The whole premise of this blog when I started it two years ago(-ish) was that – even though I had crested the hill and had moved past the “50” milestone – I wanted to assert that I am not done yet. Though my tagline is that this is a chronicle of a journey through a century, I don’t really know when I got to the apex of my personal journey or if 50 is that magical number. If stats have anything to do with it, chances are it’s more like it happened in my forties. But if I follow in the footsteps of my 100+ grandmother and her father, then I’m at the top of that mountain right now.

All this preamble is to say: I think about aging a lot. Am I doing it well? Are my expectations of my body, my brain, my energy realistic? What can I do better? And to what do I need to say, “Fugget about it!” ?

It’s not like all of this messaging is coming from within, either. If I flip through any magazine targeting women or sit through the commercials on television, I find that I am regularly assaulted with admonitions to, “Look younger! Feel younger! BE YOUNGER!” My search through Instagram for #fabulousafterfifty and the like, relentlessly turns up accounts of women who focus on their looks, their clothes and – especially – their not-looking-fifty-ish. Sigh.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Body positivity is a good thing, but while the actually-younger-peoples have IG accounts that celebrate all sizes and shapes, I have yet to find an older woman who’s flaunting her rolls and her wrinkles. I’m sure they’re out there, it’s just harder to find. And why do I even care? At this point in my life, you would think that I had built up some sort of resilience to this emphasis on the preferred physical expression of a person. But, instead, years of being a girl, a woman, a human being have stockpiled a garbage dump of uncertainty, reticence and even surrender to the messaging. After all, I’m still coloring my hair and trying not to dress “older” than I am. And I still like to hear compliments on my looks or expressions of “You don’t look like you’re fifty(three)!” (Although, admittedly, I haven’t heard that for awhile.)

It’s into this milieu that Mary Pipher’s book Women Rowing North comes like a drink of fresh water. Pipher, a therapist and writer who previously made her mark with Reviving Ophelia, a book that helped the adults navigate the landscape of adolescent girls, has turned her attention to women in the last third of life. I fall in the first third of that third, but Women Rowing North, like her title suggests, reads like a traveler’s guidebook, letting you know what to expect and how to make the most of your journey. And unlike my searches on Instagram, Pipher includes the wide swathe of women who fall in this age bracket, addressing different socioeconomic and health realities for the women she case studies throughout. Although reviews on Goodreads suggest it may be a bit premature for the 50-something to “enjoy” this book, older women say that they wish they’d read it sooner. I suppose it’s the difference between knowing what to (maybe) expect and wishing you knew then what you know now.

What I love about Pipher is that she doesn’t see aging as a problem that needs to be solved, ignored or reversed with the usual admonitions of exercise, healthy food and a miracle wrinkle cream – although she doesn’t say that such balance isn’t important either. Mostly, Pipher – in the time-honored tradition of therapists – focuses on attitude, which she says in her introduction, “…isn’t everything, but it is almost everything.” Which means that it’s within all of our grasps to do better and for each of us to decide exactly what that “better” is.