So This Is What 72 Looks Like

I’m 72 years old, and I think I’ve finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be me. Now, it took me 72 years to figure that out, which might mean I’m a slow learner, but at least I finally got there.

This past weekend reminded me that sometimes you don’t discover your purpose by looking for something new. Sometimes you discover it by paying attention to what keeps showing up in your life. And for me, something kept showing up all weekend.

Friday, I spent time with my fraternity brother and good friend Jeff. Jeff and I can sit around and talk about almost anything, and then there’s his dog, Austin, who apparently believes he is part of every conversation. Austin listens so closely that sometimes I expect him to look at me and say, “Michael, I don’t know about that one.”

But there was something serious on my mind. We recently lost one of our fraternity brothers, Carnell Livingston, and he was only about 45 years old. When somebody that young dies, it makes you think about your own life and ask: What am I doing with the time I do have?

Saturday morning, I got up early and made a long, long, LONG drive to a Dallas Storytelling Guild retreat. It was a small group, and many of the people sitting in front of me had probably been telling stories longer than I had. Yet somehow, I was the fellow standing in front of the room teaching the workshop.

The workshop was based on my book, Make a Point, Tell a Story—Tell a Story, Make a Point. I had prepared carefully, and it paid off—they listened, laughed, participated, and told me afterward they had learned something they could use. I gave everybody a copy of my book, and when I was compensated for the workshop, the money basically covered what I had spent giving the books away.

I had to smile. Life seems to do that to me sometimes—the more generous I try to be with what I have, the more generous life seems to be with me. Maybe generosity is one of my superpowers.

Sunday morning, I was the platform assistant at CSL Dallas, talking about membership and why belonging to a community matters. Sunday afternoon, I went to the Carrollton Library, where the N40 Storytelling Guild was telling stories. The audience wasn’t huge, but I’ve learned that twelve people who want to hear you can be just as important as twelve hundred.

And somewhere between Friday afternoon and Sunday evening, I noticed something. Friday, I was talking with a friend; Saturday, I was teaching storytellers; Sunday morning, I was speaking at church; and Sunday afternoon, I was telling stories in a library. Different places, different people, different purposes—but underneath all of them, I was doing the same thing: communicating, connecting, sharing, and hopefully serving.

And I thought, Michael, maybe you ought to pay attention to this.

This isn’t something that suddenly appeared at 72. I’ve spoken at conferences, churches, graduations, workshops, meetings, and reunions. Now, 55 years after graduating from Leavenworth High School, I’ve even been asked to speak at my class reunion—apparently, after all these years, people still haven’t figured out that giving me a microphone can be dangerous.

That’s when the weekend finally made sense to me.

This is my thing.

Speaking, storytelling, communicating, leadership, and service aren’t separate pieces of my life. They’re different ways of doing what I seem to have been doing most of my life: using words and stories to connect with people. And at 72, I’m still excited about getting better at it.

Maybe that’s one of the gifts of getting older. We spend so much of our younger lives trying to figure out who we’re supposed to become, and eventually we get the opportunity to look backward and recognize the pattern. We can finally say, “Oh. That’s who I’ve been all along.”

If I’m blessed with another 20 or 30 years, I don’t want to spend them sitting on the sidelines talking about what I used to do. I want to keep learning, exercising, serving, speaking, telling stories, standing tall, and yes, every once in a while putting on a good suit and walking into a room like I belong there. Maybe somebody younger will look at me and think, “So that’s what 72 can look like.”

The funny thing is, just one week earlier I had given a talk called The Stories We Tell Ourselves. I asked people to imagine walking into a library, finding a book with their name on the cover, and opening it. Every page up to today is already filled—victories, mistakes, people we’ve loved, disappointments, detours—all of it.

Then you turn the page, and it’s blank. You turn another, and it’s blank too. Those pages aren’t missing—they’re waiting.

I told that audience that the rest of our lives are still unwritten. One week later, after a weekend of friendship, loss, teaching, church, storytelling, laughter, long drives, and small audiences, I realized something. Maybe I needed to hear my own message.

I can’t rewrite my first 72 years, and I don’t want to. Those pages made me the man I am, but there are still blank pages in my book. As long as God and life give me pages, I intend to put something worth reading on them.

So stay on target, Michael. Keep learning, keep giving, keep showing up, and keep telling the stories. You know who the main character is, and you finally know what his thing is.

Now turn the page. The rest is still unwritten.