Over 40? You’re just getting started! What I learned from Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Checking out at a store a recently, the clerk asked if I qualified for their senior discount. “You have to be at least 55”, she said. After I’d finished flinching (this was the first time I’d been asked that), I proudly told her that no, I didn’t qualify, and that I still had one more year of non-senior-discount life to go.

Then last week I was exposed to a different perspective on aging. A girlfriend and I had made the 10-hour drive to De Smet, South Dakota, to experience some parts of my idol Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life. There we were, standing in the Surveyor’s House (one of Laura ‘s homes growing up) and the tour guide explained that Ingalls-Wilder hadn’t written her books– which have been continuously in print since 1932, have been translated into 40 languages, and have touched the hearts of millions of readers–until she was in her 60’s.

I flinched at that, too. I’d known she was older when she wrote her books, but in her 60’s? My heart leapt for joy; the best of my professional impact could just be starting!

In my work, helping individuals along their career paths, I hear concerns about aging at least a few times each week.  It seems as though as soon as someone hits the age of 40, they start to worry that they’ll be passed over or chopped out because they’re too old. This, in fact, may be true. Discrimination exists along the full spectrum of a person’s chronological life. To reference another great author, Robert Southey in his, “The Story of the Three Bears”, no matter what we do, we may be too old, or too young, and rarely just the right age.

I tell my clients who are concerned about the number of years they’ve been on the planet there’s nothing they can do about it, except make the best of it. And that’s what Ms. Ingalls-Wilder did with her life. As she put it, “It is still best to be honest and truthful and to make the most of what you have.”