I am sure you have read a ton of articles, books, listened to a million podcasts, heard a gazillion stories about how the one sure fire strategy that we should all employ to reach a ripe old age is exercise. Move your body. Work your muscles, pump your heart, expand your lungs, practice agility, climb those steps, walk, run, bike, swim -- do it all and you will have a better old age.
I don't disagree. Physical movement is good for you in too many ways to count. But I think in focusing on physical exercise (as a strategy to a good senior life), we're not paying attention to something just as important. Perhaps, dare I say it -- even more important?
Here it is (and you can tell everyone you read it on Ocean first, that source of worldly wisdom!) (just kidding):
If you want to have a healthy and happy senior life, you have got to practice happiness with just as much vigor and commitment as you practice physical dexterity. Because if it's not your thing at middle age, believe me, you will not suddenly develop happiness skills in your senior years. Worse -- all those simmering feelings of self pity and disrespect toward those who aren't like you, who don't look, act, think like you, that "I know better" attitude, all of it will fester and grow and soon it will be like sticky willy weeds -- it will consume and choke you and you will not be able to climb out of your world of judgment, anger, and despair. Happiness is like a muscle -- use it or lose it.
Just sayin'...
It's a gorgeous day today! Simply stunning!. Weird how we flip from bad weather to great weather! Yesterday's storms and rains were actually worse for our flower fields (and for those of real farmers) than the storms that pounded us on Tuesday. Peonies fell. Irises fell. Meadow flowers groaned under the weight of the relentless rain. It didn't last long, but it was a menace.
Still, I think the fields will recover. Those peonies still look... okay.
The flower fields will bounce back. And they surely do look lush right now. Last year May was really dry. Not so this May -- we've had sunshine, we've had rain. On balance, we're doing well!
I am now in the habit of getting up very early on Saturdays so that I can be at the downtown farmer's market just a little after seven. On a day like this, the early market is one big piece of heaven.
My list is small -- asparagus, carrots, mushrooms, flowers. But I peer into each stall and watch the progression of produce as we move briskly through the season. Spring is way too short in my opinion!
Of course, there is also a stop for me at Madison Sourdough.
For fresh breakfast treats. On the porch, with Ed, shortly after.
Yes, for sure, there follows an hour of weed pulling. You know the equation: rain plus more rain equals weeds. So I work on that.
But at the lunch hour, Ed and I drive over to my mother's new rooms to check in on her and to maybe get her to help me decide what else she might need from her old room. (Ed is there to do the heavy lifting, should the need arise.)
Unfortunately, I get nowhere with that. She is convinced that everyone is "cruel" and working their hardest to make her life miserable and of course, who better to share this with than me. But not only me. I think the staff has heard plenty from her on the subject!
Will she improve over time? I don't know.
Thinking that perhaps an arrangement of pictures and familiar objects put in front of her might help, I get Ed to lug a bookshelf up the hill and we place this in her line of vision with some arrangement of photos that would belie her complaint that she has nothing but a wall to stare at (as she sits by a floor to ceiling window with a beautiful view toward the forest).
Eventually, after reviewing everything with various staff members we leave.
I think Ed was a little taken aback by the whole visit, but I wasn't. I've been listening to this far too long to be shocked. Though I admit it, it's not easy to be on the receiving end of someone's never ending unhappiness with life.
It does take me a while to regain my feeling of peace after the visit. But this, too, is my "normal." I've had years of practice! I know what to do: it's back to the garden! This time I'm motivated to take out the tractor-mower to carve out good paths on farmette lands. I hack away at the thistles, the wild parsnips, the burdock and by the time I'm done and I shut off the loud engine the world feels grand once more.
In the late afternoon, Ed and I bike to our local park. I haven't seen the prairie move into its season of bloom. (So it's a bike-hike-bike!)
It's incredibly beautiful. The Golden Alexanders dominate, but the white wild indigo is starting up as well as is the purple Spiderwort. But as always, its the entirety that wows you.
You look up and down and you feel just so good to be there on this sunny late afternoon in May.
And the cranes holler and the red tipped blackbirds dart to their perches and you do not need much else to feel happy.
At the hike's end, we lie down in the cool grass. Sooo good, Ed mumbles. Feels so good...
Yes it does.
with love...
