The First Time I Was Too Old for Something

When I was growing up I had the very unique dream of being a professional athlete. I know, right, why didn’t you ever think of that? But don’t blame yourself, friend. I was born to zig in a world of zaggers.

I played a lot of sport growing up and I wasn’t half bad at many of them. I thought I’d make it playing rugby until I had to start playing the Maori (Kiwis) (people from NZ) imports that looked like 35 year old construction workers while attending high school. I remember thinking to myself, why is everyone’s dad on the field a few moments before they would turn to run over me.

I actually have a ‘you should see the other guy’ story from these days. Some behemoth on the other team was running through us children like… well, like we were children. Eventually I would take him down and introduce part of my chin to the back of his skull. I might have got three stitches, but that fucker got eight.

There was a brief moment where I thought perhaps cricket would be my game, until it became an entire weekend affair (previously it was just on Saturdays) and my dad got very bored keeping score in the Australian summer heat. He said mate you don’t want to be burning your weekends on this, let’s go for a surf. It made sense then as now.

Time went on, as it always does. I remember watching my favourite team play one night and hearing the commentators introduce someone who was younger than me on the field. It was the first time in my life that it really clicked how far behind I was on the (extremely rare) athletic dream of my youth.

I was out of the game. A young Jords would not be making a drastic life pivot to get on the field. It wasn’t a dream of mine anymore, but it was the first time I had to witness some hubris of my past die. It was the first time I was too old for something. I suppose I was too old to drink illegally, but that was a concession I was willing to make.

When you start to peel back the layers, you realise you’re not just a few years behind running out for a professional sports team. The people on the field have been training their whole life. Their fathers were screaming at them while mine was pushing me into waves.

The World Surfing Tour is on right now at one of the gnarliest stops of the year (yes, I surf, can’t you tell? I’ve already referenced it twice so far. I even said the world gnarly, I’m actually pretty g… sorry). Last night I sat watching Kelly Slater at 54 years old score an almost perfect heat and thought fuck, I’m never going to be a GOAT.

hope i look like this at 54, without the being bald part

Maybe I can be a GOAT in the no-one-is-better-at-being-you kinda cringe way that I occasionally touch on. I could be the greatest of all time at something no one cares about. Maybe I could break one of those really stupid Guinness Book of Records that is completely meaningless, but I’m never going to be Tony Hawk or Shaun White… Like fuck… I’m never going to be Tony Hawk. You ever think about that? Damn.

For a kid who grew up playing video games in their respective names, even though it sounds absolutely ridiculous, it is kind of heavy to mourn the death of a dream. What could I have done differently? While I was quite a good snowboarder at a young age (yea I’m actually sick at all board sports), there were 6 year old Japanese kids doing 1080s and others with Redbull stickers on their cribs.

So here I am, knocking on the door of 30 and in complete control of my day. But what is the fucking point… if I can’t be… Tony Hawk? What lessons can I learn from this reflection? First I need a moment, I’m still pretty gassed about the whole lack-of-Hawk situation.

My childhood dreams might be dead, but dreams go in phases throughout a lifetime. The dreams of the living can be tracked by the regrets of the dead. Our regrets at the end of the day are usually just unfulfilled dreams and they are unsurprisingly, yet quite sadly, predictable.

When people sit on their death bed they almost always mourn the things they didn’t do because they prioritised objective success over subjective success. They took the promotion instead of the trip to Thailand. They moved to the city and gave up the girl.

There’s a list of five common deathbed regrets that exists out there, but there’s a few that I’d like to specifically mention. The most common regret by far is wishing to have lived a life true to yourself rather than the life others expected.

(the flair-less list)

The second one people always harp on about is wishing they hadn’t worked so hard. Fortunately for me, this will be absolutely no problem. In spite of self-prescribing myself a volunteering job in the form of yapping online every week, I will not join those who regretted missing their kid’s growing up or their partner’s time so I could spend more time staring at screens.

I think a good North Star in life is to filter your actions through what you would regret on your death bed. The whole YOLO philosophy is not very helpful, because realistically if I was going to die tomorrow, I’d probably do a lot of drugs and stay in the bedroom with my girlfriend.

Although many voice their regrets in their dying age, many die without doing so because it is too difficult, even then, to express the authenticity that was sacrificed over a lifetime. Only us, in the depths of our own consciousness, truly understand what we wish to be and what we weren’t brave enough to conquer.

We should not fear the judgement of society or those around us, we should fear our future, all-knowing self, looking back at what we did to them. If we fear failing ourselves more than we fear disrupting those around us, then we are one step closer to defeating our most likely villain. Open the window and let the light in, you might wake others up in the process.

I picture a 164-year-old Jords, looking much like Bilbo Baggins after he gave up the ring, staring off into the distance. Is he thinking why the fuck did I waste so much time writing nonsense in my 20s? Or is he thanking me for opening doors to places I have no idea even exist right now?

I am living much of my life now to snuff out regrets I might have on my death bed. Is it possible to begin working on the reduction of future regret, today? Of course it is, or more accurately, I have no idea, because my bed is for fu—not dying.

The conversation of kids is well and truly on the table, and I’m making sure that when it comes to fruition I have fulfilled the things I wished to have done before, now. People so often freak out about these conversations, and justifiably so, but we can forward-think these problems so that feet are warm when the time arrives.

I am ensuring my finances are sustainable for a great life ahead, but I am sure as shit treating myself when the opportunity arises. I am acutely aware that there are things I can do now that I will not be able to do in the future, maybe not even tomorrow.

There’s only so long I can be sending myself off ramps in the snow before I resign myself to the new milestone of my back hurts (my back does actually kind of hurt). I like to listen closely to when people complain about things in their mature years. It is fortunate that my dad loves to complain. They are all reminders of what I should be more grateful for right now.

I have an extremely unique life, because I have achieved financial freedom in a way that few have at my age, it comes with a unique pressure to not fuck it up. I am so lucky and blessed that there is guilt that comes with having to live for those that cannot.

It’s as if sometimes I take on the deathbed regrets of the world and book another flight. I love being home and in my routines, but don’t I owe it to some button pusher in the Mid-West to go scuba-diving in Sardinia? It is a strange thing to complain about such privilege, but number one on the list of regrets is to live authentically, so you have to listen to my top percentile problems.

My partner comes from a very different world than me. It took a surprising amount of conversation to wear down the grooves society placed in her brain. We spoke about the idea of her quitting a job that she didn’t like and to her that felt like an impossible ask. We spoke about taking some time off between work, which she had to think about for a long time.

For her entire life if she was changing jobs, she would finish on a Friday, work at the family restaurant on Saturday, then begin her new job on the Monday. Between every job I’ve ever had there were at least a month of cocktails.

I was surprised that we were not aligned on such an important topic, until I started to understand why. If a man says he is not working then he is presumed to be an absolute G, if a woman says she is taking some time off work she is presumed a trophy wife. What she was struggling with was not whether spending a month in the alps sounded fun or not.

She was struggling with the most common regret there is, being true to yourself rather than living the life others expected. I do not know how to live a life of no regrets, but I have seen through her journey that we can defeat a lifetime’s worth of conditioning.

Although she still at times feels uncomfortable or guilty, she decided to take some time off work to move internationally, help create a recipe book, and take a well earned deep-breath after a decade of six day work weeks. The cage may be all we know, but the door is wide open if we are given a little push.

Studies consistently show that being in control of your day is one of the most important indicators for happiness, but being in control of your day means breaking from the expected. Following subjective success at the sacrifice of objective comfort. Ask yourself, is it something I want to do, or something I am expected to do?

Her friends sometimes question her about our lifestyle because they don’t understand how someone can live like that. If we keep all the doors closed we can never know how glorious the sun shines outside. The sad part is they will understand someday, and I can only hope it is before their death beds.