Time Flies

Just like the pest that circles your head while hiking in the mountains, age circles around your eyes, your waist, your joints and those synapses in your brain. I never thought about getting older but somehow it happened. I thought I would be a runner into my 80s until an autoimmune disease decided to destroy the joints in my feet leaving me less than mobile. I look around and find many of my friends in the same shape and we were the active ones. The ones who worked out regularly, ate healthy, employed stress management techniques - it really doesn't seem to matter, time flies and pesty bugs get the better of our bodies. I'm still recreating my here and now based on the fact that I can't go to the gym five days a week. That was what I did. I'm not sure what to do now and am still figuring out how much movement I can endure before the pain kicks me in the butt. I have a degree in PE and a master's in Exercise Physiology so my life has been based on movement, active, running, biking, hiking, skiing, kinds of movement. Just trying to get my feet into my snowboard boots can leave me grimacing and limping and up until last winter I endured the pain because I couldn't not go but his last winter, I never got near the slopes. It scares me to know that, to know my life is changing and out of my control. I know my sisters are sitting back and laughing because they never exercised a day in their lives and both are enjoying relatively good health while I limp and sometimes consider crawling upstairs.

Echoing in my head is a refrain I often repeated to my child as she grew up "life is not fair" boy that's an understatement. It's just not. My friend who has ovarian cancer has been an organic vegetarian all her life and regular exerciser - so much for living a clean life and having it pay off. Sometimes life is just a crap shoot and you just deal with whatever comes your way.

So enough of the pity party. There has been one bright spot in the changes age has brought. It is that I have learned how to sit still and not feel guilty. I do sudoku in the evenings to relax and feel no pangs because I my saucony's lie dormant in the closet. I still lace them up to walk to the mail box. It's strange this time of transition, I both fear and look forward to it.

How has age affected you? Did you expect it? Are you ever angry about it? Has it come with unseen blessings? I would love to hear your stories.

Writing Backwards

It's weird to think about aging. Instead of a biological clock ticking it's our lifespan clock taking pieces of us and scattering them to the winds. In my case they are adding to the sandstone of the Colorado National Monument in my backyard. I've read about the insidious nature of time passing but the reality is so much more, well, real. My neck is crinkly, my eyes can barely been seen beneath the droop of the lid, I can't go 24/7 like I used to (this, I think, is a positive), and my feet are trashed. I was a runner, 5ks, 10ks and a couple of short court triathalons - now I'm happy to walk. So what's the point of all this whining, you ask? I can think of a million reasons - seeking wisdom, advising the young to appreciate youth, accepting my aging body, gaining a sense of humor, looking for grace, honoring all women of age but I think really it comes down to mortality. I am and you are - Finite! We, like a good story, have a beginning, a middle and an inevitable end. Stephen Covey said "write your epitaph" if you want to know how to live your life. Start with the end and work backwords. What do you want to be remembered for - this changed my life because I didn't want to be remembered for being a good project manager. So I quit and wrote a book and am working on two more. Think about it - it might just work for authors. Start with your last chapter and write in retrograde like running a movie in rewind.

Happy Writing!