I’m 71 and these are the 7 morning habits I credit with actually enjoying old age instead of just enduring it

By every measure the world uses, I’m old. Seventy-one.

I don’t say that the way people expect me to say it, with a little wince, or a joke about the number being wrong. I’m not being brave. I’m old, the way a tree is old, and it turns out that’s a perfectly good thing to be.

What surprised me is that I’m enjoying it. Nobody told me that was on the menu. Everything I was handed about this stage of life was written in the language of management — manage your decline, manage your expectations, manage your medications — and none of it suggested there was a version where you’re having a nice time.

I don’t meditate. I’ve tried, and I spent the whole time thinking about a man who owed me money in 1994. I don’t journal. I take one pill, and it’s for blood pressure.

What I have instead is a set of things I do before ten in the morning. And I’m convinced they are the entire difference between getting old and putting up with it, and getting old and living in it.

1. I get dressed all the way, including shoes

Pants, belt, a shirt with buttons, shoes with laces. Before nine, every day, whether anybody’s going to see me or not.

I learned this the hard way in the first year after I stopped working. There were days I stayed in what I’d slept in, put a sweater over it, and shuffled around in slippers, telling myself I was having a relaxed morning.

On those days, nothing happened. Not one thing. The mail didn’t get opened, the sink stayed full, and I’d look up, and it would be four in the afternoon, and I’d be exactly where I started.

Slippers are permission to have no day. Shoes are a small announcement that you’re expecting something of yourself.

It sounds ridiculous, and I don’t care. It works.

2. I don’t take an inventory of what hurts

Most people my age wake up and immediately run a scan. The knee. The shoulder. The thing in the hip that’s been there since March.

They go through it item by item before they’ve even sat up, and by the time their feet hit the ground, they’ve compiled a full report on their own deterioration.

I did this for about two years without realizing I was doing it.

And the problem with it isn’t small. The knee is going to find me. I don’t have to go out looking for the knee. But if the first thing I do every morning is take stock of everything failing in me, then I’ve decided what the day is about before the day has said a word.

So I get up. I put my feet down. Whatever hurts will make itself known in its own time, and it always does, and I deal with it then.

3. I go outside before I look at my phone

Five minutes on the back step. That’s all it is. Coffee in hand, no coat unless it’s really coming down.

The point isn’t fresh air, and it isn’t nature, and if you tell me it’s about vitamin D, I’m going back inside. The point is that the world gets to exist before the news does.

Because if I pick up that phone first, the first thing that happens to me is somebody else’s catastrophe, and it colors everything after it. But if I’ve stood outside for five minutes and heard a dog and watched the woman across the street drag her trash can to the curb, then whatever’s on the phone has to compete with a morning that already exists.

It loses, mostly. That’s the idea.

4. I do the ugliest thing on the list first

The call to the insurance company. The form that wants a copy of something I’ll have to go and find. The thing with the pharmacy, again.

Nobody warns you that old age comes with paperwork. It’s relentless.

Everything has to be renewed, confirmed, appealed, chased. It is the tax you pay for still being here, and it will eat you alive if you let it drift, because a thing you didn’t do at nine in the morning sits in your chest all day and turns into a thing you’re dreading by four.

So I do it first, badly, while I’m still annoyed enough to be forceful on the phone. And then the rest of the day is mine, and it’s mine at nine-forty, not at three.

5. I cook myself a real breakfast

Eggs, properly. A pan, butter, some attention. Eleven minutes, standing up, for nobody but me.

Cooking for one is where people quit. I’ve watched it happen to friends — the widowers especially, though it isn’t only them. First, it’s toast. Then it’s cereal. Then it’s cereal at eleven, and then it’s whatever’s in the freezer, and somewhere in there, they’ve stopped believing they’re worth the eleven minutes.

I’m worth the eleven minutes. So is everyone reading this, and I suspect a fair number of you have been eating standing up over the sink for a while now and calling it efficiency.

It isn’t efficiency. It’s a small, daily vote about whether you count.

6. I send one message to one person before nine

Not a phone call. Not a catch-up. Two lines, no ceremony, no occasion.

Something I read that they’d like. A photograph of a dog that looked like their dog. A rude observation about a mutual acquaintance. It takes forty seconds, and it doesn’t require either of us to be interesting.

What it does is keep me inside somebody’s day. Because the thing that gets you at this age isn’t a dramatic falling-out. It’s that you don’t speak to someone for eleven weeks and then calling them starts to feel like an event, and then you don’t call, because who calls out of the blue.

Forty seconds, before nine. It’s the cheapest thing I do, and it’s probably the one that matters most.

7. I put one thing in the day that nobody asked me for

I look at the day, and I find where the appointments are, and the errands, and the things other people need from me, and then I put one thing in there that is nobody’s business but mine.

Some mornings, it’s an hour at the piano that I, admittedly, play badly. Some mornings, it’s a drive to a town I have no reason to go to. Last Tuesday, it was three hours of reading in the backyard, which is not a thing anyone is going to thank me for.

Because otherwise, and I’ve watched this happen, the day fills entirely with obligation. The doctor, the grandchildren, the car, the neighbor who needs something. All good things. All somebody else’s.

And you get to the end of a week and realize nothing in it belonged to you.

None of this is a program

I’d be embarrassed to call it a routine. It’s not a system, and I’m not selling anything.

It’s just that I found out, somewhere around sixty-eight, that enduring and enjoying start about four feet apart, at half past six in the morning, in a bedroom, with a pair of shoes on one side of the room and a pair of slippers on the other.

And you do get to pick.

Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.

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