Recommended Reading: A Glorious Freedom by Lisa Congdon
Collage by John Smith with an assist by me!
“Lisa Congdon: You speak publicly about following your dreams. What advice do you give to older women who are considering a new career or breaking out of the gates to reshape their life in a significant way?”
Zoe Ghahremani: “I ask my audience something I once read in a birthday card: How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are? And I tell them, if you didn’t have a birth certificate, and you didn’t have any memory, and there were no mirrors, and someone came to you on the street and asked, “How old are you?”—how old would you be? And when they think about it, they are invariably twenty years younger than what their birth certificate says.”
“The average life expectancy, especially for women, is between 80 and 90. I tell them, Some of you are 60, and what are you going to do for the next thirty years? Sit there and brood about what didn’t happen, or make it happen now? There are certain things we can’t do. If you want to win a medal in the Olympics and are 70 years old and have never moved a finger, it’s not going to happen. But if you are a writer, if you have a dream of traveling, if you are an artist—there is so much you can do. It is so rewarding, to know that you did live the moment that you dreamed of.”
Excerpt From
A Glorious Freedom
by Lisa Congdon
Lisa Congdon is a badass artist and writer. One of my favorite books of hers is A Glorious Freedom: Older Women Leading Extraordinary Lives.
I've been in my 60s for over a year now. It's a trip — mostly in good ways. I like being invisible to most of the world. I'm glad to be alive and still able to walk, talk, and think (most of the time!) I'm happy to let go of the striving that pushed me to exhaustion and made me sick in earlier decades.
But still.
I'm not done yet. I don't want my world to shrink, I want it to expand. I don't want to give up on creating and sharing with the world, just because I'm of a 'certain age.' Lisa's book, and the women in it, are a wonderful reminder that there's a lot of life to live, no matter what age you are.
Someday Is Today.
