Feeling old... Defensive walking...

Age is a funny thing it's relative, personal, and it's tied to time which is such an elastic concept that there seems to be no rhyme or reason.  The passage of time is completely esoteric.  You certainly can't pin it down.

Yesterday The Best Friend had a birthday.  She was treated to the dubious pleasure of TLOML and I singing Happy Birthday onto her answering machine.  The Best Friend was one of the youngest women in our class at school.  In June I will turn 50 and TLOML hits her half century in November.  Strangely,The Chef, who was featured recently in a newspaper article has managed to only be 47....  Hmmm very interesting, cause I am almost certain that she was actually older than me!   LOL.  Oh well, we know that there are some things that can halt the passage of time and most of them have to do with wealth and fame.  I don't blame The Chef really; after all, 50 is a VERY BIG number!

Jazz, my blogging fibro sister, has written a great blog about feeling older than she is and rather than repeat all the things I wanted to say that she has already said I will just link to her here (I'm sure she won't mind).  It's a great blog.  So often I have ideas fermenting in my brain getting close to becoming a blog and Jazz will jump in just before I am ready to write it and steal all my thunder!  Sometimes we seem to be eerily in sync.

My take on this feeling older actually needs to be credited to a conversation I had with The Best Friend a couple of months ago.  She pointed out the way elderly people negotiate their way through a crowd.  Many/most/perhaps all seniors move near other people with a visible hyper-vigilance.  This isn't "defensive driving", it's "defensive walking".  Keeping a very close eye on anyone else who is moving nearby and testing the ground before putting all weight on the leading foot has become a way of life for me.  I get it, I really get how elderly people feel out in the world.  I know what it's like to fear an accidental bump with a stranger - I know because it hurts!  It hurts like (insert expletive of your choice) when I get jostled in a stupidmarket queue or when someone laughing unexpectedly steps back into me and it triggers a series of painful spasms that radiate from either the site of impact or from the part of me that moves unexpectedly to save myself.  I now travel the world with the wary, skepticism of a bona fide Methuselah!

When I was a kid I never took a staircase at less than two steps at a time; almost every time I ran down steps I would jump down the last five or six.  I touched a banister only to vault out of the stairs or down to the next flight.  There were two speeds, flat out and stopped.  Those days are gone.  Now I traverse the globe with care, caution, and a desperate desire to anticipate the movements of any other things that move!

Last night I knocked over a glass of water.  Startled myself which hurt my back.  Dropped to my knees to wipe up the spillage which caused stabbing pains to explode from both knees.  Reached under the bed with the bathmat and seriously popped some kind of tendon in my right shoulder.  Then stood up and collapsed on the bed groaning in pain.... see what happens when I am surprised?  Thank goodness TLOML was there to take over and clean up my mess.  The knees and shoulder have yet to relent.  So do I feel older than I am - damn straight I do.  Do I move like someone older than I am - pretty much all the time (unless I forget or react and do something like I did with wiping up the spill last night).  Do I have that suspicious hyper-vigilance about how other people are moving?  Yep, I do.

So to all my geriatric followers (of whom I have none) I get it!  I know you are careful and that the cranky look on your face is actually fear.  I, like you, fear the unexpected.  I don't need to bungee jump for thrills - walking through a crowd is about as much excitement as I can stand!

On the move again!

Oy Vey!

Tomorrow I am returning from the tropics to glorious Sydney.  TLOML and I are being picked up at the airport by The Best Friend, which is wonderful.  Then back to her house to see The Boy and home to The Horsewoman's house to pack up my things and get ready to move... (again)...

I think I have moved seven times in the two years that ended on Christmas Eve.  It has been far far too often.  This coming move will be my eighth in twenty-five months.  The last move was the hardest...  Culling twelve years of accumulation into six checked bags across the Pacific was exhausting, heartbreaking and expensive.  I was ruthless and I am still looking for things I left behind.  I had this stupid outfit of girl clothes... white pants, a mauve tank top, and a crinkled floral over-shirt of white with mauve flowers...  I have the bloody ugly shirt that I never liked, and the tank top that goes with nothing else I own, but can I find the damn white pants (the only useful part of the outfit) anywhere?  *big frustrated sigh*  I just have to console myself that I made the best decisions I could at the time, as TLOML so often says "We are all just doing our best".

Part of me is dreading the return to Sydney because it is going to be incredibly hectic.  We both have people we love who we want and need to see.  In the four months since I returned to Australia I have reached out over and over to my old friends, my friends from school and university, my friends from my crazy early jobs and even my ex-girlfriends and without exception they have welcomed me into their lives in spite of my pathetic attempts to maintain contact over the decades.  I can't just jump in my car with TLOML and smile and wave and yell "So long and thanks for all the fish!"  I love and appreciate my old friends and I really want to get a chance to see them again this trip and thank them.  I will be leaving The Boy and although I know he is an adult now he will always be my baby, for that matter he is also one of my best friends and is a trustworthy confidant and a thoughtful adviser.  I have really enjoyed being as close to him as we have been the last couple of months.

Of course there will be other trips to Sydney but this move is really significant.  I am packing up and piling my junk in the car and heading 2400 km (about 1500 miles) north with every expectation of staying there forever.

TLOML and I have had a busy and quite stressful couple of days tying to get ready for the return to Sydney and struggling to coordinate the competing priorities of the people in Sydney, and even to some extent, the people up here.  Still we have not had a cross word or a moments disagreement, if anything we have both been a calming influence on each other.  We are well aware that "real life" will not be the same as either the lazy days or the frantic preparation this "holiday time" has provided but I'm pretty certain we will be fine.  I will be studying and she will be back at work and I think we will eagerly anticipate our time together.

So here I go again another giant leap of a move but somehow this one just feels different, it feels right and it feels relaxed in spite of the chaos of the time in Sydney.  I do feel anxiety about getting everything done and seeing everyone we really want to see but I have not had even one moments anxiety about if this is the right decision or if TLOML is the right person.  I named her TLOML and that continues to be the most apt and accurate description.

We will be fine because we will be together.

When vim and vigour vamoose

It sounded like a cute title and then I read the definitions and was struck by the degree of applicability!


(The following definitions are taken from Dictionary.com)

• Vim (Noun) - lively or energetic spirit; enthusiasm; vitality
• Vigour (Noun) - healthy physical or mental energy or power; vitality 
• Vamoose (Verb) - to leave hurriedly or quickly; decamp

Until the beginning of September this year I had not been a full time resident in Sydney for about 23 years.  Although it is my home town, I was born and educated here, as were both my parents.  I consider myself a "Sydneysider".  Moving "home", and through the wonders of such tools as Facebook and Linked In, I have managed to reconnect with many of my old friends.  Some I have maintained contact with throughout all my travels (perhaps infrequent but certainly reoccurrent), others I had thought were lost forever.  At present I am staying with a friend who I met in 1983 when we were a couple of horse crazy girls driving horse-drawn vehicles full of tourists.  The other week I went to Occupy Sydney and met up with an old school friend who I had known since 1975 and had not seen since 1981.  I have reconnected with my dearest friend (another school mate) and we have a cup of tea (like a couple of old biddies) several times a week.  Tomorrow I will catch up with two friends I met in 1981 when I was at University the first time, and on Wednesday of this week past I had lunch with a woman I went to Kindergarten with and had not seen since 1978.

My friend from Kindergarten/Primary School (Elementary for you North Americans) and I spent nearly three hours together talking and to be honest we never missed a beat.  We ate, had a beer, I stretched and hobbled around as needed (and managed to resist the urge to lie down on my booth seat!) and we talked.

Ours was a bit of a funny story really.  As kids we were thrust together to some extent cause our mother's were friends, we were in a small school together and to be honest neither of us really fit in with the "cool kids".  We were both being raised by divorced women (no big deal today it was a different story in 1970!)  We both had professional and relatively affluent fathers who had shit on our mothers in the divorces.  We both read like wildfire and we both had a passion for the works of the wonderful Enid Blyton.  Our closest times were spent playacting characters from these Enid Blyton books and running around the neighbourhood, and the mudflats on the Lane Cove River, pretending we were having the same kind of adventures as the Famous Five or the Secret Seven.  In year 5, I was moved to a different school and things changed.  Although she joined me at the new school from years 7 to 10 we never resumed the same level of close friendship.  She was an intellectual bookworm (a genius I believe) who was quite a loner and I was a gregarious, athletic girl who was always participating in one activity or another.  We remained friendly but we weren't really friends and our shared history slid away like so much other flotsam and jetsam bobbing in our wakes.

You must be wondering by now what this has to do with my title and the definitions in my introduction.  Never fear!  I won't leave you hanging - I'm on my way back to the point.

Of all of the old friends I have reconnected with no other has referenced so clearly who I was when I was young.  She said, "You were fearless,  You'd do anything!"  She pointed to a palm tree that probably stood fifty feet tall, and said, "You would have been at the top of that."  I would have too.  I would have shimmied up that naked trunk, like a monkey, and hung upside down from the fronds at the top.  She told me something I had never known; that she had envied me my fearless physicality.  I was the living definition of vigour and enthusiasm.  My barely controllable surplus of energy and my readiness to participate were a hindrance to me as a teenager.  I didn't have Buckley's chance of even simulating the droll ennui of the "cool girls" the vitality, the vim, was sparking from me like electricity, in fact I was the very picture of a "live wire".

Until a few years ago I would have still described myself as very enthusiastic.  One of the reasons I loved living in the US is that enthusiasm is appreciated there - it actually attracts people rather than making them look at you like you are embarrassingly energetic.  I think mentally I am still capable of enthusiasm, I get enthusiastic about writing these blogs, I am enthusiastic to convey clearly what I think and feel.  The outward signs of my mental passion have dimmed though...  My body no longer permits me to move or respond quickly or forcefully, and the crisp and powerful gestures have been watered down to careful and restrained movements.

Twelve hours from now I am going to attend the Rally to Re-Occupy Sydney and I am hoping that my friend from kindergarten will be there.  She doesn't like crowds, but she said she will try.  My other friend has said she is coming too (the one I met up with at the other rally).

I don't like crowds either and I'll stay well clear of any mass of people, I'm not fearless any more, I don't want to be bumped or jostled - that shit hurts!  I would go everywhere in a bubble of padding if I could.  I guess the bottom line is that when vim and vigour vamoose you have no choice other than to take it very gently.

Confession time!

They say confession is good for the soul but mostly I think it is good for your stress level.

I have never been very good at accepting any limitations and it remains a challenge.  Asking more of my body and my mind has always been a component of my way of life.  The last five or so years have really knocked me around, in every way, and I must confess, for the first time in my life, my confidence is pretty badly dented (though hopefully not totaled!).  Yet, accepting limits is not my strong suit.  

Professor McAwfullyCute (the doc who came up with the nifty 'Undampened Stress Response Resulting In Widespread Chronic Pain' tagline (hereafter referred to as AUSRRIWCP)) said if I felt comfortable walking for half an hour I should walk for twenty minutes.  At that moment, though clearly I heard him, I think he was talking in rectangles and I was only understanding in triangles because that whole concept really didn't sink in.  He actually told me that pushing the envelope makes things worse not better - again I didn't grasp the real meaning of that, it seems so counter-intuitive not to be able to build fitness by gradually pushing harder.

I know I have talked about pain and the AUSRRIWCP (where are those catchy anagrams by the way???) before, but I'm not sure if I made it clear that this is an immensely variable condition.  I can't ever say there is NO pain at all but sometimes it is both tolerable and manageable, these are the GOOD days!

Yesterday was a GOOD day, after a couple of not too heavy pain pills I was feeling about as good as I ever do and as I mentioned in my blog yesterday it was a glorious day here in the most beautiful city on earth (and no, I have not seen them all but I have seen more than most people ever will and the only one that comes even close to Sydney is Cape Town - so there)! [deep breath]

Forgive me, body, for I have sinned.

Yesterday I was overcome with the urge to play golf and I failed to fight the temptation.  

The view to Rose Bay from Woollahara Golf Course (3rd Tee)

Here is my conscious mind's version of limitations - "don't take too many practice swings, move slowly, only play 9 - or less if it hurts too much... yadda yadda..."

The reality was that even by the second hole it was starting to hurt, but I pushed on...  I should have listened... I didn't.

Here is my body's attitude to my limitations - "SCREW YOU - tomorrow you will PAY!"  (My body is more vengeful that the most vicious tyrant in history - than even Caligula at his worst!)

Alas, tomorrow is now today...

On a lighter note a few days ago Diane J Standiford in her excellent blog A Stellarlife blogged about a childhood confession and asked her readers to tell their stories too... this was my comment.  (Please don't let my brother actually read this!)

I guess I was about 7. we had a huge, battered old table in the basement/rumpus room of our house and my mother had left some ghastly mauve paint lying around down there...  My oldest brother was very naughty and I was a pretty easy kid most of the time but I was angry with him...  I wrote HIS initials on the table in mauve paint.  It was just the sort of thing he would have done!  What was the difference between my mother and a nuclear bomb?  The bomb only explodes once!  No one has ever known to this day that it was me...

So I invite your confession - good for the soul remember!

PS - Seattle might be nearly as beautiful as Sydney if the sun ever shone and Auckland is pretty too.

The Pessimistic Optimist Erupts

This little image appeared (originally from someone called Stevie Kidd) in my facebook feed today...

The accompanying text indicated that we need to take this step out of our comfort zones TODAY!

Well I looked at the diagram and considered my personal steps out of my comfort zone (that were MANY and varied) and how many of them actually landed in that enormous circle "where the magic happens" and I figured the diagram should look a little more like this...

I just listened to an interview on the radio with a woman called Barbara Ehrenreich who has written a book called Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.  You can listen to the interesting interview here- http://www.kpbs.org/news/2009/dec/14/has-positive-thinking-undermined-america/

We have been completely swamped in the last few years by movements like "The Secret" and "Think and Grow Rich" and it makes me wonder if it has created a culture of ostrich-ism (no not ostracism though that is evident too).  It seems everyone was doing the ostrich thing while the mortgage industry collapsed into chaos.  Ms Ehrenreich suggests that it may have been viewed as negative if someone had said to their bank something like, "I'm concerned about our exposure to subprime mortages".

Could it be that this relentless dedication to positive thinking is really a way to tell people who have a problem to "Just shut up!"?  Is it the great ameliorate of all ills that it is purported to be or is it simply an unrealistic superficial way of chucking a Scarlet O'Hara and deciding to "think about that tomorrow"?

I have always deeply resented the "heartwarming" stories I see on TV of people who through positivity, grit and determination overcome a disease or a disability.  The partial paraplegic who is lauded for learning to walk again, to me, is a not so subtle put down of the person whose physical condition is unable to be overcome.  Positivity and determination WILL NOT allow someone with a severed spinal cord to walk, it doesn't allow someone with MS to halt the degeneration of their body, and it doesn't make my aches, pains and fatigue disappear.  I resent this slight against the people, of whom I am one, who have real constant issues that won't go away.

Getting fired or laid off is a REAL problem and is not as easily surmounted as those who have job security might think.  Studies about stress and satisfaction have indicated that seeing the final outcome of your labours is intrinsic to having less stress, a better self image, and a sense of accomplishment.  Is there anything more dissatisfying than sending resume after resume into the ether and receiving NO response?  Having a positive attitude becomes like a drug that requires a regular "fix".  You write a cover letter and send it off with high hopes and visions of success... you never hear back... you write another and hope again... etc etc....  There is a point at which pasting on the smile and imagining yourself in the position becomes kind of sad and desperate, and where you could easily fit into that classic definition of insanity - doing the same thing and expecting different results.  Sure if you get an interview and have a chance to actually meet someone THAT is the time for pumping yourself up like an East German female weight lifter and being UBER POSTIVE TO THE POWER OF 10!

I have stepped out of my comfort zone in this life more than almost anyone I know - almost every time I have seen an opportunity I have reached for it - and quite a few of those chances have failed and damaged me financially, physically and emotionally.  The simple act of leaping into the unknown wrapped in your positive attitude is DANGEROUS!  I took what at the time I described as "calculated risks" - I should have realized that I wasn't good at maths and that my calculations might be flawed!  Don't get me wrong, I have no regrets and I wouldn't give back the depth of experience I have gained through taking chances.  I have busted my comfort zone over and over and I will bust out of it again very soon I am sure - just as soon as I lick my wounds and try to heal a little from the damage caused last time.

My mother used to say "Hope for the best and prepare for the worst."  Mum was a child during The Great Depression and was one of the most positive and genuinely upbeat people I have ever known.  Her zest for life and rollicking enthusiasm were evident to anyone who had the privilege to meet her and I hope that I have inherited some of that spark.  She was right in her pessimistic optimism and I really believe the world would be a better place if BIG business and BIG government took a leaf from her book.