My Time: Gibbs Isn't Looking Back




Home \| Elder Rights \| Health \| Pension Watch \| Rural Aging \| Armed Conflict \| Aging Watch at the UN

	SEARCH	SUBSCRIBE
			Mission \| Contact Us \| Internships \| Donate Now!

back

My Time: Gibbs Isn't Looking Back

By Abigail Trafford, the Washington Post

January 13, 2004

Is Joe Gibbs an old-timer? Or a My Timer?

For days the buzz has been about how much football has changed and whether the old lion can catch up with the new game. But the real question is: How much has Joe Gibbs changed? The headlines have focused on his coming back to coach the Washington Redskins, but he'd better be moving ahead rather than resurrecting the past if he wants to have an impact in his new assignment. That's the psychological imperative in My Time.

His appointment points up the asset of age, which is experience -- a welcome advantage in a celebrity culture laced with geezer stereotypes and preoccupied with the wrinkle-free appeal of youth. Who is the Young Turk who is going to come in and rescue a failing company? Shake up a stodgy department? Accomplish a mission impossible? Invigorate a floundering football team?

Increasingly it is the Gray Turk -- the men and women of a certain age who can bring a fresh approach to a stubborn challenge. People such as James Baker, veteran of an earlier administration, now on a mission for the president to seek debt forgiveness for Iraq . Or Diane Keaton in the movie "Something's Gotta Give," who plays a woman of a certain age who wins the man -- and steals the show.

My Timers have earned a confidence that sets them apart from younger Turks. Researchers call this life empowerment. You get to be 50 or 60 and you know something about winning and losing. You've completed the tasks of early adulthood. You're battle-ready. You don't get bogged down in the trivia of striving. As one woman, 63, told me: "I don't give a hoot about superficial things anymore. I've been over the mountain too many times."

Once you've been over the mountain, you're a lot freer to do what you really want to do -- and do what you really think is best. You are relieved of the earlier burdens of adulthood -- raising young children, finding a niche in the workplace.

You're not looking out for the next rung on the career ladder. That often means you can take more risks that you could at 40. What have you got to lose? As researcher Gene D. Cohen, director of the Center on Aging, Health and Humanities at George Washington University , put it: "It's the 'if not now, when?' phenomenon. . . . It allows people to step out of the box and do something very different."

You may be in the same job . . . or the same marriage, but internally you hear the call of "If not now, when?" Rather than shutting down at 50, you open up and do something different. Sometimes it's a big difference, sometimes small. But you don't stay fixed in one place. After all, you probably have several more healthy decades to go. If you don't regenerate, you can slip into a kind of functional stagnation. You can suffer life burnout.

There's a danger in getting stuck in the high point of life. You look back on a previous job, a long-ago romance, and say -- Aha, that was the glory moment. If only I could get it back. Nothing in the present comes close. You fall into the identity trap of being only what you were: an engineer in Mission Control on Apollo 13. A wife who helped her husband rise in the bank (a husband who's been dead for 10 years). A coach who took the team to the Super Bowl. A president of the United States .

But you can't go back to what you were. Jimmy Carter is a prime example of regeneration in My Time. He achieved the high point of the presidency. And the low point of electoral defeat. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter chronicle the changes they went though in their memoir "Everything to Gain." Finally, wrote Rosalynn, they came to the "exciting discovery that our lives do not need to be limited by past experiences." In their bonus decades, they have built up the Carter Center in Atlanta and had a major impact on international politics, health and social change. In 2002, Jimmy Carter accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. Another high point .

Has Joe Gibbs been on a similar odyssey since he left the Redskins 11 years ago? Only Gibbs knows about his interior life. But his résumé suggests that he has changed. He broke away from his football past and reinvented himself in another field -- stock-car racing. He morphed his coaching talents to take on a new challenge and had a successful next career.

What will he make of this new job? He's given us some clues. At his first press conference at Redskins Park , he looked relaxed, happy and ready. Significantly, he did not wear his Super Bowl ring. "We're trying to go forward," he said, and "The past doesn't buy us much . . . ." Undoubtedly he will do some things differently and tap into that out-of-the box boldness that characterizes successful My Timers. He might even have more fun, another hallmark of My Time. "Hopefully I can enjoy it a little more than I did last time," he said.

So Joe Gibbs takes the field to start the fourth quarter: what next? Even if you aren't a football fan, this game is going to be fun to watch.