When you're a kid you hear your grandparents complain about all the aches and pains in their old bodies and you think to yourself how sad it would be to get to be so old! You jump, play, run, do flips in the air. You dive, you climb, you wrestle, move, dance, you have next to zero concerns about biting a pecan open with your teeth because you know that teeth are pretty hard and you can do this! You really don't give much thought to any of it until you have the first real knee injury, or perhaps you shoulders hurt the day after you helped brand a few Mustangs. Why is that? Wasn't it just yesterday that you were hang gliding off the side of a craggy old mountain in the southern hills of Oklahoma? Wasn't it just a few weeks back that you ran a mile for the hell of it to see if you could beat your best friend's time? She said she was pretty good, if you beat her time that would make you pretty good, right? We get old.
Now, the word "old" is a relative term of course; you can said you're old in comparison to something or you can say you're old just because you feel like crap and don't have a better way to describe how it that you feel. You say words like "he's too old for her" or "she's too old to do that", and maybe you'd be right if what you said about the person actually had a time limit. If I'm older than say, 40, I can't go off and enlist in the U.S. Army, but that doesn't mean I can't pass every physical they would have given me. (I wouldn't pass, but all I'm saying is, there are times when time matters.) You can say you're feeling old when really what you're feeling is down, out, tired, exhausted, hurt, injured, scared, or just plain done. The reason(s) you're feeling that way likely have less to do with the clock and more to do with the lack of energy you have created or reserved for yourself. It's been my experience anyway - - so far, and yes, in about 11 days I'll be officially "old" to some. I've been officially old for others, and I'm actually still rather young to still others, so what is old? Old is when you give up.
I hurt, yes. I have aches, I have pains, I have knee tendons that don't want me to continue my exercises, but my knee tendons can suck an egg! I'm working out. I have aches in my joints, and tears in my ligaments at times. I heal. It's not fun, but it happens. It is what we do. We heal. We get over it, or we learn to live with it. If we give up, we're so much worse off. I say that, if I were to die today I'd be so much better off because I'd be in Heaven but I'm trying to keep this on an Earthly and more in-real-time thing. It is and would be a REAL event if I died and went to Heaven, but here on Earth we like to say "keep it real" meaning, keep it in the reality that we experience on a daily basis here. So yeah, I'm old in some ways, younger in others, and it really doesn't matter to me what anyone else may call me I have to decide for myself what I will accept as a compliment or an insult. Believe me, I don't feel anywhere near as old as the calendar says I am. Why should I? I work hard not to let the clock catch up with me like it has to so many of those I graduated high school with back in...wow...1979.
I went to the dentist yesterday to have a tooth pulled. He gave me a great compliment and said he had just taken 28 teeth out of a 42 year old woman who didn't take care of her teeth. He said I had. The fact that the tooth I was having removed was even a thing was due to my age actually. In the late 1960s and early 1970s some of the medications given to kids actually caused lack of tooth enamel and it left us with hollowed out molars. Yuck. Some would say "that's not fair" and they may be correct, but what is fair in life? The medicines saved our lives otherwise. Now, after so many years, and for some, bad hygiene, it's time to pay the piper - - we have our teeth pulled. I know people of all ages with missing front, back, and side teeth. It happens. I've tried to live my life in such a way as to be more concerned with how I handle a situation as opposed to the situation itself. I lost a tooth, now, instead of feeling old about it, I'm going to learn to adjust my chewing habits. The dentist was quick to tell me that we really don't use our back molars that much anyway; that was kind.
My dentist gave me nitrous gas and about four shots to work on the back molar. It was painful and it was so much not fun, but the alternative would have been so much worse. Thank you, Jesus for drugs. Thank you for skilled people. Thank you for tools, thank you for electricity, thank you for suction drainage systems. Thank you for comfortable chairs to sit in, and to be able to be at the right angles. I'm telling you, we have so much to be thankful for, and saying it's not worth it to have a tooth removed that hurts or cuts my tongue just wasn't an option. Age or no age, it was "time" to let that go. I spent over 10 years rubbing my tongue over a hard jagged edge and I was finally just tired of having to adjust my speech to avoid a calamity with my tongue! Nothing in this world is "normal" really -- we have to adjust and compromise at times. We have to adjust and change. We have to overcome if we can, and yes, we have to surrender at times and admit defeat. I was glad to have the nitrous but I didn't accept any pain meds after the procedure. God made Ibuprofen for that.
My good friend (no name) is in the medical profession. He/she (no I won't say) is about 60 pounds overweight, smokes, and has a drinking issue. When I asked him/her to go for a hike the other day the answer was quick and with a finalization that left no wiggle room. He/she said "I'm too old, hell you're too old. We're too old to go climbing and put ourselves into that sort of situation. You can fall and break a hip! You can get caught out there with no one to help you. I can't help you and you can't help me. It's stupid and you should act your age for once!" Well, as you can imagine, I let him/her rant, but I didn't agree. No, my thoughts were more along the line of, "Here's a thought; lose weight, stop eating crap food, put the bottle down, ditch the smokes, and really live again. Breathe!" I stopped going to High School reunions after the first one. Who wants to listen to a bunch of liars comparing themselves to other liars? Nope.
God made us with an expiration date. I get that. We don't necessarily know when that will be and the world tends to place (put) time limits on us from the day we're born to the die they think we should slow down and take it easy. Be that as it may, I say you're in charge of your own work out. You're in charge of your own decisions to be healthy. You buy the food don't you? You take the cart around the grocery store yourself (or you call it in to be delivered now) and you make the final decisions about what goes into your mouth, and that includes drinking alcohol, soft drinks, sugary frizz drinks, caramelized drinks, sugary fancy coffees, shakes, whatever. You make those decisions. We all do. No one is forcing us to drink that next latte or Frap are they? No, we do that to ourselves. What about the push ups, sit ups, running, walking, climbing, jumping, moving, dancing, and the whole I need to get in better shape thing? You do if you do, and you don't if you don't, but you make that decision if you're still healthy enough to do so. Did you let yourself go to the point that you can't? Maybe it's not too late.
I won't be the one to cut down or berate someone for having let themselves go, but I will be the one to say get up, take a breath, make something good happen now. Make a change, be the change, keep the change, and become a new you. Brand new can be good. It may not be easy -- no, it won't be. If it's worth the prize you have to work for it. You may not have been blessed with good genes. Have you been using that as an excuse too? You still have a shot! Take it. You still have a way. Make it. If you can't, and all you want to do is give up; I'm not your girl. I can't do that to myself. Sorry. Maybe I'm "cheeky", maybe I'm conceited, maybe I'm arrogant. I know I don't have a Peter Pan syndrome but maybe I just love myself enough to really try and keep myself in health for as long as I really can. That clock will some day chase me down, I'm sure it will, but until that day, I'm moving through the pain.
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