21/01/2019
Truer words I have never heard, thank you for this story.
On this overlook, I met a 77 year old woman who’d been traveling the world for 8 years. She wore a hat that was wilted down with pins she’d picked up in the dozens of countries she’d visited—Albania, Japan, Russia, Argentina. After almost a decade of travel, her hat was more metal than felt... its brim drooped under the weight of all the those souvenirs. I was wearing a few pins of my own, selected for the day from my own collection, a magpie, a coyote, a moose pin from Montana. Being the pin collector I am, I just had to approach her to pay my compliments.
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Her name was Jo. At 69, Jo had decided to invest her life’s savings into an endless journey of traveling the world until she died, paying her middle-aged daughter to accompany her “as my assistant,” Jo said with a wink. “I told her we had to do it, because this has been my dream since I was your age,” she said. Sounded like we had more than just pins in common....
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We bantered for awhile, until JR told me he wanted to take a photo. Jo watched intently as I tiptoed out to the overlook’s edge, past the sidewalk and onto the granite. Her eyes sat heavy on me all the way. When I came back to the lot, she stopped me, and in a coarse voice said “You know, you’re lucky you have the chance to come here while you can still walk. It’s so pretty I could cry, but in this chair, this is as far in as I’ll go.”
And with misty eyes I looked down and said “yeah well isn’t it true that it’s never too late to do what you’ve dreamed...but that in the same way, it’s also never too early.” Then I stooped down and hugged her, and she whispered in my ear “Never let anyone tell you you’re wasting your time.”
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Since then, whenever anyone’s accused JR and I of being hopelessly irresponsible, devoting our younger years to travel and to wholehearted living, to manifesting the largely impractical things that make our wandering souls sing, I’ll look em in the eyes and say: “A 77 year old woman told me to go while I can still walk, and that’s wisdom from my elders I’d like to follow.”
