Day 18 Never Too Late

“Never too sick, never too old, never too broken … to begin again.”

That’s the slogan at my yoga studio. Labouring, as I am, through the murk of a full-blown mid-life crisis, I find it particularly encouraging. Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking. I look so stable. Normal, even. Well, beneath my mild-mannered exterior pulses the hot, red knowledge of mortality, the running-out of the sand in my hourglass. Like Superman, but with neuroses instead of power.

I look after myself. I’m responsible, vigilant even, some might suggest hypochondriacal, about my health. (I want “I TOLD you I was sick!” carved on my headstone.) I don’t obsess, really, but I pay attention. Just because I didn’t have (fill in the blank) last year, when I complained about that weird pain in my (fill in the blank) doesn’t mean I don’t have it now.

I’m not sick, but some days, I feel old and broken in ways that there simply isn’t time to fix. My life is changing, once more, and I’ve never been particularly good with change. But that’s what life is. Like it or not, it’s all about change.

So I push myself out of my comfort zone, day after day, trying to get my head to my knee, forcing myself to face my aging body, my changing life. It’s hard. Sometimes it hurts.

As Westley said to Buttercup in The Princess Bride, “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” (Westley was sad when he said that, suffering as he was under the burden of unrequited love, and I’m quite sure he’d adopted a more optimistic outlook by the movie’s end.) Unrequited love or midlife crisis, it’s all temporary. It’ll all change soon.

It’s a good body. It’s a good life. It’s up to me to enjoy them while I can.

Namaste.