The Challenges of Staying in Shape

I see them, people not so much older than I, struggling to get in and out of their cars, or to walk from their car to the front door of a Kohl’s or Target. I see motorized wheelchairs, oxygen masks, and walkers. I see labored breathing after a flight of stairs. And I know that not only do none of us get out of here alive, but most of us are going to have significant physical limitations before our bodies finally call it a day.

Still, I’d like to take steps to at least give my body a chance to avoid the worst of it, to recover after an accident or an illness or a surgery. When my wife had an accident last winter and broke six (or was it seven?) ribs, it was a wake-up call to both of us. Neither of us was in as good of shape as we should have been, and it was painfully clear that events are inevitably going to happen to our bodies that require recovery. The better shape we’re in now, the better chance we’ll have to recover quickly and successfully. Something as simple as getting out of a chair can be a terrible burden after an accident, but even more if your muscles aren’t in good working order. Physical fitness matters. For years, I’ve watched guys in workout facilities pump iron like their lives depended on it, and I’ve finally started to realize…they’re lives might depend on it!

And so my wife and I started seeing a personal trainer twice a week. My plan was to see him for three or four months, get a good routine established, and continue the workouts at home. I worked diligently last winter and spring, expanding my repertoire, purchasing mat flooring, a workout bench, some bands and dumbbells, and after a few months, I felt stronger: my movements had become more fluid, I had increased my confidence in exercises like hinges and squats and lunges, and my left knee – for decades the source of on-again, off-again piercing pain – finally got over its persnicketiness. All it took was one additional step up onto a 20-inch plyo box – one that had me groan audibly in pain – and as if my magic, all the knee pain that had plagued me since I was in my 20s disappeared. I can now step up onto 20-inch box without a thought.

Yay for the human body!

I was going along just fine, feeling rather smug about how much by body was improving, continuing my workouts at home plus an occasional check-in with my trainer, when suddenly my neck – also a source of on-again, off-again piercing pain for the past several decades – cried uncle, immobilizing my head to the point where it could barely turn.

Back to the drawing board. I began a three-month period of virtually no working out; that is, not unless you include the dozens of physical therapy sessions I attended at a well-run local clinic. I worked as diligently on my assigned “necksercises” as I had on my normal workout routine, and after months of pain and frustration, my neck began to relax, allowing me to increase my head movement significantly. It’ll probably never be “normal,” but it is much better. It’s at a point where if I can maintain my level of mobility for the rest of my life, I’ll be a happy man.

Yay for the human body!

But then I returned to the gym. It was as if I’d never started working out to begin with. After my first session, I could barely walk for the next two days.

So the journey begins again, trying to establish a functioning human body that has a fighting chance to recover after a fall or a car accident or a surgery. I’m trying. But now I’m proceeding with more caution than last winter. I’m lifting, but not as much. I’m allowed to do overhead pulls, but no longer overhead presses. I have to recognize that as much as I want to get stronger and achieve more fluidity, I also want to be able to move my head. It’s a balancing act, a variation of which I suspect all of us will be navigating for the remainder of our lives.

“Just keep moving,” is my motto these days.  And try to avoid the types of events that will test how fit (or unfit) you really are.

Life's Meaning and Selfish Pursuits

Speaking with my mother on the phone a few weeks ago, she lamented the aches and pains that she and her older friends have been experiencing lately, concluding that today’s elderly are dealing with issues that their parents never encountered because they’re “living too darn long.” While my mother is certainly still active and enjoying various activities, she feels like she’s no longer living a “purpose-driven life,” borrowing a phrase from Rick Warren’s best-selling book. Aside from doing some tutoring and volunteering at a hospital, she doesn’t feel like she’s truly contributing to society or the greater good.

I don’t know that one has to actively contribute to society to live a meaningful life, but I’ve been ruminating about this ever since our conversation. I too am wrestling with what a meaningful existence entails. Back in 2017, I wrote a few blogs that tackled this subject, and I seemed more assured of the answer than ever before. I wrote:

Learn. Explore. Volunteer. Start a hobby. Help others. Learn an instrument. Love, and experience joy with the ones you love. Learn a craft. Grow something. Learn a language. Have fun with friends. And perhaps most importantly, enjoy the little miracles around you every day. 

But for me, 2022 has been a year of saying “no” to things. I resigned from my two biggest volunteering activities: picking up food for a local food pantry and serving on my synagogue’s board. At the end of the summer I am leaving one of my bands, and I’ve also given up baseball this year, having watched not one game this season in person or on TV, an act of defiance which provoked the following response from an old friend of mine: “Oh shit, this is getting real.” It is kind of! I’m used to watching over a hundred games a year. This year I’ve probably freed up somewhere around 300 hours to pursue other things.

But what things, exactly? As a friend of mine once said of retirement: you can’t just retire from something, you have to retire to something. And if 2022 is the year for me to say no to some things, I’m also going to have to say yes to other things. 

So far, it’s a little unresolved, and I echo my mother’s thoughts that perhaps I’m not living a purpose-driven life. But the thing is, I’m happy to have walked away from a few of my volunteer activities. It was time. I’m at peace with leaving one of my bands. It was time. I don’t miss baseball in the least, something I couldn’t fathom saying a few years ago. But what will I walk towards?

I have friends whose purpose in life seems to be to enjoy life itself. Is that enough? It’s a self-centered pursuit for sure, but damn, they seem pretty happy, and after spending years and years doing what I thought I should do, I’m kind of enjoying just doing what I want to. I’m recording a new album that few people will ever hear. I’m playing in a few bands. I’m reading books more proactively. I’m tackling home maintenance projects. I’m reaching out to friends and family, attending concerts, enjoying food and taking walks with my wife and dog.

Is that enough? It isn’t noble. It’s perhaps not the life I can sustain for long before I tell myself to get back in the game and – as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. described in his novel Dead-Eye Dick – stop living life as epilogue and get back to adding to one’s story. It’s tricky. My mom probably feels like her life is epilogue – that her life story is over now. I’m 29 years younger than my mom, and in some ways I’m living a life that’s “short on story and overburdened with epilogue.” But I’m enjoying it except for the part of me that feels guilty for enjoying it! 

For now, I’m going to try to give myself permission to pat myself on my back for twenty years of parenting and volunteering and say it’s okay to have a reprieve. To reset. To just breathe for a while and let my whims take me where they may. Eventually I’ll find something to say yes to, that excites me.

This meaning of life stuff is tricky, whether you’re 83 or 54. It really never gets any easier.

Aging Like Peter Gabriel

Aging can be scary.  Just ask my daughters about Peter Gabriel.  But first, a little background…

In 1994 I mentioned to my friend Julie that I thought my hairline was starting to recede.  “Well, duh!” was her response.  Apparently, I was the last to know.  Or maybe the last to know was Alice, my wife, because I managed to snare her prior to my long descent into baldness.  2013 helped spur the aging process, as I put on about seven pound and purchased my first pair of reading glasses.  I figure it’s only downhill from here.  There are exceptions to men aging in unattractive ways: say, George Clooney, Cary Grant, and every man who’s ever played James Bond.

But for me, I think I’m going to go down the path of Peter Gabriel (except for the world stardom part).

Gabriel didn’t really reach world stardom until his album So in 1986 when he was thirty-six years old, a fairly elevated age for a rock performer’s peak, but even six years later, when he toured behind his follow-up album Us and sang about aging issues like divorce, he looked good.  Svelte.  Tireless.  Exuberant.  When my daughters were young, we would play Gabriel’s Secret World DVD over and over, mesmerized by the visual spectacle of the show as much as the musical performances.  Still own it.  Still love it.

And then…

As Gabriel is wont to do, he stayed largely hidden from public view for a number of years, but appeared in 1999 at the Academy Awards to sing Randy Newman’s song “That’ll Do” from the movie Babe - Pig in the City.  You could almost hear the audience gasp as he came onto the stage.

Check out the reaction that people shared on-line immediately following the Oscars (under the heading “Peter Gabriel YIKES”).

My favorite line is: “My husband came into the room and asked me why Marlon Brando was singing.”

Big deal, right?  People age.  Except it was only SIX YEARS AFTER the Secret World tour!  The man went from this…

…to this…

...from the age of 43 to 49!

I’m 45, smack dab in the middle of the road that goes from “tolerable looking” to “ewww”.

Four years after Gabriel’s Oscar performance, I rented the DVD of his Up tour, excited to once again show my daughters an inspiring Peter Gabriel concert.  I don’t want it to sound like I’ve raised two shallow-minded girls, but they practically cowered while watching the hairless, bloated figure on screen.  They were only six years old, but they knew a cover up when the saw one.

“This is the same man?” they asked.

“It is.”

“Are you sure?” 

I wasn’t.  They went back to playing with their Barbies, and I finished the DVD, searching for a melody in tunes like “More than This” and “Growing Up.”  It was as if the songs had suffered the same fate as their creator, plodding along, suffocating beneath their own weight.

It’s said that people see themselves at a certain age, frozen in time, and are shocked and betrayed when the mirror shows their true age.  But better to live by that internal age then the external one.  Better to be surprised when looking into the mirror than validated.

I guess that's the trick.  So I've decided I'm going to live like I'm twenty-one and see what happens. Should be divorced and homeless within a month's time.