Living versus Aging | LAYC75

Today, at popular request, I'm answering a question that's being asked of me a lot these days. “Why would you want to do that now, Isabel, at your age?” I could be flip and just say, because I can, or I could be pretty honest and say, “Because I have a tee shirt that says, ‘Because I said I would!” but the truth is it's because I have recognized the absolute power, the healing, regenerative, exciting benefits of pushing myself out of my comfort zone and deciding to do some things that I haven't done before.I've talked a little bit about that in previous episodes, but specifically today, I wanted to talk about this whole thing about why would you do that at this age? I've become a follower of Julia Louis Dreyfus, her new podcast show called “Wiser Than Me” and the episode that I tuned into was with Diane von Furstenberg. (Note inserted: In the early 1970's, Diane von Furstenburg produced twenty thousand cotton jersey wrap dresses that sold immediately. While she didn't necessarily invent the wrap dress, she certainly perfected it. Her version was a collared, long sleeve shirt dress that wrapped around the waist and accentuated the bodice.)She said: Instead of asking someone how old they are, we should say, how long have you lived? I loved that perspective, that really flipping it on its head, thinking about, I'm not, I've been saying that I'm 68 years young right now on the eve of 69 in not very many more days and how excited I am about that and all of this has brought flooding back to me a lot of the things in my lifetime that contribute to me feeling so this young, this vibrant and excited about the future ahead of me.That brought me back to thinking about a time in my life when I was part of an executive coaching program called ‘The Strategic Coach, with Dan Sullivan.And one of the many things that I thank him for, and the lessons that I learned as as a client of that venerable institution, was his exercise called “The Lifetime Extender”. And that was about 20 years ago that I went through that exercise, and at the time I remember the discomfort I felt at that age being asked, what is the number? What's my number when I expected I will die? So I wrote on my worksheet the number 88. Not because I thought through or that I was predicting the end of my physical existence on this planet, but I, my grandmother, I think was around that age at the time, and I was also thinking, eight is one of my favorite numbers and I like, I like multiple numbers, so for the sake of the exercise, I put down 88. Then we were required to make a list of the things that we would do, if we had more time and no limitations, no restriction. What are the things that we hadn't yet gotten around to in our life that we wish we could do, but we're really prepared to, committed to it or didn't think we had the resources or we didn't think we'd have the time, but without any of those limitations we spent quite a bit of time writing down all the sorts of things that we would do if time and resources were not an object.Then the process was that we had to stop and calculate, tabulate about how much time would it take to accomplish those things that we put on the I wish I could, if I had the opportunity list.And lo and behold, my list back then, this was 20 years ago, added up to 40 years, which would mean I would have then had to live, change my life expectancy to 128 years living to accomplish all those things. I gotta tell ya, it was spectacular how that changed my perspective on what is possible, what is important to me, and how it, that was the beginning. I can tell you, that was the real beginning for me of thinking about not expiring, not coming to an end, downhill when I got into my 60s.On the other hand, it ma