The Restlessness of Chasing Midlife Dreams: Ambition in Your 50s

Your mid 50s brings you firmly into a place of expected wisdom and experience.

My oldest grandson scraped his knee when he fell off his bike this morning. His mom cleaned it and put a Band-Aid on it.

He told her she doesn’t know how to put a Band-Aid on because she’s not a grandma. And that Gigi should be the one to do it.

So by virtue of my age, I’m qualified to provide better medical treatment, I guess.

This applies across other parts of your life at this age. People come to you expecting you to know things.

But if you’re not done trying to know things and build things, and you believe God still has something for you, it creates a weird dichotomy.

If you’re wired to still want to achieve more and do riskier things, people scratch their heads.

Look at all you’ve done and achieved. Why would you want more?

Why don’t you just settle in to what you have?

It creates kind of a lack of peers. Not in the sense that there aren’t other people around you who have accomplished similar things. That’s one of the best things about this season. You know people who’ve done incredible things.

But it’s hard to find others in this season who are chasing dreams with the same intensity that you still feel.

By this season of life, many have simply settled in to the life they’ve already created.

We still very much operate as a society that believes dreams are for the young.

We think nothing of a 20 year-old figure skater who left skating at 16 and emerged into her Olympic dream just four years later.

No one in their right mind would try to talk her out of that dream, even in a use-it-or-lose-it sport like figure skating.

Of course she could chase that dream because she has plenty of time to pull the right levers to get there.

But by the time you’re 55, it’s tempting to think maybe you’ve pulled most of the levers that were available to you.

And it’s hard to convince yourself to pull new ones because now you understand the work involved to build something new. The last thing you want to do is work blindly at something that might fail like you did in your 20s.

You recognize the limits of time and energy.

But for some of us, we feel like our Olympic dream is still in front of us.

I believe God put these dreams in me. Which means chasing them isn’t ambition for its own sake. It’s obedience.

Maybe this season is His timing exactly. Or maybe it’s His patience with my lack of obedience when I was younger.

Or maybe both. That’s not an easy thing to own, but I’m trying to.

And it’s hard to find others who also are still chasing their best dream to normalize that for you.

So you encourage yourself because you’ve gotten pretty good at that. You tell yourself the fact that there aren’t that many others in the water with you makes sense.

Why would others want to sacrifice their time and energy chasing something uncertain?

That’s a rational choice.

But I can’t make it.

And if you’re reading this, maybe you can’t either.

There’s something in you that isn’t done yet. And you feel restless about that.

Not restless in a way that means something’s wrong with your life.

But in a way that means something’s still supposed to happen.

Community around this is harder to find than you’d think. Even among friends who are still believing God for what’s next, there are seasons when you’re standing at the water’s edge and it just feels like a solo moment.

What I do know is that God doesn’t ask me to do all the heavy lifting. He asks me to show up willing.

Joshua didn’t part the Jordan River. God did.

But the priests carrying the presence of God in the ark had to step into the water first. And they had to believe that God would bring them what had been in front of them for two generations.

Therein lies the tension.

Knowing God put something in me, believing it enough to act on it, and being willing to step in no matter what it looks like around me.

That’s why I’m documenting this year as a lab experiment of sorts in believing before I have evidence.

Part of that experiment is not being embarrassed to say I’m 55, and I still think my best work is ahead of me.

Maybe that makes me delusional.

Alrighty then.

— LRM