I read a NY Times op ed piece yesterday about aging, the author feeling uncomfortable as the oldest person in the room.  I wondered, “What has changed for me?”

For most of my life I have done enough to get what I wanted.  No more, no less.

This means that I have watched a lot of football games, spent time in class and in travel, and completely indulged and overindulged my passions of the moment. Those passions have included accumulating wealth, finding intimacy, and in the words of e. e. cummings, “singing each morning out of each night”.

Two years ago I realized that my life, my opportunity, was finite.  I was tired of weighing 278 pounds, and disappointed that I had never focused on or actively promoted my writing.  I thought about my father, nearing age 100, and Grandma Moses who famously began her art career at age 80.

I decided to change, with the twenty or more years I might have left.  Today, for the first time in my life, at 210 pounds I am receiving compliments about my appearance.  I like that, even though it’s far too late for me to impress those breathtaking high school girls who paraded before and past me in the hallway every school day of my adolescent life, but who declined to be diverted into my used Pontiac sedan.

I decided to come out from the obscurity of my private writing forest, and, if not to dance in the warmth of the revealing campfire at the forest edge, at least to admire all those dirty but happy campers from where I could both see and be seen, if anyone cared to look.  Life is messy.  I thought maybe I should give it a real try.

So I’m pretty much doing what I’ve always done.  More work, less television.

I’m writing regularly – one books out, one coming out in two weeks, and working on a third and more, blogging every week without fail.  I’m also promoting my writing.  I have found that radio and a few television interviews aren’t so bad after all.  They’re even fun.  Especially when they’re over.

I’m still micromanaging my commercial real estate business, with much needed help from my outstanding staff.  They regularly do most of the work, and point me in the right direction each morning, even if I don’t start walking that way instantaneously.

I’m riding on the winds generated by my baby Rattle, the poetry magazine I started more than eighteen years ago.  Nowadays Rattle’s editor Tim Green has grabbed the baby from its cradle, nursed and tutored it through college and beyond.  Tim is the best poetry editor on the planet.  With a staff of fewer than two we accomplish more than the talents of twenty.  I should add, of course, that without our contributors – poets in more than 100 countries have submitted – we would be silent.  It is their words we reveal to the entire world.

And I have enough time, no more and no less, for the people who are important in my life.  It might be a brief encounter in my office, a regular lunch date with someone I have enjoyed for many years, or the most comfortable and intimate conversations I experience with family, dear friends, and my wife.

I am entirely mindful that my opportunities will end in somewhere between eighteen and thirty years, so I work harder, enjoy myself more, and don’t have one second left for pettiness.  Toxic people have disappeared from my life, constructive people surround me.

What else has changed for me at age seventy four?  Absolutely nothing.

Alan