I heard it on TV!
40 is the new 20.
60 is the new 40.
Bull pucky! If you believe that, maybe it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee, and while you’re at it, come to terms with the fact that you might be buying yellow bricks from a bunch of munchkins from Planet Oz.
Illusion is the new truth out there, my friends!
What’s real in my house is the troubling personal reality that 90 minutes has become the new 30 minutes and the end results are starting to suck big time since I’m working with what I have and not so much with what I need, or used to have, or think I ought to have.
I remember working like a son of a gun without ending the day with cascading waves of muscles cramps and insomnia. I remember when a glass of white wine was all it took to unwind. But the fact that it takes 90 minutes for me to do what I used to do in 30 is a fact of life, and as distasteful as it seems, I live around it as I go about the comical but satisfying process of remaining true to myself. This time-ability-experiential -shift hasn’t changed who I am; it’s only decreased my production levels requiring me to regularly adjust priorities.
Yesterday my dentist was trying to sell me on his idea of how to best care for my teeth, saying his plan would ensure dental happiness for the next 30 years. I looked at him like he’d lost his mind.
“I have no plans to need teeth in 30 years”, I said, to which he replied, “You need to change the paradigm you use to see life.”
I have to hand it to him, it was a great line, but paying $10,000 for a couple of teeth isn’t going to impact anything except my wallet, and honest to goodness, I don’t want to see 95!
Years ago I made a deliberate choice to live my own way. It wasn’t an easy decision to make. It turned my entire life upside down, and during the first year that followed, I sometimes wondered if the consequences of that choice weren’t signs that I’d lost my mind. One the best (and worst) aspects of my personality is an over-developed sense of tenacity; I’m “in it” for the long haul no matter how long or short, how wicked or delightful the ride might be.
I lost friends. I disappointed family. I hung in. I pushed on and here I am!
Happiness is fleeting and situational at best, so to say I’ve been happy ever since would be dishonest, but I have enormous inner peace and intermittent bursts of sudden, unexplained joy.
Eventually my family came around, but there is space between us that didn’t feel as if it was there before. This was disappointing until I began to understand that life is not intended to remain constant. The human condition is based on constant evolving change as we grow from single cells into complex beings of great potential. We accept, we reject, and we settle or compromise. We break free from the pack. We stumble and fall. We get up and try again, or lie face down in the dirt unwilling to gamble on the uncertainty of the unknown. We grow large or we shrink. We bend or we break. Some of us try to stay in the same place but the wind blows and the night sky dims our vision, and well known plains and valleys in the geography of our existence evolves around us, forcing our hand.
If we are true to our core selves, resisting social rhetoric and religious dogma, we win! We get to rub Ben Gay on our swollen legs at night and drink warm milk or pop Tylenol PM in hopes of getting a decent night’s sleep.
We get to have good or bad dreams, and we get to remember or forget them when we wake in the morning. We get to choose whether or not we want to watch the 5 o’clock news. We get to decide if we eat sensibly or forgive ourselves for eating chocolate cake for dinner.
We get to keep inching along that long narrow ledge on the steepest side of the highest mountain, and it’s our choice whether or not we leap into the near-blue invisible arms of the sky or sit in place, watching the clouds swirl around us. We can be kings and queens or the village idiot. We can shut up, put up and hang on. Or not.
ittymac 
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