This is Why I Take On New Sports Every Year After 60

Since I turned 60 in 2013, a few new through lines have defined my life. Here is one of them.

What on earth does it take to master something? Do I have to master anything? What does incremental progress look like? Should you and I take on new challenges as we age? After all, what’s the point?

With any luck I will give you a window on that. I’m a 68-year-old woman who happens to love adventure travel. Didn’t always do that. Nor did I always pick up new skills like kayaking or bungee jumping.

When I turned 60 I utterly retooled my life. I took up all kinds of sports, failed spectacularly at most of them and pressed on anyway. The “press on anyway” piece is precisely what gives me the gravitas to talk about this. People who are naturally gifted physically — that would be the men in my family and not me- often find that because they don’t have to work as hard, they can slide. That’s not always the case, but too often it is.

The flip side of that is societal conditioning. Particularly as we age, we can buy into the death spiral of “I’m just getting old.”

Every year I take up something new. Every year I bruise, bust something, make an unholy and ridiculous fool of myself. And I have more damned fun doing it, while also keeping my brain and body elastic, challenged, lively and engaged.

Youthful, in other words.

From the article:

“The brain is a complicated little thing, but if there’s one thing we know, it’s that it LOVES to learn. So much so that it quite literally grows to “make space” for the learning process.

This idea is known as neuroplasticity. The theory states that the brain alters its structure to accommodate developmental changes and learning. Research has shown that when you’re learning or practicing…

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