In my day - I was born in 1942 and grew up in the fifties - a girl couldn't even contemplate a sport like this. I was 30 before I ever met a woman who could pilot a plane. I was awestruck.
A lot has changed since then, thanks to the many cultural revolutions, including feminism. And my bones have changed, too, and are, oh, brittle, due to a lifetime of scorning milk and kidney failure and also just plain aging. I know what broken bones are, and there's no way I would try a jet-ski or even surfboard now. Or anything that might jar me sufficiently to lead to a long, long rehab.
We do age. And the time keeps coming and coming and you realize that today you can't do something you could do only yesterday. Anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something. So live with no illusions about tomorrow - you don't have forever to get to Paris.
When I picked out the above video and listened to it, it seemed so sweet, so innocent, so sort of Buddhist in its emphasis on this day, and I'd thought John Denver was like the public persona honored in the video. Just now I read over his bio in Wikipedia and found that his life was not innocent or easy. He was only 53 when he died crashing his private jet. He'd survived crashing his Porsche two years earlier. From Wikipedia -
In 1996, nearly a year before the accident, the Federal Aviation Administration had learned of Denver's failure to abstain entirely from alcohol after his drunk driving arrests, and had previously revoked his medical certification. . . . [Therefore] he was not legally able to fly at the time of the accident. However, there was no trace of alcohol or drugs in Denver's body at autopsy.I know. It's sad. I didn't think this post was going to go this way, and I suspect he didn't think that flight was going to end that way, either. I'd been playing over in my mind all the people I've known who have lost abilities as they aged, including me and, actually, every old person I know. Actually, that's more real to me, because I've been close to people who didn't see it coming and had nothing else to turn to.
Time to go to the bottom of the blog, again, and think about The Five Remembrances. Cheers.
I'm older than you are but I prefer to think about Now and whatever Future I have ina more positive way. Never mind wasting time and emotion thinking about what we can no longer do or try. Better to think about and try what we CAN do ar at least can try. And that, Dear Lady, is a very long list. There are two women in my Zumba class who are in their mid-90s. Are they good at it? Well, not really, but they keep moving and do the best they can and they show up each week which is saying a lot!
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