A New Chapter, Later in Life

I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is the Sunday story from Up First where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. As we approach the New Year, we often think about resolutions. You know, like, wanting to exercise more, maybe do some Pilates, some cardio, eating better, drinking more water, saving money, all of those things. Today, we're actually going to focus on life altering changes, like the choice to go back to school, to pursue a new calling or pick up an old passion, and specifically making those changes late in life. Now you've probably heard of a three act structure in movies or plays. It's sort of like the beginning, middle, and end of a story where the beginning is the setup, the middle is the big challenges and conflicts, and the end is the the resolution. In life, we've assumed that the first act is youth and adolescence. The second is middle age, and the third act is usually retirement. But what if you choose not to rest and retire, but to launch into a whole new era? That's what today's episode is about, people who are rejecting the idea that a productive life ends at a certain age and who see life in older age not as an ending, but a powerful and purposeful long time correspondent at member station, WBUR, in Boston. He's spent the last few years interviewing people about their decision to reimagine and reinvent themselves late in life. His series is called Third Act, and he joins us now to talk about what he's learned. Hi, Anthony. Hey, Ayesha. Nice to talk to you. Yeah. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you. So I'm intrigued by the origin story of this project. Did you decide to do this because you were feeling stuck or or you wanted a change in your life? I think there's always a bit of that going on with me, but but I think where this really started for me was about sixteen years ago. I had a bit of a health scare, which thankfully I recovered from. I was also mourning the loss of my dad, and I guess you could say that I was coming to terms with this idea that there's a lot more of my life behind me than ahead of me. And and I'm thinking for the first time, what do I really wanna do with the time that remains? And I became intrigued with stories of people who found ways to reinvent themselves late in life in interesting and inspirational ways. And just when I was dialing into this idea, Catherine Seeley of The New York Times reported a great story about a man who began this third act journey in a really fascinating way, and that story really helped launch this project. Okay. So tell me about the man in that story, that drew your attention. Yeah. So his name is Tom Andrew, and he worked, …