Getting older ain’t for cowards, this getting older is a lot to go through. ~ John Mellencamp (Don’t need this body)
Getting older is interesting
The quote tonight comes from a John Mellencamp album, Life, Death, Love and Freedom. I’ve always been a John Mellencamp fan, have always found his songwriting to really feel like notes from blue-collar America. However, the album above I find to be his most personal and best songwriting. The album really sounds like a guy who is getting older and looking around at his life and where he’s been. There’s a great line on the album, all I’ve got here is a rear view mirror. As a writer of poetry, I always appreciate when poets and songwriters find really interesting ways to say simple things, the rear view mirror line is such an amazing way of saying at this point in life, I’m only looking back.
Over my life I’ve been pretty immune to the impact of birthday numbers. Turing 30 didn’t bother me, even if my mother did send me a dozen dead roses for my birthday that year. When I turned 40 I was so excited I did a year full of celebrations. It was a hell of a year, my first Burning Man and my 50th state among the celebrations. I was equally happy to turn 50 and really enjoyed my celebrations that year as well. It was the year that I hiked the Appalachian Trail and wrote my book, Appalachian Trail Happiness, I celebrated my birthday in a trail town just over the Mason-Dixon line.
However, turning 60 for me seems to be a bit different. Maybe it’s that life expectancy for men in America is only 75. Maybe it’s having lost some friends over the last couple of years, some even younger than me. Maybe it has something to do with all of the change that is about to happen in my life. You see I will turn 60 in August, I’ll likely be semi-retiring about five months later. The plan is then to move all of my things to the East Coast. Shortly thereafter to start my second attempt at thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail at best, doing the thousand miles of trail I didn’t the first time at worst. So this once again means that 2025 will be another year of being homeless.
Now please understand, being homeless is one of those nervous/excited situations for me. I’m a nomad, it’s in my bloody DNA. Rubber tramping for a few months then hitting the trail for up to six months is me living my best life. But getting it all together, not knowing where I’ll be sleeping for the two months in between, setting up all of the logistics and then of course a few things have changed since I hit the trail in 2014. The biggest being that since then I’ve been diagnosed as a Type 2 Diabetic and two heart conditions. Not to mention I’ll be ten years older, of course I’m also 25 pounds lighter and hopefully will be thirty to thirty-five pounds later when I hit the trail.
The trepidation and excitement the first time I hit the trail will not be the same this time. This time around I’ve experienced months on the trail before. The feeling will be more about how will things compare, will I make the same connections, will I get hurt again. Will I be able to connect with the new generation of hikers on the trail?
So turning 60 this time has so much baggage attached to it, mostly because of all the change that’s coming with it. And getting older in general is interesting. Time flies by in your mind, you don’t realize how long it’s been since you’ve done things you did when you were younger. Then you go to do something and you find your body is just not capable. This is one of the reasons I started running a couple of years ago. I realized I hadn’t actually run in years and felt like that was something I should be able to do. One of the bigger shocks was grabbing a foul ball from practice at the college. So I decided to throw it back onto the field. I played baseball my whole life including in college and so when I threw the ball, expecting it to land over the bullpen and into left field, I was shocked to watch it drop into the bullpen, a good 20 yards short of where I intended. It’s a small thing, but it hit me pretty hard. It makes sense, I probably hadn’t thrown a baseball in twenty years. But in my mind, I’d thrown one just yesterday.
So many things change with your body. I find that I’m beginning to have that saggy old person skin. My arms are beginning to resemble my grandfathers, as my old Tai Chi instructor used to describe them, steel wrapped in cotton. There’s muscle there, but it’s wrapped it too much skin. Hair grows everywhere as you age, one day you look in the mirror and you realize you’re turning into a bloody hobbit. Now if I can live a 131 years like Bilbo Baggins I might be ok with that, you know minus the evil ring. The one great present of getting older is the ability to injure yourself simply by sleeping. Go to bed fine, wake up with some new mysterious, leg, back or knee injury. One of the things I’ve found interesting is there is a bit of nostalgia that seems to come with aging as well. I’ve made the mistake of giving into this a few times. You reach out to someone from a past part of your life, only to realize once you did that nothing is the same. You see, no matter how consistent you’ve remained in your personality and values over time, you’re just not the same person you were back then and neither are they. I’ve come to realize that these dips into the nostalgia pool live you feeling more empty in the end. So it’s best not to jump in the pool.
In the end, it’s a privilege to be aging. I’ve known far too many people over my lifetime who did not get the chance. One of the early ones that always hits me when I think about him, is a kid named David March. He died of brain cancer when we were teenagers and it has always seemed so horrible. He was maybe the nicest kid I ever knew, an early lesson that life is not fair and that no one is guaranteed tomorrow.
So I’m happy to be here, maybe not Mr. Happy Go Lucky (to stick with the Mellencamp theme). But I’m doing well, I’ve already lived a decade longer than my maternal grandfather. I’ve tried hard to live life to the fullest and hell, if I’m on Hobbit time I’m barely middle-aged. Have a happy day my friends, and stay out of Mordor. ~ Rev Kane