Still Ill

Michael Blowhard offers up a lovely meditation on age and the relationship of body and mind (okay, soul). This musing is occasioned by MB’s participation in beach volleyball during a long weekend. At 53 and surviving cancer, he explores a number of metaphors for the relationship “we” have with our bodies, and how those relationships evolve as we age. It sorta culminates in this:

The best comparison I’ve been able to come up with is to owning a car. When your car is brand new, you roar around in it, relishing the speed, the nimbleness, and the responsiveness. It isn’t just that your car is an extension of you. You’re a team, merging into one fabulous, even better organism.

By the time your car is 10 years old, though, you have a different relationship with it. Your car has developed intractable quirks and failings. Things often go wrong for no apparent reason whatsoever. And when a reason is apparent, there’s often nothing that can be done about it anyway. In order to keep this car running, you have to take its weaknesses into account. You need to be prepared for surprises, as well as for the fact that few of them will be good ones. You and your car aren’t roaring around together any longer, celebrating the power that together you represent. You’re now your car’s caretaker. You’re clearly in charge, you’re definitely responsible, and fate will do what fate’s gonna do anyway.

I started doing a variety of yoga last October, and found it to be enormously beneficial. I had a small surgical procedure that forced me to stop for a few weeks last May, and then I let inertia / laziness take over, leading to three months without a real workout. I started again last week, and am kicking myself for falling out practice just at the time of year when my job grows most stressful (the added flexibility helps when you need to kick yourself).

Now that I’m going into a heavy-duty mode to finish an unexpectedly large September issue, put on our annual conference and make its 40-page attendee guide, assemble the big October issue, and promote our year-end gigantic directory (400+ pages), I’m making a point of getting a workout in every other day. But that’s neither here nor there, unless you have to work or live with me.

Anyway, his post has some interesting ruminations on age. It’s a subject I’ve been pondering as I deal with the inevitability of the fact that I just don’t fit in with the 20- and early 30-somethings here in my office. Oh, and that there are college basketball players who were born the year I entered college. Here’s another excerpt:

One thing that some younger people often don’t understand about aging is that age isn’t merely the failure to be young. Age is its own thing. Younger people sometimes look at older people and see people who just aren’t trying hard enough. The aches, the protectiveness, the irritability . . . If only the graybeards would try harder, none of that would be a problem.

Young people often seem to explain age to themselves as a failure of will, in other words. What they miss is that it isn’t only the body that changes as you age. Your values, your abilities, and your desires change too. Excitement becomes less important, for example — something often to actively avoid, because it’s just too damn rattling. Besides, been there done that. Calm and peace become more important. Youthful willpower — aka push — evaporates, to be replaced by a determination to enjoy life as it is. Dissatisfaction and the lust to achieve is replaced by gratitude for what is. It’s not just that the ability to will things into being vanishes, it’s that the desire to do so also goes. Energy and inspiration can no longer be ordered up and bossed into performing. Instead, maybe they come, maybe they go . . . They do what they do on their own schedule. Life’s good either way.

I’m gonna go be crochetty now. Goddamn kids . . .