JUST SAY YES!

I was standing in line to get coffee one morning at a café in Sebastopol, my California hometown, and began chatting with the woman in front of me. We didn’t know each other but had both been looking out the door at the little red headed girl in yellow boots stomping around in a mud puddle, and we went from there to talking about doing brave things.
She said that she was about to leave on a trip to the Arizona desert where she was going to lead a vision quest. It was the first time she would be in charge of a trip that she had previously attended with others, spending time in meditative walking and quiet contemplation.
She was nervous, though, about being the leader, not the follower, and had worriedly said to a friend, “I’m too OLD to do this.”
And her wise friend countered, “You’re too old NOT to do this.”
She and I shared a knowing laugh, I wished her good luck and we went our separate ways. But I thought a lot about what she said.
Age can be a big cop-out. It’s a good excuse to not do a lot. You get to a certain point in life and people start letting you off the hook. Instead of saying “Oh, come on, you can do it,” they’ll give you a pass.
Go ahead, sit out the volleyball game. No, you probably wouldn’t want to take a bus to Mexico.
It’s almost like they don’t expect as much of you anymore and don’t challenge you like they once did. Maybe in deference to your age, energy level, creaky bones. Or maybe because you’ve become an old poop.
What this woman – whose name I never dig get – took from her friend’s counsel was that now was the perfect time to accept, not decline tempting but scary challenges. She has valuable knowledge to share. Her experience counts. She gets to be the wise one.
If she didn’t lead the group now, she might never get another invite. She might lose her nerve.
Right on. We’re too old not to say, “Yes. And more yes.”
Eleanor Roosevelt said, “You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.”