I’m down in the back at the moment.
And it’s a bloody sad day when you can’t decide if you got your back injury rolling over in bed, or when you turned to grab the soap in the shower. I can’t be sure what did me in, but I suspect it was the rolling around in bed. I just transitioned into my winter PJ’s — the thick flannel situation that keeps me from freezing to death in our drafty cottage once it starts to get colder outside.
Those jammies don’t slide very well on my sheets, and sometimes, my upper body and my lower body get a little out of synch and twisted when I turn from my side to my back — which is odd for me because it seems like a simple turn like that should be so effortless at my age. But it’s not…
Because I’m feeling old.
And I realize how lucky I am to have “gained” a year this year due to that bizarre miscalculation I made about my age last year. But I do wonder if my mistake that I am actually 48 when I thought I was 49 is the result of feeling like my body isn’t as zippy as it used to be all of a sudden. I seem to “break” a lot more easily these days. Less than a year ago, my neck was all jacked up, and I still don’t have any meaningful feeling in the pointer finger on my left hand…
And now my back is hobbled up?
What gives?
I was driving our truck today, and the radio was on, and they were advertising some pill that’s supposed to make your telomeres longer. (Whaaaat??) Supposedly, telomeres are these little parts of your chromosomes, and they somehow shorten with age. Long telomeres are good; short ones are bad… Short ones mean you’re old, and you need this special pill to make them longer, I guess…
Hmmm…
Perhaps I did something in my life to clip my darn telomeres prematurely…
And now…
I’m suddenly old???
At least that’s how I feel right now…
(The only thing I can think of is that some of the cheap cleaning products I’ve been forced to use in the past could’ve been involved in the shortening of my gloriously long and flowing telomeres… But who could know for sure?)
But as that ad was playing, I had this funny thought about the fact that when I felt zippy and young, an ad about getting old would’ve seemed irrelevant and annoying to me. I know this because all of the warnings my lovely mom gave me about regrets I would have later in my life — like not wearing sunscreen or taking better care of my elbow skin — just went right over my head because I really didn’t want to believe she might be right.
The thing is, I do think I believed my mother about such things — because she never lied to me, and, I know she was only telling me something she could vouch for in her own life. But still. I didn’t listen when there was still time to appreciate my lusciously long telomeres, and my sag-free, pasty-white face and elbow skin. Back then, perhaps I could’ve prevented some of these newly emerging problems, but I didn’t listen… And now, I’ve turned into a cliche-of-a-woman who can’t believe how quickly age comes on when you’ve spent most of your life believing the things that happened to your own mother probably won’t happen to you in the same way.
But.
For the most part, I like being the age I am now.
With the struggles I’ve had with my health in the past, reaching this point in my life is a pretty awesome thing. And so I do apologize if I’m sounding whiney or ungrateful for my outstanding life. I am thankful, and I do know I’m still young. (However, my back has not gotten that memo…)
But I guess I’m just shocked to roll over into another day of my life, and suddenly, I’m aware of the fact that my body doesn’t turn as well as it used to — which is something I’ve taken advantage of for such a long time. And it bugs me that things have to change, but they do… And, if something changes in one part of my life than I better be willing to change things in other parts of it, too.
But there was something on social media once that said something like, “Don’t you wish you could go back to the first time in your life when you called yourself old?” For me, that was probably when I was a freshman in college and I was home for Christmas! High school seemed so beneath me back then because I was so much older and better than the kids still stuck in high school!
But the truth is, I don’t think I’d want to go back in time and do it all over again, because like I said, I’m mostly happy now. And, there’s no way I could handle doing any part of my life over again just to get back here to the same place where I notice life’s inevitable changes in my being.
One thing I’ve learned in my life is that sometimes, a physical disruption is just a lesson in disguise. A setback or a detour that physically alters your pathway forward might reveal something you need to know. So as I sit here with an icepack on my lower back, and a pointer finger that somehow miraculously keeps on finding the correct keys on my computer, I wonder if my back is trying to tell me this:
