I can think, write, sleep, drink, eat, eliminate waste, exercise, be nice or not. The following is about thinking and exercising. If I get these two right, I’ll be nice. I’ll start with exercise, then sprinkle in thoughts as you go with me.
Over my life I’ve done a lot of exercising, but what can I do at 82?
Jogging? Calisthenics? Lifting weights? Walking?
No to jogging – iffy knees.
No to calisthenics – I’ll fall over.
No to lifting weights – when I bend my elbows, my hands go numb. I suspect lifting weights are responsible.
Yes to walking – not casual walking, “destination” walking.
When I walk, I want to be going somewhere, anywhere that results in a destination, a tangible place. It could be to get a bottle of booze at the local outlet or, a little further, to our local restaurant for breakfast. I live on a crescent. I have been encouraged to walk around it, but I rebel. Walking around the crescent is walking nowhere. It was somewhere walking when we had our dog George, our Jack Russell. We walked with him around our crescent to make him happy. His happiness was for me a destination.
I like to walk in the morning, so that is when I do it.
Casual thoughts can often lead to unexpected places. After I’d admitted I don’t like walking in circles a profound thought surfaced within me. I realized, for much of my life, I’d been living in circles. The feeling was intense.
Having just turned 82 my thoughts returned me to those dark days, for a patch of years, I’d been moving in circles, going nowhere. I was in a sort of fog, running most of the time in circles. I never gave myself the luxury of a clear destination. Whether it was money, or women. Money? I worked at what I could get! Women? Not the right one, just one . . . what I could get. I was young, naive and didn’t know what I needed in both respects.
I’d been a moth who’d blindly flown into flame and been critically burned by life.
If my past was incredibly futile, how can I be here, writing about wanting a better future? Answer: I’ve been extremely lucky. Also, I believe acknowledging a weakness enables individuals to be stronger. I’d became wiser.
In this now, I have decided to acknowledge who I was. I have decided to leave my tired and moderately twisted 82 years behind and mindfully move to an improved 83.
Better late than never, right?
This is the part where I write I never wanted to write a self-help story. This is literally a self-help story – helping myself. If anyone sees themselves mirrored in the words or illustrations below, I’m okay with that.
Below is an illustration of who I am, minus personality and looks, as I am at this point in time.
“CHART ME”
Me as an illustration . . . everything on this page represents “82+ = ME”.
As you can see, “chart me” is 82+ years old, near the top of this strange skeletal representation. I want to explain the + beside the 82. The time required for a person to be born is, I assume, fairly short, I’d estimate about a minute, so all time after that minute is + time. I have accomplished 82 years plus two minutes, or an hour, or a week, or a month, or much more. I’ll need it all my 82 years plus days, hours and minutes that got me to my now to construct a better me at 83.
In the chart above the thick red vertical line represents what I will choose to do with my + time in the long term. The green line represents my short-term destination – becoming a more wholesome person when I hit 83. The chart can be viewed as a simple life map where one can see the past and anticipate the future with insight. Seeing all my years from my beginnings until my now, is instructive.
Below is a chart that could represent you if you choose to use it.
“A POTENTIAL YOU”
Everything on this page is the basis for you.
You just need to fill in the blanks — “YOUR AGE+ = YOU”
Instructions are below.
If you wish to participate in my chart experiment, you could use the chart above or copy it and make it any size that suits you. Okay, now you’ve got your chart the size you want we will continue. Assuming you want to push on, the experiment requires you to take a ruler and mark a horizontal line at your age on the chart and label it “ME+”. Also, take the same ruler, and with a green pen, mark a thick vertical line upward to your next year, then take the ruler and a red pen and make a thick vertical line upward from the end of the green line to the number 100. I use 100 as an arbitrary destination. Who’s to say, you and I might get that far on our life experience. From time to time I find it helpful to look back at ME. You might find it helpful to look back at YOU — at all your past YOU’S if you have a good memory. At 82, mine’s sporadic . . . mostly shot, although as you will read later, images from long past, are some how coming into focus.
You have seen YOUR CURRENT BIG PICTURE, the exciting big picture of YOU. It’s like looking at planet earth from outer space! Remember seeing the exciting big picture of our world, knowing everyone lives on it? That is not quite correct. If we consider atmosphere as part of the planet, then we live in the planet. I digress. Sorry.
You are lucky if the position on your chart is lower than 82. Time hasn’t eaten at you as it has me. The chart says you are alive, functioning, and lucky to be alive, perhaps not optimally, but we can examine that. I think my best years are ahead of me and, after reading this you might agree. When my 82 turns into 83, it will be my best year. I will make it that. You can follow me in this quest if you like.
If your position on the chart is above 82 you shouldn’t need this story, unless, of course, you feel you have done nothing right and wrecked your entire life. If that is the case you need this story more than I do.
So, let’s look at your past. If it is like mine, it’s not always a pleasant, some terrible, some joyful, all represent the who you were. History, in general is a good thing. Personal history is a fantastic thing. The key is to see the big picture, not the way many people see themselves, with narrow vision of negativity. Experiencing mistakes is a good thing. I have learned more from my mistakes than my successes. The wise know a success is the result of suffering through failure, sometimes multiple failures. However, seeing everything is key. Look back at all your experiences, good, bad, indifferent, but turn down the volume on them. Keep memories as background music to the upbeat music of your current and future life.
As I have typed before, I didn’t intend on writing a self-help story. It started when I took the time to look at my life, the tragedies and the successes. As I first saw it, there were more tragedies than successes. Then I looked again, and guess what, there was a lot I overlooked. Why? Because I learned to emphasize the negative things I’ve done, not the positive things I’ve done. I’ve had a lot of re-learning to do. It’s not easy for me to accept my mistakes, to know how good they were for me. If you look back, do what I’ve done, I’m sure you will agree.
Look at the number you wrote down on the chart. See the numbers lower than your number, the numbers you were before you arrived, through time, to this wonderful number, which is the definition of who you are now – (your age +).
Now, look higher on the chart, imagine yourself as higher number. Will you look the same? Will you be fatter? Thinner? Healthier? Wiser? More loving? Happier? What? Imagination and the power of suggestion comes in here. If you are good at either one you are well on your way to your optimal, fully functioning future you.
I need to digress here, to throw you into my life. I will use myself as an example of what can happen to alter one’s perception, a narrowing of sight that closes future selves down. Think of your past years, the ups, downs and in-betweens that happened along with mine, but all the while imagine all the higher numbers you are required to encounter. Yes, required! It’s either that or die. Will you choose for your higher numbers to be better than your now number? There is aging, right? Not good. Then there is attitude. Good!
I was stupid young when I married. I spent 12 years with a wife, had two kids with her, then she decided I was not what she needed. Spouses can have different needs? Marriage isn’t forever?! That was a huge lesson for me to absorb. I was emotionally involved in what I thought was a perfect marriage. It was too much for me, at the time, to appreciate what was happening. I spent a lot of time in anguish, self-blaming, and misery because I did not understand how peoples’ needs could change. Burning moth time . . . healing time was to come.
Now I thank God for that happening as exiting that relationship was correcting a wrong that set me on a positive path. I’ve maintained a strong relationship with my children and was able to meet two much more suitable wives. I had a life worth living again! No, I’m not a bigamist and wasn’t dumped twice. My second wife had a weak heart . . . to quote the greatest American writer to ever live, Kurt Vonnegut “. . . and so it goes”.
It has been my belief that there are patterns to periods in peoples’ lifetimes. Duplicate challenges. I’m focusing on North American culture. There are sets of life that people willingly or unwillingly fall into. A couple of examples are as follows:
First – A chaotic period in my life. Married young and wrong, two children, loss of permanent access to them, lost and alone as a single man, meet appropriate and inappropriate people, sort out where and with whom I belong . . . eventually. Many people have a similar experience and make similar, but different, choices.
Second – A couple marry young, for better or worse, have good times and bad, but remain together throughout their entire lives. Many have this experience. Choices are different for this set.
Is one set better or worse than the other? I don’t know. These are things I’ve observed.
I haven’t covered chance encounters, accidental meetings, stuff like that. I offer an example. When I was young, in my late 30s, before internet. Can you imagine there was a dark space of time with no internet? Don’t deny it! Yes, there was! I was mostly over the dead marriage event and was on the prowl at a local dance. People, mostly single people of all ages, got together to music and dancing. I was wearing my camel hair sport coat, yellowish. I thought it made me look better than in the dark one as my hair still had some brown in it.
It was a huge rectangular room with long tables on each side of a dancing area. I was seated at one of the long tables, had finished my first rye and ginger and into my second when I spotted a casually attractive woman on the long table on the other side of the hall sitting with girlfriends. Not too flashy, quite plain. I strolled over asked her to dance. She appeared to be a few years younger than me. Standing up can improve a woman’s appeal, and when she did, her appeal soared. We danced and chatted a little. I noticed, her right hand, the one in my left hand was shaking. It was a Foxtrot – my right hand behind at her waist and her right hand high up in my left. No, I wasn’t grasping her hand too tightly. I asked her why her hand was shaking, and she said something I have been thinking about for a long time. She said, “it is because I am dancing with you.” At that precise moment my attention was drawn to the other side of the hall where a man was drinking the drink I’d left on the table. I have never been good at dealing with simultaneous messages. I ignored the important message, hers, sat the young lady where I had acquired her, and went after the drink stealer and made him buy me another drink.
Satisfied, sipping the fresh drink, I turned around in a hope of finding the young woman I’d been dancing with. She was gone, vanished from the building. I often think what would have happened if the jerk who’d drank my drink didn’t go to the dance that night, or if I had the good sense to ignore the drink stealer and let her words resonate within my thick head. Would my life have shot off in an entirely different direction? Would it have been better? Worse? At the end of the night I left alone with an unexpected feeling gnawing at me, a sense of deep loss, of what I didn’t know, just an empty feeling. Life is a complicated affair.
I was a Catholic in the 80s. I quit Catholicism because of its stand on planned parenthood. I joked with a co-worker, Bob Moore, that I would form my own church. I said I’ll call it The Church Of The Eternal Now. I was kidding with him about it, asked him to be my pope. He agreed if he could be in charge of collections. I have been thinking of that time for a while, remembering what I knew then, that this current chunk of time, the now, is all anyone has to work with. Please keep this thought in mind as we work at finding motivation for acquiring a new you, as I have done in acquiring a new me at 83.
I’ve written “The End” at the end of this story, but that was a mistake, so I am back here in the middle of the story to fill in a blank, giving the story context. If you believe in astrology, you know people born in the sign of Cancer are not good with confrontation. Since I consider myself a typical Cancer, I’ve had to force myself back into the story, all the while fighting the need to back off. So, in a way, this has become a confession/self help story. I wanted to ignore this embarrassing part, but telling it will help illustrate the first point I made about moving in circles.
I am the eldest of five children. Two brothers, two sisters. Our father was a person who loved work, but not only work, different kinds of work. He enjoyed work like nobody else. He was young in the 1950s. That is when he attached a clawed digging machine to the back of his little grey Ford tractor and started a trenching business. He tired of that, learned how to make septic tanks, made them, got a dump truck for moving the trencher/tractor combination to job sites, bored of that, learned how to build houses, built and sold more than a couple, tired of that got paving equipment, paved asphalt driveways. He had a bulldozer for a while. It was a D4. Odd the things I remember. Oh, a cedar strip motorboat too, stained cedar top and painted red bottom. I don’t remember riding in it though, but I saw it and, for the time, it was the ultimate watercraft. During winter months he would take different jobs – making freezers in a factory, delivering cookies for Weston. He laughed when he came home from work and announced he’d been fired from his surveying job. After over a year of fooling qualified surveyors and getting paid like one, they discovered he didn’t have the required qualifications to be a surveyor. He faked it. For my father work was his social life, his entertainment. As his laborer son, work became my entertainment. I was a professional at work, but an amateur at life.
So, here I need to return you to the end of the first marriage. I was busy trying to satisfy the unsatisfiable, bring up two kids, keeping my job and converting a two-story house into a duplex for the rent, the money. I thought I was doing okay with the first three but lousy at the last one – hence stress overload and marriage dissolution. During the 12-year marriage I relied on my wife’s social skills because I had none, so I thought her friends were my friends. When we split, she took the kids, dog, half the value of the house, and all of our friends.
This is important because it describes how I was able to waste a huge chunk of time, so I need to return you to the dance hall where I’d go to try and manufacture friends. I’d had little social experience — a fish out of water. I hate clichés, but I can’t think of a better one to describe how I felt inside. Not the barely able to move big fish, see the smaller fish, the ones that twitch a lot. There I am at the dance, feeling like I’m driving a car without a steering wheel.
I danced a little and drank a lot. When the white lights came on at the end of one night there, I heard a female voice ask if I wanted to go for a coffee. I raised my head, fighting the glare of sharp light and hazy thinking and saw a smiling woman staring down at me. We went for coffee and a two-year relationship. It ended badly with tears and more, you can imagine. My fault. I told her from the start about my not wanting it long term, but she was hopeful. I was not.
I know you will find the next bit hard to understand, but it did happen. I was at the dance another night, did the little dance, a big drink thing again and heard a female voice ask if I waned to go with her for coffee. This time the voice had a French accent. I love the sound of a woman speaking with a French accent. It’s my big flaw other than due and undue flattery. We had two years together, then a young woman from my work, significantly younger, wanted me — flattery. I took younger over accent and was off on another two-year relationship, going where the others took me — nowhere. There were quite a few doomed relationships, all shorter. I was a relationship wrecking ball, a serial sinner. So, now you can see where my going in circles habit came from.
We need to get back to the self-help part. This is the hard part, so focus.
People imagine fantastic scenarios, then, when reality comes a knocking, back off into the safety of yesterday.
No more! Not for me! Not for you!
I am what I do. Below is a sort of inventory of the things I do. I’m not including actions of the past, just the actions I currently do. The past is history. I am in my now, not my yesterday.
The pep talk I mentioned a few lines earlier was to grab your attention if it was waning. The hard part comes later.
I encourage you to make an inventory list of what you do, what functions you take on either necessarily or for fun, but first read my list. It consists of what I am currently doing.
My inventory list is below.
- I make rum balls.
- I manage a dishwasher, dishes in and out (mechanical not a person).
- I write stage plays.
- I write this.
- I cut my own hair (mirrors)
- I walk to places I like.
- I do morning and nighttime bathroom grooming stuff.
- I take out the garbage once a week (three types).
- I bring in the garbage once a week (three types).
- I shop.
- I cook for my wife and myself.
- I eat out at restaurants when I can afford it.
- I mow the grass.
- I cut the hedge.
- I blow the snow.
- I shovel the walk.
- I listen to mostly classical music.
- I watch TV, mostly (black and white, an era when stories had plot).
- I try to fix things around the house, mostly break them though. Plumbers love me.
You might wonder why making rum balls is at the top of the list. Answer: I can make delicious rum balls. I can taste the quality. The rest get done, but never tasted, except for my cooking, which doesn’t measure up to the rum balls.
You know my immediate destination is a better me at 83. My long-term destination is 100 (hopefully). Yours most likely is a number below mine, which is good. Your immediate destination line will be the same length as mine but, lucky you — your long-term destination will be significantly longer, and hopefully, more enjoyable.
Finally we are at the hardest part – just kidding – hardest part is still to come. This is where you make your list of what you currently do and think about possible changes you can make in the next months, until you are a year older.
Okay, time has passed, you’ve thought about what you do and have made your list. I expect you have been suitably impressed with it as I was with mine.
The following is finally my hardest part, my WILL DO list. It will be comprised of the actions I need to take to get me to my optimal self at 83 — a challenging destination. The first list was like walking downhill. This list will be like walking uphill. If I can do it, so can you.
We will get around to your WILL DO list after we deal with mine.
What I WILL DO with my time between now and my 83rd birthday to make my life better. I will continue to do all the things I wrote down in the last list.
- I will maintain my weight between 235 lbs to 240 lbs. (I’m over 6 feet)
- I will work at least an hour a week offering my plays to theatres.
- I will work on my plays for a portion of my week.
- I will walk somewhere, twice a week, some long, some short, depending on how I feel. (shopping counts)
- I will smile more. I look dreadful in my drivers licence photo, closer to the walking dead than happy to be alive.
- I will continue to think about actions I can make to help me to my destination — short term and long term.
I recommend that you check with your medical doctor before making any lifestyle changes.
This isn’t the hardest part, but we’re getting closer to it. Now it’s your turn to make your WILL DO list. Keep it real, not extreme, and adhere to what you have chosen to write down. Remember some sacrifice will be involved, but it will be a sacrifice of love for your future you. You will like yourself if you’ve stayed strong, adhering to your list once you’ve arrived at your destination.
List complete! Good. The hardest part comes next, so buckle up.
If people think like me, they know they are of two minds — a permissive mind, the one that wants all kinds of immediate desires fulfilled no matter what, and the restrictive mind that takes the long view, and allows only healthy desires, and stops the unhealthy desires, even habits — overeating, drinking, drugs, addictions, negative experiences, etc.
During the next year you may find your restrictive mind getting pushed around by your permissive mind. In that case you might need to reinforce your resolve with a motivational song or video. If you already have one, feel free to listen to it when the need arises. I listen to my recording of Bonny Tyler’s “Holding Out For A Hero”. It and others are available free on YouTube. You might need to play your motivational song off and on throughout YOUR year or during YOUR life to pull you up when you feel down.
Now put your list into an envelope, put the envelope in a safe place, a drawer, someplace no-one will come across it, then open it on your next birthday. It will be your birthday present to you.
YOU ARE THE HERO OF YOUR OWN LIFE! CELEBRATE!
THE END
