You want to buy the latest fashion, but you back away because of your age, or your height or weight, fearing you will look foolish.
You see an event that interests you, possibly a concert, but it's a young people's event, and you think you'll feel out of place. If you're a younger person, it might be something that you think only old people are likely to attend, so you opt out.
Your anniversary is coming up, or the birthday of a loved one, and you look at dinner in a fine restaurant, but the prices scare the daylights out of you, so you go a different direction.
A vacation to an exotic country calls to you, but the front page of the newspaper has a lead story about some tourists who were arrested, or abducted, and you stay home.
You, my friends, are suffering from the Terrible Toos - an affliction that leads to entirely too many of us reaching the end of our lives wishing we had done more with, or during, our lives.
Too, that wonderful word that many of us forget to use instead of 'to,' can be entirely too restrictive. The Oxford dictionary defines the adverb too as: "to a higher degree than is desirable, permissible or possible; excessively: he was driving too fast | he wore suits that seemed a size too small for him." Therein lies the problem.
You want to go to that young people's club, but you think you're too old. You are too afraid to take that vacation in Morocco, or you're too afraid of going to that posh restaurant because you're not really familiar with the ins and outs of fine dining. You want to take your husband or wife out for that special evening, but it might be too expensive.
Many of us allow our fears to cheat us out of exciting and fun experiences because of the Terrible Toos?
We're all subject to this syndrome. After all, we've evolved this marvelous brain that sends up more warning signals than Homeland Security on a nervous day.
That mental claxon going off in our heads is probably a good thing; it is likely responsible in part for our survival as a species, warning us about casually putting things like mushrooms we know nothing about in our mouths. But it can also go berserk and impede our enjoyment of life, raising too many flags about all sorts of concerns based on supposition, rumor or media hype.
We develop complex explanations for our fears, justifying why we shouldn't or can't do something, when the truth is we're moving into unfamiliar territory. Not wanting to move out of our comfort zones, we invoke the Terrible Toos as a way to explain why we chickened out. More often than not, I'd guess, we're really worried about what someone else will think or say about us.
My wife and I have worked hard on overcoming the TT syndrome. We go to young people's clubs, staying out until 2 a.m., although there are few in our age group out there at that time of night, and we pretty much try to live our lives to the fullest, hoping our money holds out.
We've been to Tost in Fremont on a weekend night to hear Picoso, a Latin band that Alphonso, owner of La Isla Puerto Rican restaurant in Ballard, plays with and told us about, hanging out until they closed the place.
We've dropped by Fado' in Pioneer Square at midnight, meeting young people out on the town, celebrating an engagement or just partying.
And we've gone to a show at the Triple Door downtown, then closed the night in the Musiquarium Lounge with some great blues, jazz or Latin music.
Many times we have young people come up to say hello - fascinated, we suspect, that a couple in their mid-to-late 60s are (a) out that late, and (b) actually enjoying the music and crowds. We joke that they probably think we missed the bus back to the old folks' home. We like to think we've shown them life doesn't end when your hair turns gray.
No, we can't party all weekend like we did when we were younger, but we still enjoy adventure, music, great food and wine, and all the things we did then - we just enjoy them in smaller doses, with a bit more discipline and, I like to think, more fully.
The point is, whether you're young, old, fat, skinny, tall or short, don't let the Terrible Toos get in the way of enjoying the things in life that you love.
I often say that when I'm taking that last breath, I don't want to be thinking about something I wish I'd done. Oh, I know there will always be something I haven't done, but it won't be because I said it was "too" anything. That would be too easy.
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