By now you're not measured against everyone else. Most of your peers are gone. What's left is the time in front of you and what you decide to do with it.
One friend stopped keeping score years ago. Another still tracks every appointment in a paper calendar and likes it that way.
Your granddaughter calls about her own kids now. Your great-nephew calls to ask about a man you knew in 1961.
By your 90s, most conversations about the future belong to someone else. Your grandkids. Your great-grandkids. The ones who will take your name into places you'll never see.
If you make it to 100, nobody asks what you did for a living. They ask what you remember, and they listen like nothing else in the room is happening.
Still happening without you
An old friend is telling your story in a room you've never been in.
Someone you never met makes a call the way you would have, and has no idea where they got it.
The manual left your hands a while back. People are reading it without you.
And you? What are they reading without you?
Whether it says what you meant was decided a long time before this.
That question has a related book
