An Important Truth for those of us Over 50: We have the first real opportunity in years to focus on ourselves, and there’s no one else to hold accountable if we’re not doing it successfully or at all.

It’s Saturday morning.   The sun is long since up.   My wife, Brown Eyes, is still asleep or is sipping the coffee I left beside the bed for her along with the morning newspapers I just returned from buying.

I’m sitting in my back yard with my laptop perched on a table beside me.    The birds are chirping.  My morning tea with lots of milk is steaming.  A small frog has blundered onto the patio and is trying repeatedly but fruitlessly to hop over a wall too tall for him.

I find myself relating to this frog at the moment...

Throughout my 30s and 40s I was constantly busy.   Someone always wanted something from me: my work or my wife or the kids or our pets or the kids’ sports and other activities or the house or the yard or my parents or our friends and neighbors or organizations to which I belonged...

Nobody’s fault.  I had simply, along with many of my male and female peers, built a life of productivity and service tied directly to other people being OK.

So I could be "OK".

Now it’s different.   I’m over 60.   I’m self-employed.  I’m an entrepreneur.   Gone are the kids and pets.   Nice men come and mow the lawn once a week in exchange for money.   I have a kind of liberty I hadn’t imagined before.   It isn’t that I’m not overbooked and many days.  I am.   Yet, it’s all of my choosing.

The  transition has been made: I do things primarily because I want to do them, not because my being "OK" is tied to others being OK.

I decide to call the frog Patrick Henry, after the early American patriot, famous for “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

“Patrick, my friend," I say aloud — all of my neighbors are already suspicious about my mental health, so I’m not very worried about what they will think in overhearing my morning conversation with a small frog — “you have obviously come to remind me that liberty after 50 doesn’t come for free."

With it comes responsibility for making choices and living with the consequences of them.   There isn’t anyone to hold more responsible for my life and happiness than I am responsible.

I get a dust pan and a gloves.   I capture him gently and put him in what seems to be a safe, froggy place in the garden.

“Have a great life, Patrick, and remember to make the best choices you can in support of your own liberty and responsibility.   I’ll do the same for my own life after 50.”