Speed # One: All out race!
Speed # Two: Dead stop!
Conclusion? Delusional thinking and denial of the reality of dealing with time and anxiety.
Ha!!!
I just spent the last hour reviewing journal articles on `denial of aging.' I've even got a book on that subject waiting for me at the Prescott Library.
With the wife gone for a week and being relatively immobile while the knee heals up I've spent waaaaay too much time `thinking.' Such a waste! Not my best `muscle,' i.e., from the neck up.
I preached two mantras in my clinical practice as a psychologist: "Action Defines Us" and "Behavior Precedes Awareness." One of my patients even went out and got me a ball cap with those phrases emblazoned on it as a retirement memento.
Take my own advice: Think less. Do more.
A good deal of the reason I am so active with cycling is so that I can wear myself out. (DSM-IV-TR diagnosis: Cyclothymia. Just a tad short of all out mania). Just a different way of dealing with the same anxiety that creates alcoholics, zealots, workaholics and others among us burning up excess psychic kerosene.
The challenge of `retirement' is in being able to integrate life's accumulated wisdom and the strengths it brings, and a relative certainty about the trajectory of the future having an ultimate downward slope (unless of course I'm on a 4% downhill descent into Wilhoit on a 75 degree angle left turn doing 36.4 mph on a posted 25 mph speed limit ... then the slope is a right angle, straight down. I got lucky and am here to tell about it.).
I really did feel pissed that I came in behind 51 other people in the recent Skull Valley Loop Challenge. Angry, in fact. I gave myself no `slack' for probably being among the 3 oldest people racing. Some of it is good fuel for motivation. A lot of it is denial of `inherent' athletic/genetic limits and limits imposed on me as a consequence of age.
Transition. Age and the time to think about it carefully and with acceptance and courage. A denial of it ... thinking that "I'm different and I'll prove it" can prove futile. And `resistance is futile.'
Of course, we all know that the only people without stress in their life ... are dead!
Sermon over.
LOL! Good sermon Rev. Dan! I agree that doing is of increasing importance as we continue to mature.
ReplyDeleteDylan Thomas says it well:
"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
51 people ahead of you? I would have been tickled to have had 51 people BEHIND me! HA!
Looking forward "raging" together again when you get healed up.