Recent events been a kind of wake up call on my own mortality. All around me are reminders that we are not as young as we used to be, and reminders that our health should not to be taken for granted. Friends and relatives of mine are being cursed with failing bodies.
My dad is being treated for prostate cancer. Will I get it? Only time will tell. My brother-in-law, Gary, just got out of the hospital after a heart attack. Maybe he had a lifetime of making 'less than stellar' health choices, or maybe it was just that fact that he's always been a heavy smoker that reared its ugly head. I haven't done the best with my health either, but at least I quit smoking back in 1980. Will I have a heart attack? Who knows. My mother's side of the family has had a few strokes in it's history. Will that be my fate? Recently, there have been more instances of friends from school dropping... The most recently last week.
I don't like where I'm at with my health, but yet I have trouble motivating myself. You'd think that anything you could do to prolong your health (and ultimately your life) would be sufficient motivation wouldn't you? Apparently not. People hate to alter their routines. We hate to change anything that might inconvenience us. We all want to exercise because we know we're supposed to, but it's just so much work!
I had an issue with the vision in my left eye last weekend. I started to see a little "halo" effect in that eye (kind of like when you look at a bright light and then see a spot afterward) and lost some of my peripheral vision. Does it have anything to do with the headaches I always get behind my left eye? Maybe, maybe not. I certainly need to get it checked out. I don't think I'd like to go through the rest of my life with an eye patch because of my ignorance.
I have done things in excess a lot during my life. It's a small streak of obsessive/compulsive behavior that I have. I have always had times when I did things too much--be it too often, too long, or too intensely. I've eaten myself sick, I've driven until I've fallen asleep, and I've worked myself way past when I should stop. One time I went on an exercise regimen and physically hurt myself because I worked out 5 days in a row, each time to the point of muscle failure and collapsing with exhaustion. There have been several times in my life when I have found it hard to stop doing something because I was "in the moment".
There have been lots of times in my life that I could have cared less whether I lived or died. I think I just had a "what for?" attitude and didn't really care for where I was in my life. Like I had taken the wrong road somewhere but the road I was was one way only. Back at the end of my previous marriage I would go on rides on the Harley and would repeatedly find myself going way faster on it than I should have been. Fast enough in highway curves that inertia would send it bottoming out in just the slightest dip. I'm sure, based on the sound it made, that it sent a nice shower of sparks off whatever contacted the asphalt. Not just once either. For those not familiar with inertia, it takes a lot of speed to cause that. All it would have taken was one little pebble or one misjudged curve. I apparently had a lot of trust in my tires or was just ignorant. I think I was just in a place in my life where I just flat didn't care. That's not the case now.
It's kind of a cruel joke of life isn't it? That when we are young and do everything wrong we survive. We're practically invincible in our own minds. When we made a bad decision it didn't matter too much because when we were young we healed quickly. The cruel part is that now when we're older and start making conscious decisions to better ourselves everything starts to go wrong. When we were young any pain, suffering, or death was 90% due to bad decisions we made and 10% due to outside circumstance beyond our control. Now it's exactly the opposite.
I don't know if it's just me or not, but I find as I age, my physical activity/brain activity ratio as changed considerably. It used to be I was very active and didn't ponder things or worry about things very much if at all. Now I find myself not physically doing much, but my mind is sometimes going 1000 miles per hour. I worry about things, ponder things, analyze things, and all sorts of other thought processes. Maybe it's because of all that thought that I seek a sort of release by putting my words in this blog.
Worry? Who me? You betcha.
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