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 lateOn to another year.
It’s never too late
to change or
maybe
to become more and more
myself
Thanks for the Dhruv Khullar link. I remember 75, ha ha, my kids started taking me out to dinner for my birthday. Things were slower but not bad. This year I turned 80 and much has changed, or not, such as Covid. I am vaxxed to max. Every morning I wake up and think "wow, I'm still here." Underlying conditions and all. But you are correct, part of the price of long life is those who leave before us. The last of my aunts and uncles died this year, many of my cousins(I'm the eldest) have gone as well. Keep moving and with some luck maybe a new friend or two will manifest.
ReplyDeleteUm, fat is not so bad. Sedentary is bad. Immobile is bad.
ReplyDeleteHi Anne - should have explained further. Byron and the rest of the Clydesdale Virtual Racing Team would agree. We are a 30-year old virtual network of people who come shaped "the wrong size" for athletic endeavors. The world commonly sees us as fat, but inexplicably, even to ourselves sometimes, we are moved to move and even participate -- marathons, ultras, triathletes and more. That is, we're fat people whose joy is to be fit.
ReplyDeleteHi Celia -- I figured my older friends would find my musings funny and self-indulgent. And they did. A 94 year old friend drove across the bridge from Marin to bless our endeavor in Nevada -- what am I complaining about? But I took the day...
ReplyDeleteThanks for that clarification. Days later, it still stings enough that I felt compelled to revisit the post to see if you replied. I don't mean to be a killjoy, but if the phrase were "It's okay to grow old. Just don't grow old and poor!" I don't imagine it would be repeated. I guess I'm missing the context, but this hurt me.
ReplyDeleteDear Anne, glad you came back. I hurt you and probably others and that's bad. And wrong. Many apologies, and more important, will try to take opportunities to make amends.
ReplyDeleteThis, if you haven't yet encountered it, might help: google "on the media podcast" "the F word". Apparently we fat people are NOT at extraordinary risk for COVID!