Pearls of Elul 5786 - Day Eighteen

August 30 | 17 Elul

The following article is much longer than what we include in our daily Pearls of Elul. And yet, it is a worthwhile read at this time of the year. It appeared in The Free Press in late September of 2025 and was part of their “Ancient Wisdom” series. The article was written by long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad and, as the title suggests, is about learning to forgive ourselves. Please note that this article does make references to sexual abuse.

While we could have excerpted this article, it made the most sense to not do so since it does speak to many issues that are relevant to the High Holidays, among them: honesty, what we learn from our past, atonement, and forgiveness.

How Diana Nyad Learned to Forgive Herself

In this country, we seem to assign great significance to our birthdays. Yet, all along, what more is there to do—at any age, on any given day—than to rise to seize your dreams, to reach for your best self, to face your hardships, to connect with your loved ones, to relish your adventures?

Nevertheless, today, at 76, I can’t pretend aging is not on my mind. Perhaps today, I have something to add to the American conversation, the American fixation, on aging.

It’s not the number that alarms me. What chokes me is the stunningly rapid passage of time. I have all my life, even as a child, been at the edge of panic about life zipping by with no controls to slow it down. I was struck as a kid at the scene from a 1923 silent film in which actor Harold Lloyd clung to the hands of a giant clock, dangerously high above the streets of New York City, desperately trying to wrestle with the hands of time. I keep my eye on the clock all night long, awakening for a moment to see that it’s now 2:44 a.m., now 3:58 a.m. In a sense, I’ve been wrestling those clock hands myself.

I am admittedly functioning under a lifelong state of sleep deprivation, staying up quite late and getting up before dawn, obsessed to capture every possible waking hour. Perhaps that is why I doze in my car at red lights in the afternoon. (Don’t drive with me!) What is it, exactly, that I’m afraid of? It’s not death.

I swam from Havana to Key West at the age of 64, and that crossing gave my closest friends and family reason to fear for my life—but I felt that I had to do it. Just as the extreme alpine climbers must justify their potential death on the highest peaks to their loved ones, I had to make believers out of those who worried for me way out in that epic ocean, without a shark cage. But whether we are to die embroiled in the wrath of the open seas or otherwise, the contract is understood. We are, all of us, going to die. The question is: How will we look back at the hours, the days, the years, under the pressured realization that we can never live any of those days over again?

At 76, more than any age before, I find myself prompted to take stock of my life. The hands on that clock seem to be ticking ahead at a faster rate than ever before. It’s time for me to assess my past at this juncture, in order to do the right thing with whatever wild and precious time is left to me.

I spent decades furious with myself for not throwing my sexual abuser, my very own swimming coach when I was a teenager, off me. Why didn’t I bash him up against a wall? Why didn’t I tell my mom, or my school principal? As is often the syndrome in such cases, the young victim takes all the blame for the abuse. It’s all our fault. It wasn’t until my 50s that I found peace in no longer blaming myself, but then there followed a thunderous berating of myself for wallowing for so long in that self-blame in the first place.

In cases of trauma, negative self-regard and regrettable, unevolved behaviors become our coping mechanisms. His assaults had left me feeling worthless. Denigrated and shamed through those high school years, anything I did accomplish seemed empty, inconsequential. For decades, I took to acting out. I was driven to be the obnoxious center of attention. I embellished my records, not capable of accepting with pride the things I did achieve. To the outside world, I was always bold and fearless. Inside, I was lost. At some point, we hopefully do evolve into the people we choose to be, not the people we became out of survival. I can’t go back and erase those early days of confusion and self-loathing. Yet I have since become a person I can truly be proud of. I’ve come to forgive myself.

I’ve also grappled with the regrets of not being a better friend to my mother. All those years I lived in New York City in my 20s and 30s—a place Lucy loved and where she gave birth to me, where we spent my early childhood days, just Lucy and I—would it have killed me to invite her from Florida for a weekend of Broadway shows and fun dinners? It wasn’t until Lucy was disengaging under the cruelty of Alzheimer’s that I finally turned my whole being toward her. In the throes of her dementia, we were sitting in the rose garden one day and Lucy turned to me with pain in her eyes. She said, “I was the worst mother in the world, wasn’t I?” I knew what she meant. This was her apology. We at long last found closure to our missing bond through my teenage trauma. I embraced Lucy and said to her, “You were the best mother in the world.” Candidly, that wasn’t true, but my saying so seemed to ease her troubled mind.

Such is life. I wish I had been the person I am today through the entire journey. Yet we are most likely doing our best, given our limitations, at every turn. I’ll wager that I’ll say, at 86, that I wish I had known at 76 what I will know then.

The French have a wonderful expression: Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait. Loosely translated, it means If only the young knew and the aged could do. The inherent facts cannot be changed. We age. We don’t have much wisdom in our youth, but our eyes and muscles and reflexes and memory skills are strong and sharp. Then our myriad faculties decline and slow as we age. Just as we lament slowing at older ages, we regret not having known more in our younger years. But human life wouldn’t be as it is if we could garner all our older wisdom while young. We must earn it.

On the jeunesse/vieillesse pendulum, I think we have it better at older ages. We have no control over the vapidity of our youth, but we do have many ways to maintain our vigor at older ages. We can eat well, exercise rigorously, keep our minds fertile and busy. I value a superlative level of fitness, eating simply—after all, it has been said that we are what we eat—and I attempt to live a daily mantra of gratitude, focusing on what I do have rather than what I don’t. Perhaps these are my ways to control that relentless ticking of the hands of time.

I can’t go back and erase those early days of confusion and self-loathing. Yet I have since become a person I can truly be proud of.

We age gradually. We don’t wake up one day to find gravity tugging at our skin, or the trepidation of negotiating down a steep set of stairs, or an inability to recall names. And it seems to me that during that process, we begin to face the tipping point between will and grace. On one side, we still pulse with the pride and will to persist, and yet a voice of reason within urges us to accept and relinquish.

Twelve years ago, upon swimming from Havana to Key West, people wanted to know how I could possibly do something so grueling, so epic if you will, in my mid-60s, when I had failed at that crossing at age 28. The answer to that question is that I refuse to bow to conventional dictates of limitations. Not only was I thoroughly confident that my 64-year-old body was as strong and perhaps even better, endurance-wise, than it had been at 28, but the mental strength in my older years is vastly superior to what it was in my youth. I have better pain tolerance now, as well as better perspective on enduring the long hours. My time from Havana to Key West, at age 64, was 52 hours, 54 minutes, longer and stronger than I had ever achieved in my 20s.

At the same time, I admit that standing on that Havana beach a fifth time, utterly aware the odds of making it all the way across were slim to none, while my resolve of the moment was undeniable, there was a whisper further back in my mind. A whisper that told me if I didn’t make it, that a day of grace, of letting go of my lifelong dream, had to be near. For the sake of my team and their mammoth efforts and yearslong commitment, I was going to have to summon the courage to hold the life lessons, the discoveries, the friendships deep in my heart and move on. And I knew that very summer morning—August 31, 2013—that moving on would take far more backbone than training another full year and giving it a sixth try.

Two-and-a-half days later, the first words I spoke on that triumphant day on that Key West beach were, “We should never, ever give up.” The second words were, “It’s never too late to chase your dreams.” I was saved from that dreaded decision of letting go and moving on. My dream was fulfilled.

I can flat-out declare that these years, the 70s, are the best of my life. I have surely known the highs of joy and the depths of feeling at many different stages, but the daily ease and well-being of these days is unlike any period to date. I find myself smiling, for no apparent reason, day by day. My acceptance and appreciation of others has grown exponentially throughout the years. I stand at the ocean’s edge, whether about to swim out to the horizon or not, beaming with awe at our breathtakingly beautiful blue planet. I look into brown and green and blue and hazel eyes, dogs’ eyes too, with wonder at the feelings flowing to and from me and another being. I bound out of bed each day, lucky to enjoy the genetics of good health. I recognize the healing aspect of laughter. And love.

Maybe I’ll always be one who leans toward the will side of the will/grace balance. Maybe I’ll be one who does not “go gentle into that good night.” All I can assure you of is that you can achieve your dreams—indeed, be a badass—at any age.

It’s not too late.

It’s never too late.