The one game we are all compelled to play but can never win is aging. Visiting my mother this past weekend in a rest home was a joyous occasion, however it was also painful. Most lessons in life are painful, yet at the same time necessary. Watching my mother age has been a brutal reality. We will all get our turn to grow old, right now it just happens to be her turn. While I was visiting her, I had this strange tingle run down my spine and I had the thought that this could be me in another 25 years. We are all heavily steeped in the aging process at every stage of our lives whether we are aware of it or not. Most of us aren't aware of it until the sun starts to set. Realizing that that the earth has successfully made another trip around the sun is both daunting and humbling, that's why most of us try not to think about it. In high school very few of us even give it a second thought, at that point we are too busy appeasing our hormones. But by the time we reach our fifties we are reminded of the process every time we pass by a mirror. We realize that those that came before also had their turn at life like a pitcher at home plate, until their time disappeared like a tumbleweed in a tornado. We too will get our time to watch our mortality disappear before our eyes as well and that is a bitter pill to swallow. It's passe to say that we should treat every minute as if it is precious. We all say it, but how much of that reality truly sticks in our grey matter? Any time life affords us the opportunity to enjoy a glass of sweet tea on a beautiful day we should revel in it. Every minute should be grabbed by the lapels and shaken like a lawyer with an overpriced retainer, which by the way is all of them.
Sometime in our twenties life lights a fire under us in which we try with all of our might to make sure we are at least as well off as our parents. Nobody knows why but that is a theme we hear repeatedly. Our thirties and forties are filled with self-loathing in which we wonder which of our friends are going to put black candles on our birthday cake or place fake headstones in our front yard for all to see. When did we as a species keeping up with the number of trips our planet has taken around the sun become a test case for embarrassment? At that point shouldn't we be springing forthwith from our beds every morning and kissing the ground we walk on, even if it is just red dirt. Our fifties become a blur of scheduling dental appointments, colonoscopies, and trips to the eye doctor. That makes sense right, anytime you use any tool that long it is bound to need some maintenance or least of bit of sharpening. I don't trust those eye clinics that claim they can fix our sight problems in an hour; IT TOOK 50 YEARS FOR THEM TO PETER OUT! I have not reached my sixties yet, but I assume that will consist of complaining about the fact that we can no longer keep up with the twenty-somethings in our lives. I already do a lot of that now and my wife says I should get a metal just for trying. Speculation about my seventies goes as follows; I will have a major surgery that I will refer to as a "procedure" and I will come home with a thirty-year-old nurse maid named Tiffany, but I will call her mommy.
Just remember, in order to come full circle in life you must have stuck a fishing stringer in a light socket and lived to tell the tale. I watched my younger brother do that as a toddler and interestingly I never tried to stop him. This is either because I am a bad brother or maybe just a little sadistic, either way I am not all that proud of it. He may have some sort of strange proclivity towards electricity because he is the same child my dad had test nine-volt batteries with his tongue and he seemed to enjoy it. Maybe we should have nick named him sparky. What I am trying to illustrate is that sometimes our appreciation for life comes in the form of a near miss. That is just a gentle reminder that not all of life goes according to plan. In fact, if you would like to hear God giggle tell him your five-year-plan. The reality of our lives falls somewhere between merely keeping it between the lines and going straight into a ditch. That alone is why you should never ignore sound advice about getting a front-end alinement. Either way, eventually our tires will go bald, and our rear end will shake. Am I still talking about your car? I'll let you be the judge of that. Do you feel what I am throwing down friends?
Aging can either be great, or an experiment in terror. It may be contrived to say that we should make lemonade out of lemons, but it does makes sense, doesn't it? Most overused saying are overused for a reason.
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