The Nth-Year Plan
This blog is about keeping options open as the years add up.
It’s not about chasing youth or outrunning time. Nor pretending that aging is optional. It isn’t.
It is about preserving physical and mental capacity such that, at each stage of life, there are doors available—doors we can walk through if we choose.
That idea has shaped how I’ve thought about the future since my twenties.
A Direction, Not a Destination
For most of my adult life, I’ve carried what I think of as a ten-year plan. It was never a plan for where I wanted to arrive, but for what I wanted to avoid. I wasn’t mapping outcomes. I was choosing directions.
Early in my career, as a newly minted mechanical engineer at a defense firm, I once tracked down a senior colleague who was legendary for his mastery of military specifications. I needed help locating a particular standard—nothing exotic, probably a fastener or gasket.
I found him one floor up, seated in a cramped, dimly lit cubicle. Battleship-gray partitions. Metal cabinets. A few family photos. Stacks of manuals. He worked methodically through a thick black binder, flipping pages with practiced precision.
He was competent. Respected. Seemingly content.
And as I stood there waiting, a thought settled in my mind—one that has stayed with me for almost four decades:
This is my future, if I keep going exactly the way I am.
Nothing about that future was wrong. It simply wasn’t the one I wanted.
Not long after, another idea took hold—simple, obvious, and difficult to ignore:
The only destinations available to you lie along the direction you’re traveling.
It’s little more than a restatement of Newton’s First Law, applied to life. If nothing changes, outcomes don’t either. It’s irrational to expect a different destination without changing direction.
At the time, I felt no urgency. In one’s twenties, time looks endless. Decades stretch out like open road. But perspective shifts. Sitting at the cusp of my sixties, the horizon looms closer than I had ever imagined.
Time compounds actions just as surely as it compounds money. And as time compresses, changing direction becomes harder—not impossible, but less forgiving.
Why This Matters More With Age
I find it useful to think of the future not as a single endpoint, but as a series of way stations. At each one, I want as many doors as possible on which opportunity might knock.
Why? Because while our core selves remain surprisingly stable, the surrounding details change. Interests evolve. Old routines lose their appeal. New curiosities emerge. Some abilities fade while others deepen.
What I fear—deeply—is not aging itself, but arriving at a point in life where the doors are gone. Where the body or the mind quietly closes off choices before we notice their absence.
There’s nothing mystical about how I’ve chosen to address that concern.
We experience the world through our bodies and our minds. If we want access to experiences in our sixties, seventies, and beyond, then strength, mobility, cognitive clarity, and resilience matter. And aging, left unattended, erodes all of them—relentlessly.
This blog exists to explore what we can do now to slow that erosion, compensate for it, or adapt intelligently to it later.
What This Blog Is—and Isn’t
This is not an anti-aging site.
I have no interest in selling fantasies or the illusion of control over time. Aging is real. Father Time is persistent. He will call all of us eventually.
But acknowledging that doesn’t mean lying down in surrender.
This blog is about time traveling with class, dignity, and attitude—about making time work harder for us by making thoughtful choices earlier than we might otherwise.
Some posts will examine what aging does to the body and brain: hydration, sleep, muscle loss, balance, cognition, and the systems that quietly shape daily life. Others will step back and ask broader questions about possibility, curiosity, and how we want to spend our days.
The Underlying Belief
I believe that small, deliberate actions—taken consistently—can preserve far more choice than we realize.
Not infinite choice. Not youth. But enough.
Enough strength to stay mobile.
Enough clarity to stay engaged.
Enough resilience to say yes when opportunity knocks.
If we can manage that, then each way station ahead offers more doors—and a better chance of living the life we want to live, not just the one that happens to us.
That is the Nth year plan.
And that is what this blog is about.
Cutting Capers 