’t about weather.
This was about identity.
Around that same time I came across something I have not been able to stop thinking about — something that sheds real light on how our own minds can work either for us or flat-out against us.
It is often called the Counterclockwise study. Conducted by psychologist Ellen Langer of Harvard University in 1979, at a retreat setting in New Hampshire. A group of older men — each with their own health issues — were immersed in an environment carefully recreated to reflect twenty years earlier in their lives. They were not asked to remember the past. They were asked to live as if it were that time again — speaking, moving, and engaging with the world from that earlier point in their lives.
What followed has been widely documented.
Their posture improved. Their mobility increased. Their eyesight showed measurable change.
Their bodies responded — not to their age — but to the version of themselves they believed they were.
I read that and felt something crack open.
Because I had done the exact opposite.
Nobody put me in an environment that made me older. I had built one internally. I had begun moving through my life as someone who needed to be careful. Someone who should stay inside. Someone who might fall.
And my body — obedient thing that it is — followed right along.
Now here is what I need you to understand.
We have all — every single one of us — been absorbing a message about ourselves for years.
It comes through the television commercials for medications with side effects longer than the commercial itself. It comes through the programming designed for our age group that centers on limitation, on slowing down, on what to be careful about. It seeps in through the well-meaning people around us who use words like fragile and at risk until we start using them ourselves.
And here is the thing about a message you hear often enough.
You stop questioning it. You internalize it. And you just start living it.
Most of us never consciously decided to become smaller. We just kept receiving the message and our bodies kept following the instruction.
I am here to give you permission to reject it.
Not recklessly. And certainly not in denial of reality.
But deliberately. On your own terms.
You are allowed to look at that script — the one that says be careful, slow down, step back — and decide it does not apply to you.
You are allowed to refuse it.
That identity is not fixed.
It is not stamped on you by a number. It is not handed down by a doctor or a television commercial or a well-meaning adult child who thinks you should ease up.
It is a thought pattern.
And like any thought pattern — it can be questioned. It can be interrupted. It can be flat-out refused.
Hard pass.
I started small.
I am now choosing to go outside. Just a slow walk around. Nothing dramatic. But intentional — as if I am gently re-training my body that it is safe to move through the world again.
And I added some micro counterclockwise moments of my own.
YouTube has an enormous volume of music from my youth, the 70s, and I put it on while I’m washing dishes, folding clothes, moving through my day. Before I even think about it, my body starts to respond. I catch myself moving, loosening up, remembering something I didn’t realize I had set aside.
At some point, I realized this could not stay theoretical for me. It had to move into my body on purpose. So I pulled up some 1970s music on YouTube, set my phone on a tripod, and stepped onto the one area of my home with bare wood floors. And yes, I danced. Not well, not for an audience, but for the feeling of it. For the recognition in my own body that this version of me is still here. I even recorded a short clip, partly to make myself laugh and partly because I wanted to see it for myself.
The difference it has made is almost embarrassing in the best possible way. Chores I used to dread now come with a little anticipation. That one tiny tweak was all it took. I do it every single day now.
Small things. But not insignificant things.
And then I did something that made me laugh at myself a little.
I went looking for bell-bottom jeans and a leather vest.
Not as a costume. Not as a joke.
As a signal.
Those pieces — the textures, the shapes, the sheer feeling of them — they belong to a version of me that was completely at home in her own body. Effortless. Unafraid. Not calculating risk at the front door.
I’m not trying to go backward.
I am intentionally setting the stage for my body to feel like that young, brassy, sassy woman with energy to burn. I roll back the carpet so I can actually bust a move. I dance around my own living room like nobody’s watching.
Because nobody is. And it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that my mind and my body have something familiar to recognize. Something that says — she’s still here. That woman is still in here.
And that is where the real shift happens.
Not in trying to become younger.
In refusing to become smaller.
If any of this is landing for you — if you recognize yourself standing at your own door, hesitating — I am not asking you to overhaul your life overnight.
I am asking you to see the script.
And then decide, consciously and on your own terms, whether you want to keep following it.
Because you don’t have to.
That is the work of returning to yourself.
That is the entire point of we don’t retire — we rewire, aka The Daily RE-Wire.
But there is another piece to this that I believe is just as important as moving our bodies and reclaiming our vitality.
Learning to trust ourselves again.
After decades of being told what is best for us, what we should think, how we should behave, and what we should expect from growing older, trusting our own thoughts and feelings doesn’t always come naturally.
We have become so accustomed to looking outside ourselves for answers that we sometimes question the very instincts that could lead us back to the lives we want to live.
And reclaiming our vitality requires more than movement. It requires believing that we still have the ability to influence how we experience our lives, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
That is why I created Building Believable Trust.
It’s a simple, practical resource designed to help rebuild confidence in your own inner wisdom, one small practice at a time.
As you begin introducing your own little counterclockwise moments, whether that’s dancing to music from your youth, walking a little farther, or simply choosing to think differently about what growing older means, you can use Building Believable Trust alongside those practices.
Because the more you learn to trust yourself, the easier it becomes to stop living according to someone else’s expectations of what aging should look like.
Your vitality is worth reclaiming. And so is your trust in yourself.
It is my delight to make this a gift to all paid subscribers.. You can get your own copy by visiting the PERKS PAGE of my Substack. Be sure to access this via your web browser - NOT- the substack app.
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I really enjoyed all of the insights you shared in this article. Especially the identity part.
I like to dance around to Latin music when I clean house! I dance with my vacuum!!