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What Will You Do In Your Next Life?
by Sharon Randall

Here's a question I like to ask people my age (meaning the age at which the only thing you're still too young for is retirement): What will you do in your next life?

I am not talking about the life after death that my grandmother called the Great Hereafter. I'm talking about life after 50, known to some of us as the Like it or not Here and Now.

One day I was sitting around feeling my mortality, squinting into a computer and rubbing my aching knees, when suddenly I had a revelation. It began, as with Descartes and other great thinkers, by doing the math, calculating the years I'd been an adult, from age 21, the legal onset of adulthood, to the present -- 30 years.

I thought about the things I had done in those years: all the places I had been, all the people I had known, all the things that I had done and learned and loved. I had married, mothered three children, built a career, burned a lot of bridges, buried my grandparents, my parents and my husband, and found myself asking, as I had 30 years ago, what do I want to do now?

In some ways, it was like being 21 all over again, without the innocence and arrogance of youth, of course, not to mention the 20-inch waist.

Then, estimating the years I could have left (based on my grandmother who lived to be 90 and my mother who smoked like a chimney until she succumbed to lung cancer at 70) I came up with an average of 30 more years, maybe, a whole adult life in the waiting.

I liked thinking about that. I liked it so much I started asking other people to think about it, too, and I loved the reactions.

It was a lot like asking a 21-year-old what he's going to do now that he's all grown up and graduating from college -- the same deer-caught-in-the-headlights, hepmejeezes look.

The difference in asking that of a 50-year old (besides the fact you'll have to repeat it louder) is the 21-year-old has been thinking about it since he was 4, the day his grandpa said, "So sonny, what do you want to be when you grow up?"

The 50-year-old has already been whatever he or she chose to be when they grew up. The idea that they could have yet another lifetime ahead is often a whole new thought -- one that's every bit as exhilarating and terrifying as it was at 21.

But at 21, the answers are about careers and marriage, having babies and making money. At 50, they tend to be more about doing things that for whatever reasons you didn't get to do, or didn't think about doing, before.

Like the CEO who gave up an expense account to sit on the floor and teach kindergarten.

Or the middle-aged couple who sold their home to buy an RV and ride the highways.

Or the woman who reared five children, then found herself rearing a grandchild, too.

One of the best answers I've heard came from a friend who said, "What I want to do in the time I have left is be involved in the next generation."

She intends to have her own life independent of her grown children but stay close enough to be a player, make a difference, in their lives and those of their children.

Not everybody gets a second chance at life. The obituaries tell us that. Longevity is a gift, one we don't know we're given until it's almost over. To appreciate it and use it well takes an act of faith, believing we'll have forever and living like there's no tomorrow.

I'm not sure what I'll do in my next life, if I'm lucky enough to have one. But I do like thinking about it. I wonder. What will you do with yours?

© Sharon Randall, author of "Birdbaths and Paper Cranes: A Family Tale," is a syndicated columnist for The Monterey Herald, The San Jose Mercury News, and Scripps Howard New Service.