Who? Me? Die? Nope, that kind of stuff doesn’t happen to me. These bad habits of mine might be harmful for you, but I’ve got this. At least, that’s what I thought and how I lived for the first four decades of my life.
Now that I am approaching 60 (in two years), my stance on the whole “living forever” thing has shifted.
Suddenly, as I sit in my progressive lenses and nurse my chronically ailing knees, I realize that I am as old as really old people were when I was in my 20s.
“That whole aging thing is never going to happen to me,” I often thought to myself when I found myself feeling especially sorry for those “really old” people in my life. I often wondered how they could stand being so, you know, droopy.
Now I am one of those poor, droopy souls. I have wrinkles, and I gain weight just looking at food. My aunts tried to warn me that one day I would wake up and everything I had eaten in my 20s would suddenly appear on my body. It happened in my 40s, and I have never been the same since.
I see all these women, including many of my childhood friends, who’ve managed to defy gravity and hormones in their later years. I am in awe, but does that mean they will live longer than I will? Assuming they eat better and get more exercise than I do, I guess the odds of living longer are in their favor. But when it is all said and done, will that mean they have lived better?
You see, I want to live better. Sometimes that means enjoying some bad habits, letting those gray roots show, embracing the wrinkles on my legs — yes, my legs! I think that’s what the forever-young Jayne Seymour refers to as “crepe” on the infomercials that come on in the middle of the night when I have age-related insomnia.
As my days on this earth grow shorter, I am actually thinking less about how many of them I have left than I am about how I am living them. If my cardiologist reads this, I am in trouble. No, I don’t want to have high blood pressure or high cholesterol. I really do work on eating better and exercising, but I don’t want to waste my life being obsessed with them to the point where I’m not really living.
I think author Diane Ackerman said it best: “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.”
By all means, yes, we should be taking steps to protect our health. I am not suggesting you run with scissors or weave in and out of traffic, but go ahead and eat the pizza, and count wrestling with your dog as cardio on those days you can’t make it to the gym.
I just think we should all live a little, and truly living isn’t being in a constant state of fear about when you might die. Whoever dies at a ripe old age with the fewest wrinkles or crepe doesn’t win a prize, you know.
