Health is Wealth

An interesting thing happened on my well-traveled road to maturity. My collateral, long assumed to be material things and assets, morphed into something far more valuable and priceless. Health became paramount and without it, everything else pales in comparison.

At my age, all the money in the world doesn’t mean a damn thing if you don’t have your health. As wealthy as some folks are, few of them if any, can buy their way back to health once it’s gone.

In retrospect, I’ve been very lucky. I think I’m in fairly good shape simply because I started running early on and never stopped until I was well past 70. After one memorable weekend in the service, I stopped drinking all hard liquor except for a light beer once in a while. I’ve never smoked (OK, weed doesn’t count during my wannabe hippie years), and I’ve maintained my weight pretty well. It wasn’t planned out that way. There were no goals and objectives for a lifetime of trying to stay fit. I just started working and moving about beginning in 7th grade and have kept at it all my life.

I thought about this phenomenon recently after attending yet another funeral. It seems more and more of my friends and acquaintances have experienced recent health issues at this stage in their lives. That and my own aches and pains crawling out of bed each morning brought that issue to mind.

‘Late in life’ issues often prompt a reflective glimpse back in time. The famous Irish poet Oscar Wilde once said, “The final mystery is oneself.” So how does one unravel the mystery of self? It probably can’t happen without self-awareness and self-awareness won’t happen without reflection.

I’m at that point in life where things are starting to happen beyond my control. This old body has been pumping and expanding for seventy-six years. Fortunately its wear and tear has been relatively minimum. For others an excess of ‘living the good life’ is finally starting to show its consequences. For others, it’s the luck of the draw or the flip side of that event. I mentioned that idea in another blog entitled ‘Our Final Tabulation.’

Reflecting back on circumstances or events in one’s life can bring about new insights into your present circumstances. I think reflection is looking inward so one can look back with a broader, more accurate perspective of your current situation in life. Health more than most other events can bring that to the forefront.

As the cliché goes, it’s never too late to begin again. When my Mother and stepfather couldn’t dance anymore at ages ninety and eight-two respectively, they took up cards to strengthen their minds. I didn’t recognize it back then but their actions were a powerful motivator for me to keep pressing on.

Hiking the Garstin Trail each Saturday morning has brought me renewed appreciation for the mountain goats that so often pass me on their trek to the summit. These are weathered old goats who have passed up their country club lifestyle for the more challenging heights of our surrounding mountains.

Assessing what is important at this stage of one’s life really comes down to the basics. Health, family, friendships and life experiences. All the rest is soon to be outdated, worn out, or soon to be replaced by this season’s new trend.

Stages

The Coachella Valley gets a lot of top-flight entertainers during high season. Not long ago, I saw a doo-wop show of rock and roll artists from the fifties and sixties. Rating the show, I’d give it a solid C. It only rated a C because two of the four acts should have retired ten or twenty years ago. Their grasp of the music had long since slipped away along with their tired voices.

Instead of resting on their well-deserved laurels, these aging rockers were still clinging to the sad assumption that audiences would revel in their act and not recognize their many shortcomings. Unfortunately the audience was as old as the performers and not very forgiving of their failed effort at still rocking it in their eighties. Most of us felt we hadn’t gotten what we paid for.

That got me to thinking about old age and the four stages we all passed through to get there. Four stages roughly calibrated to benchmark some of life’s milestones and recognize the unmarked passages one slips through while here on earth.

0 – 25 years of age

Mickey and I [Photo courtesy of Jerry Hoffman]

Most of us are trying to figure it all out and get an education at the same time. We learn, we love and we’re making babies. Then reality sets in and we go to work, figurative and literally. It’s one great big learning process and some of us never stop learning.

25- 50 years of age

We think we’re getting it together then reality sets in at work, in marriage and child rearing makes it stressful, wonderful and mainly a continuing lesson in life.

50 – 75 years of age

Some of us end up playing catch-up with our health, relationships, and world experiences. We come to realize that in the long term ‘Health is Wealth.’ We’d better watch our whiskey and donuts if we want to stick around a little longer.

75 – 100 years of age

Now it gets more interesting. We’re facing our own mortality. We’ve made it this far but we’re on that sometimes subtle, gradual downhill slide. This can be the toughest stage because unlike some of our friends, loved ones and associates, we got this far and a lot of them didn’t. Now it’s time to reflect on how we got here and what to do next. The recognition that health is everything becomes even more pronounced at this stage.

Some folks think of aging as simply an inexorable decline that ends in death. And our fear of death has become almost pathological. Along with this apathy is the dread of decline. Our bodies are slowing down and are often trailed by a tired mind. Some would argue that it’s inevitable and settled back in their easy chair.

But life is movement, either physically or mentally. The secret is to keep moving, keep busy, be active and do something, do anything. Ideally, it should be something worthwhile for yourself, for others, for whatever motivates you in the first place.

There is also that nagging question some of us can’t ignore; Potential. Did we or can we still reach our potential, no matter what it might be? Honestly, I think any attempt at ‘trying’ is success in the making. One argument is that we are all ultimately responsible for our own success. That’s an exercise that starts between the ears but must face our own individual reality first.

Everyone faces their own mortality differently. I’d like to believe that a life’s worth of experiences can and should fuel a hunger for more. A vision quest for improvement and a desire to make a difference if only in one’s own mind.

Then again, that’s where it all started in the first place.