Mentally my friend Betty
has always rejected aging. Recently after an all-day senior outing she emailed
me and said, “Do you think my body is saying, “No more trips for you, Old Lady?”
Actually, yesterday was the first day I admitted to feeling 92!” I laughed and
told her I was shocked by her admission, but she quickly pulled me up short and
wrote back, “I said YESTERDAY was the first day I admitted to feeling 92. Today
is another day. Slower, perhaps, but still…” Betty and Caleb seem to have a
similar zest for life. Caleb, who remembered the promise from the Lord 38 years
earlier said, “Now then, just as the LORD promised, he has kept me alive for
forty-five years since the time he said this to Moses, while Israel moved about
in the desert. So here I am today, eighty-five years old! I am still as
strong today as the day Moses sent me out; I’m just as vigorous to go out to
battle now as I was then” (Joshua 14:10-11 NIV).
1 comment:
Gail;
-----Our bodies are generally pretty healthy mechanisms. Its our hearts and minds that get weak. I used to rue all of the positive thinking, mind-over-body garbage, until I started aging a little. In my early fifties I popped something in my shoulder while dumping a wheel-barrel of cement. That evening, when I went to retrieve my washrag from where it hung over the shower door, I didn’t get my arm above shoulder-level before I felt the pain. I dropped it to my side and thought, “I can mind this pain and get old now, or I can reach through it and stay young.” I chose the latter. The next attempt was successful, and without pain! Nor has it hurt since.
-----When my back gets stiff I do a dozen or more toe-touchers, straighten up my posture, hold firm the muscles in my lower-torso, suck in my gut, level my shoulders, and engage my lower-back into my stride. It’s not an immediate cure, but my back stiffness rarely carries over from one day to the next anymore. When in my late forties I started getting those piercing pains in my heels, like 20-penny nails hammered into them, I cut back on my chow and lengthened my stride to fullness, rather than those diffident, little half-strides I shuffled with up until then. One would wonder, “What would a full stride have to do with heel pain?” Simple. Completing the stride stretches and flexes the tendon attaching to the heel, keeping it strong and pliable. When I took up battle against my manic-depression forty years ago, among the first adjustments I made was to stop breathing with my stomach muscles and start using the muscles in my upper chest to draw in my air. Emotions are subtly expressed and sympathetically stimulated by the actions of muscle groups and body positions - yummy, yummy, yummy love in the tummy; butterflies in the stomach, curl up in grief, etc. I don’t know if that is due to hard wiring or cultural Psychosomatics, but at least the constant engagement of the ole temporal lobes it took to shift the mundane breathing habit effectively put the foot down on my chronic, emotional beast.
-----Whenever I used to hear, “God is great,” (or “Allahu Akbar,” otherwisely expressed) I used to think, “What’s so great about Him?!” I mean, yah, He’s perfect and all, but He’s got me poked down this Hell-hole everyone runs around calling a “wonderful life.” It’s nothing but a bunch of strife and worries. And ok, so it is. And it is going to just get worse until it becomes even more than unbearable. That day Jesus returns. Greatness begins when rottenness ends. So. What is great about Him is that it is rottenness that has an end, not greatness. Greatness will never end. There’s a lot of strength to siphon out of that thought, probably just enough to keep me standing up straight, walking with full stride, breathing with confident chest right through Hillary’s election into some “Allahu Akbar” screaming Muslim’s machete. I’m joyful our purpose is not served by any creature comforts of this life.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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