Slowly Getting There

I'm still here. I'm wondering about this weekend, more than anything.

This last few weeks have given me much pause for thought. My birthday is on Sunday, and while I've been prepping for it as much as possible, and my family has been exceptionally busy helping out with the rest of the arrangements behind the scenes, this encroaching birthday has been giving me a lot to think about.

My body is not officially going to be considered young any more.

I mean, I'm not going to be enacting the mental breakdown scene from Whatever Happened To Baby Jane any day soon, but I was reminded of this a bit earlier when I read a back number of 2000 AD where Psi-Judge Cassandra Anderson reminisced that she was "pushing fifty," and how Judge Dredd is now in his seventies, and his body is beginning to make critical mistakes that are getting him seriously injured on a regular basis.

I still think of my mind as flexible, and open to new ideas. However, I have enough experience of the world to be able to critically examine every new idea that comes along and, on weighing the options of the new idea against what I perceive to be the common good, either accept it or dismiss the new idea as abject horseshit.

And I can make those kinds of judgments very, very quickly these days.

It's why I don't complain, unlike some of my younger peers who never seem to do anything but grouse and gripe about the world these days. I am alive, and to live means to understand that there will be suffering. But there will also be the "getting over it" part of overcoming suffering to look forward to, too. Suffering and pleasure alike are transient, momentary things; the trick is to learn not to cling to them to any great degree, but be ready to let them go at any time, or to be ready to accept that they could suddenly be taken away any moment.

Most of all, it's why I am still learning new things, and new ways of doing things. I think that this is probably the most profoundly human capability we have - the ability to continuously learn, throughout our lives. It cultivates flexibility, physical and mental; and that flexibility contributes towards your emotional and physical wellbeing throughout your days.

jIbepQo'. pagh vIpay.