The First Day Of The Rest Of My Life

I contacted Carly Simon, whom I'd known when we were younger, because I'd heard she'd been dealing with multiple blows: she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy at the same time she and her husband were drifting apart, her kids were moving off on their own and her record company was abandoning her. "I felt discarded like a dog," she told me. "I'd had so much rejection I couldn't take it anymore." Forced to give up her apartment in Manhattan when the rent was tripled, she moved by herself to Martha's Vineyard where she started recording songs in her daughter's old bedroom. She'd stay up late, mixing tracks on her own, just trying to please herself. "I was doing what I'd done at 19," she says, "making sounds I liked. That was the only star I could follow."

Six months after our talk, she receiveda call from Richard Perry, the superstar producer with whom she'd made "You're So Vain" and other hits. He asked her to collaborate on some romantic ballads. They funded the recording themselves and when they were satisfied, sold it to Columbia. The week it was released as "Moonlight Serenade," it hit No. 7 on the Billboard chart.

How sweet it was--and unexpected. Carly told me, in another moment, that she wants to learn "how to walk down the ladder gracefully. I have this image--I'd like to get smaller and smaller in a relevant way."

It's a gorgeous image. I can picture her--tall, willowy and magnetic--walking down the staircase. But how could I do that? My eyes have been habitually trained upward. My shoulders are hitched forward, my orientation is toward rising rather than descending, and to reverse that feels like turning a train around.

People I respect had told me I needed to "surrender," that at this stage of life, instead of powering your way to your goals it's better to listen and let things unfold. But I detested the notion of surrender. It felt like giving up in defeat.

As I spoke with dozens who'd managed to make it out of the narrows, I saw that each had had a conversion, and each was different. For Carly Simon, it was learning to walk down the ladder with grace. For Tom Hayden, who, after 18 years in the California legislature, lost an election to a man half his age, then collapsed with heart failure and had a quintuple bypass, it was "putting your career drives down." He gave up running for office and shifted his focus to reading and writing, speaking out and teaching. "But not a day goes by that I don't have conflict about it," he said. For a friend in Chicago, it was quitting his job of 30 years as a tax attorney and starting a nonprofit musical company.