At some point in our lives, we grow up enough to realize that some of the things (pick your poison) that we assumed that we would grow out of, just isn’t going to happen—there just won’t be enough time—even if we do live to be 100.
We even get to a place in our minds where that fact is either OK or just plain doesn’t matter enough. Add to that, the fact, that sometimes those things never needed changing to begin with. We were often, from infancy, given incorrect information and lived our lives as if it was correct information. That is the price we pay for not coming with proper operating instructions.
What was once important seems somehow irrelevant as we get older.
When I could press my own weight above my head, I could not imagine there would ever be a time when I could not. What is surprising to me is actually how little that seems to matter now. If someone had told me 40 years ago, that I would not care about lifting myself over my head when I was 67, I would have found it disturbingly absurd.
This is not so much about missing what I once could do, as it is with the enjoyment of what has replaced it. I now cannot imagine where I would find the time to do what it takes to be that strong. Instead I merely enjoy that I am still strong enough to do what I do want to do (for the most part), while doing some of those “old” things often enough to have my body bitch about it for weeks later.
There is a vast ocean between what the mind remembers doing and what the body can actually do. We are born with that disconnect and, if we live long enough, we die with that disconnect.
By Charles Buell