“Dreams are renewable. No matter what our age or condition, there are still untapped possibilities within us and new beauty waiting to be born.”
~Dale E. Turner
This morning as I was watching the news they started talking about baseball (which is my least favorite sport, next to golf) and I started to go into my usual mode whenever I heard baseball mentioned, ignore mode. But this time something caught my attention, enough to actually make me sit and listen.
They were discussing the oldest major league pitcher to have ever played baseball. Jamie Moyer is a 49 year old pitcher who is now playing with the Colorado Rockies after suffering an elbow injury in 2010 that caused him to lose an entire season of playtime. The injury required him to have reconstructive surgery (Tommy John Surgery) with an estimated recovery time of at least a year.
The word throughout the sports world was that his career was most likely over because this was not his first injury. However, Jamie Moyer had other things in mind then letting go of his career, although his career has already surpassed many of the people he came into the league with and he was now playing with men of the next generation of baseball.
All he wanted was the chance to prove to all of the people who said he was too old or that he didn’t throw hard enough anymore that he could in fact do this once again. They gave him his chance and he proved them wrong and now he could potentially be making history as the oldest major league baseball pitcher to ever win a game.
It got me to thinking about all of the times that I doubted continuing my efforts as a writer because I was starting to feel as though maybe I was getting too old to be starting out in this career. I mean in my mind I should’ve already done so many great things within my career by now and I have, instead, been stuck going around in circles. Watching that story on the news this morning taught me something. The age factor is only in my mind, not anyone else’s.
Jamie Moyer commented that “as long as you have an opportunity you can succeed, but you have to be willing to put the time and the effort into it.” Essentially as long as the opportunities keep presenting themselves to me, I don’t have a reason (or rather an excuse) to not go after them.
People often tell me that I waste a lot of time watching TV and watching the news, but I never listen to that because I know what I get out of it. I get inspiration and I get motivated. I hear other people’s stories and experiences and I receive the wisdom and lessons that they try to impart to those that are watching and listening.
Today, just in those five minutes that I watched that news piece I saw someone who wouldn’t let people tell him he was too old to continue on with his dream. I saw someone who didn’t use his age as an excuse to just give up. I heard something that motivated me to give up my last excuse for not going after every single opportunity that comes my way, especially the ones that are a pathway to my dreams.
I will only be too old when I can’t write anymore and my fingers can’t translate the words from my mind onto paper (or computer screen). As long as I have ideas in my head and the ability to convey them, I will never be too old. Hell even in my senior years (I mean really old-80’s old), I can still dictate my thoughts into a tape recorder and (if the arthritis has really set in) have someone else type up my work. Age really is just a number, not a dream killer!
Jimmetta Carpenter
Writer/Editor
The Diary: Succession of Lies (Now Available)
Writing as “Jaycee Durant”
http://unpleasantlyplump.wordpress.com/
http://www.facebook.com/people/Jimmetta-Carpenter/1069480310
Write 2 Be 