It starts slowly.
Not with a bolt of inspiration or some trumpet-blare midlife reinvention—but with something smaller. Softer. A tug.
A pen in the junk drawer.
A dusty box of watercolors behind the furnace.
A poem you didn’t mean to write, but did, in the margins of last month’s electric bill.
At 60, the world doesn’t expect us to begin again. Hell, it hardly expects us to feel anything new at all.
The ads shift from adventure to arthritis, and the loudest voices seem to whisper one message: Quiet down. You had your time.
But what if they’re wrong?
What if now—when the house is quieter, when the noise of ego has softened into something like perspective—what if now is when the real creating begins?
Not to build a brand. Not to get a book deal.
But to remember who the hell we were before everything else got louder.
Maybe you used to sketch in the corners of your notebook before the job, the kids, the mortgage.
Maybe you were a drummer (I was), or wrote daily in your journal, or that guy who always wanted to write a novel about a man just like you.
Maybe you were just a kid who loved the feel of a pencil on paper. That counts, too.
I don’t think creativity ever leaves us. I think it hibernates—wrapped in fleece, buried beneath decades of productivity and responsibility. And I think we owe it something now.
We owe it the gift of time.
Of silence.
Of finally saying, “Alright, I’m listening. What do you want to become?”
Some mornings, I’ll walk the beach before the town wakes up, and it’s so quiet it feels like I’ve slipped between the folds of the world. That’s when I remember. The old fire. The call. The ache to make something that doesn’t need to be explained or monetized or approved. Just made.
Men don’t talk about this much. Maybe we were never shown how. But I’ve come to believe that the most masculine thing a man can do in his sixties is to create with vulnerability.
To write.
To sculpt.
To strum.
To bake, if that’s your rhythm.
To tend to the soul the same way we’ve spent decades tending to everyone else’s needs.
Because in this season of life—when you’ve seen enough to know what matters and are lost enough to know what doesn’t—what’s left is the truth. Your truth.
And the truth wants to be made into something.
Still becoming,
- Jack
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