75

How odd -- here I am, turning age 75. Still here and still kicking.

What does 75 mean? Guess I'll find out this year.

I've learned that I can't do physically what I could do even a couple of years ago. Physical training just doesn't produce the same bodily results. But I keep going. Of necessity, I've learned, at my much lesser level, what the mountaineer Conrad Anker observed:

“Eventually,” he allows, “the bell-curve of what I do will get to the point where walking down a path will be my personal Everest. And I’m fine with that."

Well, I'm fine most days.

I concur with my Clydesdale Virtual Racing Team compatriot Byron Oost:

"It's okay to grow old. Just don't grow old and fat!"

Working on that one, just as most of us Clydes have been for decades.

Dhruv Khullar made these observations writing about the pandemic, but they seem true more generally.

Aging involves confronting an ever-expanding set of risks; it means accepting that one’s days are growing more dangerous. A strain, a pain, a virus that in youth might have passed without notice—each new malady becomes saturated with a sense of foreboding. There is no escaping the bodily tax of time.

I find that, having got to this age, many of the people I've known and loved have died. I miss them every day. I notice people my own age falling away. The locution "passed on" stops feeling like an annoying euphemism for death and seems more an accurate description of the great flowing course of humanity.

I cling to the wisdom of my friend Malkia, written from within boundless grief for the woman they loved, for their enduring struggling community, for their suffering ancestors:

It’s never too late
It’s never too late
to change or
maybe
to become more and more
myself

On to another year.