What do you want to be able to do in ten years’ time? It’s a question we sometimes hear when talking about health, fitness and ageing.
Perhaps your answers come easily.
You want to keep walking, travelling, gardening, working, exercising or enjoying particular hobbies. You want to remain independent, feel strong and have the energy and confidence to keep doing the things that are already important to you.
Those are good things to build towards.
But there’s another answer that I think is equally important:
I don’t know yet.
Because while we can plan for the future, we don’t know exactly what that future will contain.
And perhaps that’s where a little curiosity comes in.
What haven’t you discovered yet?
We can become very focused on maintaining what we already have as we get older.
Maintain our strength.
Maintain our mobility.
Maintain our independence.
Maintain our health as much as we reasonably can.
All of those things matter. But I don’t want getting older to be only about holding on.
There might be things ahead that we haven’t even considered yet.
A new hobby.
A different type of exercise.
A place we’d like to travel to.
Something we haven’t had the confidence to try before.
Something we haven’t even heard of yet.
Perhaps at 55, 65, 75 or 85 you’ll decide you’d like to learn something new, take on a physical challenge or say yes to an opportunity that isn’t even on your radar today.
We don’t have to know what that thing is. We can simply leave some room for it.
Building for what we know – and what we don’t
Throughout September I’ve been talking about building capacity for life.
We’ve looked at what we need, the foundations underneath our movement, what we’re actually training for and why our bodies need time to recover and adapt.
All of that leads here.
We’re building for the life we’re living now.
We’re building for the things we’d like to continue doing.
And we’re also building for a future we can’t completely predict. Strength, balance, mobility and cardiovascular fitness aren’t guarantees that we’ll always be able to do everything we want.
Health changes. Bodies change. Circumstances change.
But looking after those things gives us a foundation to work from.
It can give us more options. And I think having options is a very good reason to keep moving.
Planning still matters
Curiosity doesn’t mean we abandon plans and just see what happens. There are things we can deliberately work towards.
If you’d like to feel stronger, strength training needs a place in your week.
If you want to improve your cardiovascular fitness, you need opportunities to challenge your heart and lungs.
Balance benefits from being practised.
Mobility needs movement.
And our bodies need appropriate nourishment, recovery and rest alongside all of it.
We can make space for those things. Not perfectly and not necessarily in the same way every week.
But consistently enough for them to make a difference over time.
That consistency is rarely exciting! There isn’t always a big milestone or dramatic result.
It’s the walk you went on.
The weights you picked up.
The class you attended.
The ten minutes of movement you fitted in.
The rest day you actually took.
And then doing something again next week. Small actions accumulate.
Your plan is allowed to change
There’s another important part of planning for the life we want to keep living.
We can change our minds 🙌🏽
What matters to us at 50 might be different at 60.
Our priorities can shift. Our health can change. Our circumstances may alter what is possible for a while.
Something we once loved might no longer interest us, while something completely unexpected takes its place.
That isn’t failing to stick to the plan. It’s life. Our movement and exercise can adapt with us.
Sometimes we’re building.
Sometimes we’re maintaining.
Sometimes we’re recovering or rebuilding.
And sometimes we’re ready to try something completely new.
Keep a little curiosity
So perhaps we don’t need a perfectly mapped-out vision of our future selves.
We can plan for what matters now, we can look after the foundations that help us continue doing the things we love and we can be consistent enough to keep building strength, movement and capacity.
But let’s leave a little space for curiosity too.
What might you still want to learn?
Where might you want to go?
What might you want to try?
What could your body help you experience that you haven’t even thought about yet?
At the beginning of September, I asked:
What do you need more of?
Perhaps we can finish the month with another question:
What would you like to keep yourself open to?
We don’t know exactly what the years ahead will bring.
And that’s not necessarily something to worry about.
Some of it might be something to look forward to.
Build for the life you want to keep living – and leave enough room for the life you haven’t imagined yet.
Caroline