Input/Output*

Patience is, they say, a virtue and one that, given time, I am hoping to learn…

It was just a normal conversation: fifteen years is just a blink of the eye they said.  Well, yes it is, but in fifteen years I will be EIGHTY and that sounds very old indeed.  Who would have thought it, in the blink of an eye I will be ancient – if I’m lucky.  Although nothing physical has changed this week, I suddenly feel very mortal: I will age, I will fade, I will die and so, in the meantime, I have decided that I’d better get on with a bit of living.

Against all expectations, my recent little chat with the GP was wholly reassuring so – although by no means impossible – an immediate fall from the perch is not, with any luck, imminent.  I may well stick around for a future of over-heated rooms, over-loud TVs, extra-absorbent underwear and food that doesn’t need chewing.  I’ve got time – although given the rate at which my teeth are collapsing, liquidized food may not be so far away.

Meantime I can still run when I need to, jump when I have to and embarrass the grandkids with undue ease.  I am happy, I feel well and if you’re waiting for a ‘but’, it is not coming.  I am fully aware of how willing life is to apply its boot to the backside, but you can’t spend your whole life clenching, can you?  Whatever lies ahead, it is at this precise moment ahead.  I will try to put some distance between now and then and I will tackle ‘then’ when I reach it.  Meantime, I move along like everything else.

If I’m honest, I feel fitter, happier and healthier than I have felt for years and, yes, I do realise how dangerous that is, but my poor deluded head tells me that feeling well must count for something.  My Fitbit tells me that my exercise regime is ok and my bathroom scales say that my weight is fine.  Somebody recently gave me a book of Sudoku puzzles which leads me to believe that senility might be a little nearer than is entirely comfortable, but what the hell, numbers were never my strength and I can still plod my way through The Times Crossword and very nearly follow an entire episode of ‘Vera’.

Anyway, now I’m trying to look at fifteen years differently.  My grandson is nine and he’s been in my life forever and anyway, who says that everything stops at eighty?  In fifteen years time, eighty will be the new sixty.  I don’t expect to be running marathons, but I hope that I will still be looking forward to holidays in the (not so far-flung) sun, great-grandchildren and breaking whatever rules still apply.

I’m not turning my back on the inevitability of growing old.  It comes, and after it comes the old ‘one out to let one in’ as my gran used to say (when the world’s population was half of today’s – so she wasn’t right about everything) and we all have to go.  To put it off for as long as humanly possible, that is the trick, and then to succumb to the unavoidable with all the grace I can muster.  I will be looking back on my one hundredth birthday with a smile, razor sharp wit and still eager to snowboard down the stairs on a tea tray.  My eightieth year will be nothing but fond memory and for those who may be waiting for me to make space for them on this earth, well, patience is a virtue they will have to learn, isn’t it?…

*A brief explanation. I changed the title because nobody was reading the post. I don’t know why…

The stuff coming out and stuff going in
I’m just a part of everything… I/O – Peter Gabriel