My 72nd Birthday
Selamat Pagi (Good morning) on this February morning, the day of my 72nd birthday. I’m in Bali and I am happy and content with my lot in life.
Isn’t that what we all want? A certain level of happiness, health, not too much pain, low stress levels, companionship, someone to share your ideas and love with, a willingness to be there when others need your support and most of all the passion to continue to create life as if you just arrived in this magical moment for the very first time.
I think, from my own experience that when you are a baby life is all so new, that it’s hard to fully appreciate that you’ve once again potentially won the lottery, for me this awareness amplified later in life and continues to do so.
Some may consider earth to be a prison planet, that it may be, but for some reason I feel that I am one of the lucky ones who has had a magical, peaceful and relatively affluent life without too much pain, loss or hardship, beyond the walls of “the prison”. Not that there haven’t been challenges. You need challenges, sliding doors, conundrums, hills to climb, closed doors, blocked roads in order to get stronger and wiser. A perfect life would be perfectly boring and you’d more than likely end up weak and flaccid.
Arriving at the doorway to my 73rd year I don’t feel weak , I don’t feel flacid. I have overcome many obstacles, persisted through pain and loss, enjoyed the moments when everything was almost perfect, those fleeting moments when all the pieces fall into place.
My life has been a series of small plays involving many different characters, places, circumstances. I constantly crave for change. I have always been the main character, does that make me narcissistic? I think not. I have gone to lengths to attempt to understand what this existence must be like for the other players, to garner empathy so that I can offer a certain compassion and care for their happiness and well being as well as my own. This is not to say that I haven’t had selfish moments along the way.
I feel that I have made strong strides toward a greater understanding of what I once considered to be the mysteries of life, maybe I have done this same thing countless times during innumerable lifetimes, then all but forgotten the fruits of my efforts or maybe I have held onto some of the essence of my knowledge and understanding and carried some of it through with me.
It is hard to get objective enough to the game to get an inkling of your own condition, your own worth, your own intentions. All I really know is that I am “me”. You can assume, but your assumptions are only relativite to the reality that you have created for yourself.
I have ended up at this moment in time through a series of planned and random experiences, chance, the throw of the dice, last minute gut-feeling decisions, some more considered than others, some impulsive.
I have a finite amount of time in this current existence. I’m am striving to make the most of each exquisite moment. Who knows what will come next. Maybe I will just continue along my merry way or maybe there will be a dark void.
Whatever will be will be.
Oh and by the way, I plan to live in good health for a least several more decades, if all goes to plan.
Some General Thoughts and Observations
I would very much like to share my experiences with others, especially people around the same age as I am. Telling them what to do isn’t going to cut it. Most people when they reach 70, even 60 become relatively contented with their lives until some health emergency strikes, so what I have to work out is how I can inspire everyday people who are in that age bracket to take a good look at themselves and make a decision to change their lifestyle and spend actual time and effort getting healthy and fit. It’s easy to believe that our story isn’t all that interesting but that’s probably because we are living it and our lives feel normal when in actual fact they are far from that.
It is fast approaching my 72nd birthday as well as the 5th anniversary of my renaissance. Here are a few synonyms that the Thesaurus on my computer throws at me in relation to the concept of renaissance –
Revival, renewal, resurrection, reawakening, re-emergence, reappearance, resurgence, rejuvenation, regeneration, rebirth, new birth, new dawn, new beginning; rare renascence, recrudescence, rejuvenescence.
The past 5 years have embodied all of these.
I knew that I had no option other than making changes to my life style. I had become to a certain degree like an unhealthy plant gone to seed, ready to be ripped out of the garden and discarded. I was still the same “me” that I am now but I lacked self discipline and direction, my “vehicle” needed serious maintenance before it broke down and got cast onto the scrap heap of life. I often felt like shit and sure enough I looked horrible most of the time. This was no way to enter the last decades of my life. So I made a new years resolution to get healthy, I had a few false starts but by mid-February my decision had stuck and I gave up alcohol completely on the eve of my trip to India with Georgie, John and Flora.
I stuck to my resolution. I have now abstained from alcohol for 5 years, I’ve been on a pretty healthy low carb diet since then as well plus daily exercise, saunas/cold plunges, hyperbaric oxygen. I do constant testing of metrics and use the results to guide myself. My resting heart rate is lower than 60 bpm, blood pressure 120/80 or lower, blood glucose average (A1c) at around 5, energy levels high and I am constantly exposing myself to new information on health and well being. Considering where I began this journey in early 2019 I consider that I am doing very well for an ex-overweight alcoholic on the eve of my 72nd year. I feel that I have decades left in me and that I can maintain this level of fitness and health into my 80s.
A job well done.
