Cling to Your Lead and You’ll Lose: A Midlife Playbook

I don’t take the Life Force lightly. It’s the mysterious voltage that animates us, that flicks the switch from sloth to spark. One minute you’re groggy and half-dreaming, the next you’re lacing up your sneakers, firing up the espresso machine, and attacking your kettlebell workout like you’re in a Rocky montage scored by Miles Davis. The Life Force says: Get up. Get after it. Drink, eat, laugh, lift, love, live—before the curtain drops.

Even when we’re slumped in a funk, sulking like a teenager who just discovered Camus, the Life Force doesn’t vanish. It simply retreats, muffled beneath layers of melancholy and cheap self-pity, waiting for the clouds to lift so it can slip back in with a jolt.

I’ve been thinking about this lately as I inch toward sixty-four. The aging brain doesn’t hide its compromises. The body offers new aches like parting gifts from yesterday’s workout. And I keep reading about public figures—my age or younger—dropping dead from heart attacks and cancer, as if the universe is whispering, “You’re next.”

The awareness of mortality, while useful in the Stoic-philosopher sense, has a dark gravitational pull. It makes you want to swaddle yourself in self-pity, curl up with grim hypotheticals, and mentally prewrite your own eulogy. I’m no sage, but I’ve noticed: the older you get, the easier it is to start thinking about death instead of living your life.

And that’s where the football metaphor barges in—uninvited, but apt. Picture a team nursing a small lead. Instead of playing their usual game, they start playing not to lose. They abandon boldness, creativity, and flow. They tighten up. They stall. They cling. And then they lose.

That’s what obsessing over death becomes: Playing Not to Lose Syndrome. You stop being you. You start tiptoeing through your own damn life, hands over your eyes, praying not to fall. But life’s not won through timid pacing. You win by doing what got you here in the first place—living like hell, moving the ball down the field, trusting your strength, and swinging the kettlebell with fury and joy.

Yes, I’ll admit it: the fearful doppelgänger lives in me too. He bites his nails and speaks in doomsday whispers. But so does the joyful lifer, the one who’s still in love with breakfast, jazz, hard workouts, and writing rants like this one. Maybe being fully human means acknowledging both—the brave and the cowardly—and choosing, as often as possible, to side with the one who gets up and dances anyway.

Life doesn’t reward those who cling. It rewards those who play to win—until the final whistle.