Friday, July 18, 2008

The Fifty, Three Years In

About a week before my 49th birthday (which was July 1, 2005) while driving home from the gym, it hit me that I was about to enter my 50th year of life. For a business, this is a big thing ... 50 years ... half a century ... not a lot of businesses last that long. Some people don't last that long. I decided that I should celebrate as a business might, for the whole year.

When I got home, I explained the concept to the family (all men) and asked their opinion of what I could do to make a whole year of it. Younger son (the truly creative one) immediately proposed that I make a list of 50 things I wanted to do and then do them in my 50th year. So I did. Well, I made the list, which was the easy part. About halfway through my 50th year, it became apparent that I wouldn't finish the list, at which point I extended the celebration to two years, centered around my 50th birthday. About halfway through the next year, it became apparent I wouldn't finish the list in that year. But since it's my list and my celebration, I can extend it as long as I want. My goal now is to finish by my 59th birthday, because by then I plan to have a list of 60 things to try to do in my 60th year.

I've shared this idea with many people. It's caught on more with some than others. Debi has adopted it for her own purposes, and expressed an interest in seeing my list, which it the motivation for this blog. I intend to set up a post for each item. For the ones I've completed, I'll describe or show what I did. For the others, I'll say how I might intend to accomplish it. I won't get everything entered in one day, obviously, but will try to fill in the details regularly.

2 comments:

Debi said...

Wow...this is so incredibly fabulous! I'm really going to enjoy reading the "explanations" as you get them filled them. And I'm quite impressed with your progress!

You might just have given me a few ideas for some things to fill in my list, too. I had debated using "write 50 poems" but was afraid that was too daunting. Think I might just go for it though...that whole nothing ventured theory.

Debi said...

By the way, you asked about the date. Once you go ahead and publish it as you normally would (which you've done, of course), you can now do back in and edit the post. So now go to "post options" and change the date and it should republish it but with the future date. (If you postdate it before you've actually published it, it will hold it for publication until that time.)

I have a feeling I didn't explain that as clearly as I could have, but hopefully you can figure out what I meant.