I think I’ve passed a milestone of some kind. You’re never sure at the time, I suppose. I am basing this opinion on the fact that I find myself looking back at something that I have routinely looked ahead to see. And that is being old.

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post that I called IOYK. Properly speaking, there should have been a comma between the O and the Y, but my mind’s eye saw it as a bumpersticker kind of sentiment and your really don’t punctuate bumperstickers.

It stands for “I’m Old, You Know,” and I treated it as an all too readily available excuse for not doing something you really could do if you needed to.

I began noticing the use of that excuse—phrased, of course in a variety of ways—when I moved to a senior center seven years ago. I mentally filed it under “How People Talk Here.” But now I have found that the expression has morphed into something I did not have in mind when it first occurred to me. It has become a source of success and encouragement. It has come to define how I feel about the way I am living.

Maybe some examples. When I am waking up in the morning, I practice breathing until I get the breath I was hoping for: large, deep, effortless. Then I stop and celebrate it a little. Then I get up. Then, when I am making the coffee, I have to reach the filters in an upper cupboard. The cupboard is much more “upper” than it was several years ago, but if I reach it smoothly and if I pull just one paper filter away from the pack of filters, I stop briefly to enjoy those two successes.

That may sound pathetic, but I wanted to start small enough to engage your interest. There is, in these examples, a willingness to focus on very small discrete acts. That is probably what you noticed first. But there is also a willingness to celebrate “achievements.” And how did getting a coffee filter from an upper cupboard get to be an “achievement?” That happened when I lowered the criterion for success down to the place where there would be a lot of successes.

That’s my superpower. It isn’t as dumb as I have made it sound so far, really it isn’t, but before I tell you just how it has an inner rationale that is worth exploring, let me make brief mention of a “superpower” that my brother, Mark, says I have. We are out riding out bikes in Portland and come up to a light that is just about to change from red to green. Just about. I slow down; I shift into a lower gear. I can time this light if I am careful. But, it turns out that I can’t, so I get off my bike, at which point the light changes. According to Mark, that’s my superpower. I can change the light from red to green by the simple act of getting off my bike. Some superpower, right?

That’s a faux superpower and Mark and I both know it. But my ability to lower the criterion for success down to the place where I can experience a success when I need it actually is an ability I am proud of. And it is—can be—included in IOYK if “old” is seen as the context that makes celebrating these “successes” plausible.

Here’s another way to look at it. Rolling friction is less than starting friction. If your car is stuck on the ice or in the mud, anything you can do to get that very first start toward rotating the wheel is really important. Why? Because every other rotation will benefit from the momentum. That first little success—that breath or that coffee filter—establishes rolling friction as the standard that must be met and it is a lower standard.

Or, just another metaphor really but I remember this one from my basketball playing days, a really solid defensive effort can set up some amazing offensive achievements immediately following. And it isn’t just me. As the NCAA basketball season winds down and as March Madness prepares to crank up, I see it all the time on TV. I see a really spectacular defensive action by one of Connecticut’s guards, say, and I start to look at what that guard is going to do at the offensive end on the next play. Will he take the shot he has been passing up? Will it go in? You’d be surprised.

This particular twist on IOYK isn’t quite as easy as I have made it sound so far. You have to be able to take pleasure in the success for it to have the effect you want it to have. I fail at getting that breath, that particular breath, several times before I get the one I have been trying for. That helps me really enjoy it when I get it. If my life were not full of things I care about and that IOYK helps me to enjoy, then “successes” of the kind I have been describing wouldn’t really matter. I know that because I have had some experiences of pervasive depression when nothing at all mattered. Failures were insignificant (in the most literal sense of that term) and successes meaningless. And since they didn’t mean anything, they didn’t help. All the frictions continued to be starting frictions as if some otherwise pervasive law of physics had been repealed the minute I turned by back.

In my current use of IOYK, it is “old” that serves as the justification for the new lowered criteria. I don’t mean “old” in the purely chronological sense, which, as it pertains to life in a senior center, is clearly meaningless. I have, in fact, experienced a noticeable erosion in the abilities, both physical and mental, that I used to count on. I have become “old” in the experiential sense.

That could lead, obviously, to a lot of failures if I were dumb enough to continue to expect my mind and my body to operate in the same ways and at the same levels that they once did. Of course they don’t. But they do operate in a way that provides considerable pleasure in the “successes” I experience. The successes are provided by meeting and exceeding the criteria for success. And I set the criteria. Not whimsically; not casually. The new criteria are, in fact, achievements of their own kind.

And the root of it all is the ability to take real pleasure in the things I can still do. I can, for instance, get up and go to Starbucks and write a blog post that I have been wanting to write for some time now.