The third half of what?

When I was a kid, I used to read the obituaries with an eye to how old people were when they died.  If they made it to 65, I thought, "Well, they lived a good long life."  Ah, youth!  As I race towards 65 at the rate of 365 DPY, it does not seem old at all.

So here I am, children grown, thinking of retirement, and anticipating another 30 years, roughly a third of my life.  I'm calling it my third half.  In the first half, I grew to some semblance of adulthood, acquiring a husband, an education, and three children.  In the second half, I raised the children, parted from the husband, and squandered the education.

These are the bonus years for me.  I don't feel old unless I look in the mirror, I am remarkably healthy for a person who takes such lousy care of her health, and I long ago stopped trying to have a career worthy of writing to the alumni association about.

So what's next?  Somehow I got too busy  to figure that out.  I've been talking for years about cutting back at work, but haven't managed to extricate myself from either my job responsibilities or the lure of a full-time paycheck.  And then came the day when I delivered some paperwork to the Dean's office and saw this map.

Map of Spring, 2013,  voyage courtesy of Semester at Sea

I went home and wrote a letter to the Dean saying (the condensed version) "Pick me. Pick ME. PICK ME."  Only a little more elegantly, and she said, "Come talk."  Long story short, I am about to start a job as secretary to a voyage of nearly 1000 people sailing from San Diego to Barcelona and visiting a dozen countries along the way.

Semester at Sea uses the slogan, "Your once in a lifetime is now."  George Eliot wrote,  "It's never too late to be who you might have been."

I plan to find out.

So this is my new project, my entry into the third half of my life.