The older I get the more valuable naps get. When I am idle, laid off or something, it gets irregular around here because I tend to sleep whenever I feel like it and this entails being awake also whenever I feel like it. I get more sleep, not less. I sleep less than six hours a night on work nights. I get up really early and I just can't go to bed that early to compensate so what happens is Friday night extends quite late into Saturday and then there are the day naps, and then the Saturday night sleep in as well. I am grateful that I can sleep easily, but truth is, I am up quite often with an old man's trouble. A third of us or so have this, mostly benign but intrusive, and it is said that if we could live long enough, avoiding all the other ways out, then prostate cancer would claim us all eventually. I am kind of okay with that because I am pretty sure its the same with cats and kidneys, that kidneys get them eventually if nothing else does first.
My right hip is giving me fits these days, and a fairly simple maneuver led to a seized muscle just above the hip joint and extending toward the back but staying in the buttock area alongside the spine. What a pain in the ass. It hasn't kept me home but only because my work is basically office bound these days. If I had to do much walking I would have to not go. I can find still positions which do not distress me but movement and balancing is dicey.
Growing old is not for sissies.
Education is the best provision for the journey to old age. - Aristotle
Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age. - Hosea Ballou
(Hosea Ballou (1771-1852), American Universalist clergyman - as in Unitarian Universalist)
Fundamental Universalism = "We either all go to Heaven or we don't" - Phil Carrier (obscure local Senior Engineering Designer and family man) Amen, Brother!
I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity. - Albert Einstein
With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs. - James Thurber
What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy. - Voltaire
We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. - Pearl S. Buck
Catnip Dreams
If you let me be
laying on your blue blanket
I would curl up tight
and with a snore or
two would dream a partner next
to me, just a bit
different, longer
tail, spots, a fondness for nip,
a ready mouser.
September 2, 2009 3:47 PM
Sometimes it all makes the most sense to me and yet at others, I just don't get it one bit, this aging thing.
ReplyDeleteI was talking with my manager the other day and after two years after her mother passed, she had the courage to speak about it. She was present during her mother's passing and it was fitful. She could not get her mind around it, any of it. I kind of feel like that right now. I am alive! You too! We are valuable people, are we not? Still, plenty left to learn. At what point does it become ok in our journey for us to stop, or even to wane, feel constant discomfort? Tonight it is as though someone in front of me is speaking a different language, and I am deaf. Just for tonight, I would like to say death and dying, and even waning, just plain sucks. Tomorrow I'll try for wiser.
I hope you have had a full belly of turkey and a lap of friends. Now, get your blanket and curl up.
xo
erin
(((Erin)))
ReplyDeleteI think it is your place to resist death. Hosea Ballou has that to say. The real meaning of his observation is that death and dying are phenomena for older age.
The Hindu age of "mortality" is 56. Before that other things overwhelm us with duty and responsibility, with desire and dream.
To me there is a real watershed, just as there was sometime in my late twenties and I got serious about my professional life. The way that I blog seems to be part of this. I am summing my life up, not trying to learn new things so much as laying down those things I already know. My learning now is in the realm of learning how to say these things clearly.
The quotes brought tears to my eyes. I slipped into middle age as my mother stood on the edge of an abyss. It is painful to watch her decline, to lose her independence, to become mean and petulant. Yesterday I was overcome by a wave of dizziness so strong I fell against the wall and then onto the floor. I scared her but it made us both laugh. I could better understand her losses and she could see that it is not just her losing, we all are. We reconnected for a moment and I'm thankful for that.
ReplyDeleteLilith, what a rich comment. Thank you. As you watch your mother you have the opportunity to train yourself into a better behaved old age no matter what the constraints may be. I think of aging as a calling as well as a condition. I am privileged to enter into its passage and I desire to live well. I am also careful not to pin expectations on this condition and to avoid comparing myself with others as much as possible.
ReplyDelete