Upworthy · 12 hours ago

96-year-old Insists That the 'Third Part of life,' From Age 75 on, Is Actually Awesome

At 96, Alice McGinty does resistance training three times a week, travels to Costa Rican jungles, and shows her paintings - work that has grown more vivid and abstract since macular degeneration narrowed her world to color alone. What she is pushing against is quieter than any of that: "It is subtle and unspoken," she says of the dismissal she feels. "It is a quietness." McGinty has named something many older people sense but rarely have the platform to articulate - that society's silence around the later decades of life is its own kind of message, and that refusing to receive it is a form of courage. Perhaps the most striking thing she offers isn't her yoga practice or her Instagram following, but this hard-won interior shift: "I have learned how to trust myself... perhaps one of the greatest gifts of getting older is realizing that trusting myself isn't selfish; it is finally becoming someone I can count on." She is not waiting to be studied, supported, or seen - she is simply, insistently, living.