Asking for Help . . .

I’m grateful to those of you who are reading my posts here on Breaking Age. You motivate me to continue writing. In fact, you’ve motivated me to write a book.

I'm asking for your help: read the introduction below, and answer 2 questions in the comments.

-Do you know what this book is about?
-Would you want to read it?

Your feedback would help me continue to put this book together. I will appreciate anything you have to say about my introduction. Here is the intro:

INTRODUCTION

At 78, I walked into my first workshop at the Modern Elder Academy in Baja, Mexico, and immediately wondered if I’d made a mistake. Sixteen people sat in a circle, and I took a seat next to Chip Conley, the founder—a former hospitality entrepreneur, bestselling author, someone who’d advised Airbnb through its explosive growth. The kind of person whose TED talk you’ve probably seen. Everyone in that circle seemed accomplished, articulate, already wise in ways I wasn’t sure I was. I felt a little like I’d wandered into the wrong seminar.

George Gobel once sat between Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope on The Tonight Show and said, “Did you ever think the world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?” I was feeling like a pair of brown shoes at that moment.

So when Chip turned to me early in the session and said, “Tell me, Pat, how many years do you have left in your adult life?” I was caught off guard. This wasn’t the kind of attention I’d expected, or frankly wanted.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that.”

“Just take a guess.”

I did some quick math. I’d lived this long, stayed in good health, took care of myself. “Let’s say 98.”

Then Chip did something simple that reframed everything. “If you live to be 98, and your adult life started at 18, your adult life span is 80 years. You’ve already lived 60 of those years—that’s 75% of your adult life. But you still have 25% left.”

I’d never thought about it like that. Up until that moment, I thought I was coming in for a landing and just hoping it would be smooth.

Later that day, someone in the circle quoted a line from Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

I’d heard that line before. Maybe you have too. It’s one of those quotes that shows up on coffee mugs and Instagram posts, the kind of thing that’s easy to nod at and keep scrolling. But sitting there, with Chip’s math still working on me, it landed differently.

Twenty-five percent. One wild and precious life.

Those two ideas collided, and something shifted. I wasn’t winding down. I wasn’t managing decline. I had a quarter of my adult life still ahead of me—and the question wasn’t whether I had time left, but what I was going to do with it.

I didn’t have a clear answer. I just knew I wanted to begin.

One of the mysteries of life is that we get what we need as soon as we know what we need. Maybe that’s why, after the workshop, I found myself reading Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell writes about a pattern that shows up in myths across every culture: the hero hears a call to adventure, leaves the comfortable and predictable world—boring, even—crosses a threshold into the unknown, faces trials, and returns home changed, carrying something valuable back for others.

I realized I didn’t need to have it all figured out before I began. I just needed to begin.

But beginning meant facing something uncomfortable: the patterns that had shaped the first three-quarters of my life weren’t going to serve me in the last quarter. I needed to understand what those patterns were, where they came from, and how they were quietly sabotaging my chance at a meaningful next chapter.

That’s when I discovered the Enneagram.

I’d heard of it before—seen it dismissed as corporate team-building or New Age personality typing. But when I actually studied it, I found something different: a sophisticated map of human motivation that explained not just what I did, but why I kept doing it, even when it didn’t work anymore.

I’m a Four with a Three wing. If you know the Enneagram, you know what that means: a streak of envy and melancholy paired with a relentless drive to achieve. For most of my life, that combination pushed me forward. I wanted to create something meaningful, to be recognized, to matter. It worked well enough in my career, in my earlier years.

But at 83? The usual pathways to achievement aren’t really there anymore. And without understanding that pattern, I found myself stuck—scrolling through LinkedIn, comparing myself to younger people and their milestones, replaying all the things I didn’t do, all the ways I wasn’t as successful as they appeared to be.

Without the insight I gained from the Enneagram, I’m pretty sure I’d still be stuck in that loop, heading toward a resentful and unhappy future.

Instead, I realized I had a choice: stay stuck in those patterns, or redirect that Four-wing-Three energy toward something that actually mattered at this stage of life. That redirection led me to start Breaking Age, a nonprofit focused on changing how we think about aging and life transitions. Now I feel more purposeful, more engaged with my community, more able to use my gifts in service of others—not for applause or recognition, but because it’s the work that wants to be done.

That’s what this book is about.

Not the Enneagram as a system to master or memorize. Not life transitions as a problem to solve. But the specific, practical question of how the patterns that shaped your earlier life show up differently—and often work against you—when circumstances change.

If you’ve never heard of the Enneagram, don’t worry. I’m not going to ask you to take a test or figure out if you’re a Six or a Nine. Instead, I’m going to introduce you to nine different people navigating major life transitions with nine different patterns of thinking and behavior. Real people facing real changes. You’ll recognize yourself in some of them. Maybe all of them at different moments.

If you have studied the Enneagram, you’ll find something here too: a lens you might not have considered. Most Enneagram work focuses on personal growth, relationships, career. But what happens to a One’s need for perfection when the body stops cooperating? What does a Seven’s fear of missing out look like at 72? How does a Two’s lifelong pattern of caring for others shift when they become the one who needs care?

You don’t need to be 78 or 83 to read this. The patterns we’re exploring show up in every transition—retirement, empty nest, illness, loss, reinvention. Anytime life asks us to let go of one way of being and find another.

My old friend Bill Zaner used to say, “Getting old really sucks... unless you do it right.”

This book is about doing it right.

Not by pretending major life transitions don’t involve loss—they do. But by understanding the patterns that keep us stuck in those losses, unable to see what else might be possible.

The Enneagram doesn’t give you a new script to follow. It shows you the script you’ve been unconsciously running so you can choose whether to keep running it.

This book is an invitation to see clearly, to choose differently, and to discover what becomes possible when you stop being controlled by your survival strategy and start living from something deeper.

Mary Oliver asked the question that matters most:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

The dissatisfaction you feel? That’s the question landing. Not as accusation, but as invitation.

Not “what have you done?” but “what will you do now?”

Whatever transition you’re facing is waiting.

Let’s begin.