As I’ve gotten older, the voice that tells me that I have a
smaller and smaller percentage of my life still ahead of me has evolved from a
bare whisper to a claxon that never stops reminding me that time is short.
Even back in my 20s, I’d occasionally do the calculation. At
27: I’ll probably live to be 100, that means I’ll live as long as I’ve already
lived 3.7 more times. Plenty of time.”
At 40: “I’ll probably live to be a hundred, which means that
I’ll have the amount of time I’ve already lived 1 ½ more times. Plenty of
time.”
Today: “Oh my God, if I only live to the average age for
women in the United States, I’ve already lived more than half my life, and I’ve
certainly lived the healthy part. How many more healthy years do I have to do
all this stuff I want to do? THERE’S NOT ENOUGH TIME!!!!”
Time is a bloody bastard. It’s the most inflexible, inexorable
force we're forced to deal with. We’ve learned to escape gravity, overcome mass,
create and resist force, but can’t stop time for an hour to get in that workout
we missed today. We have no choice but to work within it, and, as far as I’m
concerned, the great tragedy of human existence is the way it acts up our bodies
and minds through the aging process. By the time we’ve got things figure out,
we’re often not in a condition to do anything about them. We abandon dreams and
ambitions because of high blood pressure or bad knees or worse; old age and
failing health are the thing that keep us from achieving more of what we set
out to do, more often than not.
The only way I can see to fight back is to stay as healthy
as possible for as long as possible, which isn’t fully under our control—an aneurysm
or a car accident could derail any of us or take us out completely at any
moment—but which is, all other things being equal, a matter of choice and consistent
action.
We’ve all seen the stats on how smoking and eating the
Standard American diet raises the risks for everything from cancer to diabetes
to heart failure; new studies are coming out every day that link diet and exercise
to things we never thought were controllable, like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
But as interesting as all that is, it’s too theoretical to
make me, personally, stick to (an ironically time-consuming) program of
exercise and eating. I’m far more interested in just being functional and able
to do stuff I want to do, which means NOT letting the natural decay of age wash
me up on the shore.
It’s in my vision statement to die suddenly at 130, and have
all of my many friends and colleagues say, “But she was so healthy! I just
talked to her last week and she was planning a surfing trip!!” And I know that
without constant vigilance to make sure I stay strong, flexible, and
heart-and-brain healthy, that’s just a fantasy. Heck, it may just be a fantasy
anyway, but it has a much better chance of coming to pass when I keep my health
my One Thing.
I’ve come to believe that, while time will never stop being
an unmitigated asshole, I don’t have to just lay back and take its abuses.
Maybe refusing to go gentle into the good night of aging is just another way of
tilting at windmills, but it seems like as good a losing battle to fight as
any.
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