We've all been there. A family photo from a treasured vacation can grab hold of us in a heartbeat. The pang of yearning to go back to that moment in time. Maybe the kids were still young enough to see you as Supermom or Superdad. You were younger and maybe more fit. Maybe you had more hair, or at least less coming out your ears.

Other things can tempt our gaze to linger on the rearview mirror as well. An old favorite song. A season—Christmas, anyone? The scent of cookies baking in the oven. Clothes you can't believe ever fit you. The list could be a long one.

There's certainly nothing wrong with nostalgia, fond memories of times gone by. Unless, of course, you try to live your life there. Life is not in a photograph or treasured recollection. Life is what lies before you, waiting to be discovered. It's a river, rolling ever onward, but inexorably forward.

There's a reason the windshield in your car is bigger than the rearview mirror.

Here's the thing with memories. Our brains tend to smooth out the rough edges before storing them away. You tend to forget the "kids wouldn't stop fighting" temper tantrum you had an hour before the family photo in front of the Grand Canyon. That's a good thing for the most part, but it can create a false allure for the "good old days" that didn't exist when they were just "regular days". In fact, those "good old days" may not be any better than today or the "good new days" that lie before you. If you're too pre-occupied looking back, you might miss many opportunities to make today a day to be remembered.

This is where the opportunity you have to reinvent ourselves comes in—the sparkling platinum pill of self-reinvention.

As you move into the third period of your life, you are better suited to define who you really want to be than you ever have been before. I know people tend to think that this work was done mostly in your teen years and maybe early twenties—you decided where you wanted to go to college and/or what you wanted your career to be, setting your life on a fixed trajectory.

But how many times have you had a thought like, If I knew then what I know now...? Or, If I had it to do over again...? In other words, with the benefit of seeing how things turned out, what would you have done differently? Pondering this question is the beginning of the wisdom that can enable you to set yourself onto a new path, if you so choose.

In addition to this wisdom, there are a number of other factors to keep in mind if you're considering breaking out of the comfort zone of being set in your ways. After all, as the saying goes, "Comfort zones are where dreams go to die."

You've had plenty of time and journeys of self-exploration by now to get comfortable with the real you—warts, rashes, and all. In addition, hopefully you've been blessed with enough honest relationships that there have been people who have held up a magic mirror to help you see your blind spots. The one that helps you realize you look more George Costanza than George Clooney or more like Rosy O'Donnell than Jennifer Aniston.

The result of recognizing your imperfections over your years is that you should have developed a more mature self-awareness. It's highly likely that you know yourself better now than you did 20, 30, 40, or more years ago. You know what makes you jump out of bed in the morning, excited to greet the day, and you know what kind of outlook makes you consider pulling the covers tight and staying in bed. If you allow yourself to set sail from the harbor you've always known, that should enable you to enjoy more of the first kind of day and fewer of the second kind.

I get it; change is hard. But too many people miss out on adventures and opportunities simply because they can't find the motivation to overcome fear and inertia. As Dr. M. Scott Peck said in his brilliant book The Road Less Traveled, "Move out or grow in any dimension and pain as well as joy will be your reward. A full life will be full of pain."

A positive side effect of a higher degree of self-awareness is that the more self-aware you become, the stronger your will power becomes. Here's how that works:  you know yourself better than you ever have, so by now you know what is likely to trip you up and keep you from achieving your self-transformation. You undoubtedly also have multiple strategies you have developed over the years to help you slay those dragons, meaning that the chances are higher than ever that you will be able to channel all your energy toward achieving your reinvention goals.

You may be familiar with any number of the multitude of books available to help you develop stronger will power or find ways to coax your future self to behave in ways that will help you to achieve your goals. Some of my favorites include Atomic Habits by James Clear, Mindset:  The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck, and Daring Greatly by Brene Brown (here's a link to a review I wrote about this book).

Here's a more sobering realization you may have had in recent years, or will be having within the next few. I don't know about you, but when I was in my teens, the horizon of my life seemed endless, like gazing at the sea from the beach. You know it has an end somewhere out there, but it's hard to imagine when all you see is sky and sea. Into my 20s, 30s, and even 40s, the other shore seemed distant, like I had plenty of time. Moving later into my 50s, getting closer to 60, I have developed a more realistic sense that my days remaining are not endless. 

I do not say this to be morbid—far from it, actually. I say this to point out the increase in my resolve to pursue fulfillment with passion fueled by the realization that I'm running out of time. We all are, really, since nobody knows which day will be their last, so it's a good perspective to have no matter how young you are. To quote Abraham Lincoln, "In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years." I am more steadfast about becoming a better version of myself than I ever imagined possible. As Mae West famously said, "You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough."

Another thought along these lines is that if you're waiting for conditions to be just right before you take a step toward reinventing yourself, you might just run out of time. To me, one of the most tragic things is for a person to get to the end of their life with their head full of regret and their heart full of emptiness, the last vestige of promise unfulfilled.

I am determined not to be that person, and you should be no less committed.

Maybe by now you've come to the realization, like I have, that the closer you get to retirement, the more your choices and actions become about fulfilling something for you or within you than they are about proving something to anyone, even yourself. Did you stifle your creative side to enable your successful career as an engineer? Maybe now is the time to get yourself an easel and some paintbrushes, or whatever supplies you need for your desired craft. Did you have to pass on your dream of getting a college degree in order to jump right into the workforce to support yourself or your family? Only when they plant you in the ground will it be too late to return to that dream.

What does your heart long to do? What passion will keep you jumping out of bed in the morning, eager to face the day? What's holding you back, besides excuses? 

Close your eyes for a few moments and envision yourself doing that thing, pursuing that dream. If you can imagine it, find a way to make it happen. As James Allen wrote in his book As a Man Thinketh, "A person is limited only by the thoughts that he chooses." You don't need to get there in one day—figure out what the first step is to start you in that direction, then take it. In many cases, you don't need to wait until you retire to get started. In fact, you might be better off if you get started before you retire since it will give you something to eagerly anticipate as you count down your working days.

Start today.

If your life has been anything like mine, it's been like a ride on a bullet train. The countryside of my days speeds by at an alarming rate. Just the other day, I was a teenager. I blinked a few times, and just like that, I'm moving into my late 50s. I'm not complaining—I was blessed enough to marry the love of my life, then together we were blessed by three mostly great kids (we all have our moments). I've had a handful of deep and lasting friendships, a successful and rewarding career, and reasonably good health.

What I haven't had enough of, though, is free time. Although I've lamented that at times, in retrospect, I now see that as a good thing as well, since my time was consumed with the aforementioned blessings. 

Now my kids are not children any more (but they'll always be my kids!), so my weekends are no longer consumed by their myriad activities. Of course, I hope I will always have a part in helping them find their way in the world, but this is now not nearly so time-consuming as it once was.

My career still demands a lot from me, but now that I can get occasional glimpses of the light at the end of my career tunnel, I'm less inclined to dedicate the excessive amount of extra time to it as I once did.

All that is to say that I am starting to find a little bit more free time than I have had in decades. Maybe you are finding it, too. 

Going back to the choice mentioned at the start of this article, this leads us to the question of how you will spend this little bit of extra time. How you answer that question now will probably set you on a trajectory that will become a pattern as that little bit of extra time becomes a lot of extra time—i.e., when you retire. 

So, what will you choose? Will you just watch more stuff (the polite word) on TV, hoping nothing changes all while lamenting that they are changing, and at an alarming rate? Or will you use these small slices of time to take baby steps toward reinventing yourself, toward making the life you've always wanted, toward making yourself the you you've always wanted?

Will you actively use time to your advantage, or passively succumb to it, allowing it to weigh you down with regrets never to be resolved?

Your life has always been and will only ever be exactly what you make of it.