Tuesday, September 27, 2011

HA!! Two Speeds

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.

1 comment:

  1. LOL! Good sermon Rev. Dan! I agree that doing is of increasing importance as we continue to mature.

    Dylan 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.

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