Runester

This has been a high drama year, to say the least. I know that my last post of last year was quite cheery … but just a few weeks later Lisa’s sister, Doreen died. It was unexpected and very tragic. She had been sick with Hepatitis C for some time, and it was wearing down her body. When she got an infection, her immune system was no longer up to the task … she died in the hospital.

Lisa has now lost her brother and sister within fourteen months of each other, and feels very vulnerable and alone. She has other siblings, on her fathers side, and of course her mother and I … but it’s not the same as the kids that grew up with her suddenly being missing from her life. It also made her aware of the “babies curse” … the youngest child usually has to watch everyone else in the family (parents, older siblings) die.

So, that was a sobering development.

Then, on 4-March-2010, I turned Forty (40) years old! Though some people call forty the new thirty, I’m not sure that means much unless I get to live to be eighty. Hard part about aging, to me anyway, is not the gray in my beard or the change in skin texture around my eyes and in my hands, or the aches in my knees, etc. It’s the constant, ever present knowledge that so very, very little time is left. How many more, healthy, years do I really have left? What do I have left to accomplish, and how long do I have left to accomplish it in?

Honestly, I probably only have another two (2) decades or so left. If I don’t lose weight and correct for my families history of heart disease, I won’t even last that long. To a young man, twenty years seems like forever! But, at my end of the season, it barely seems like enough time to get started, much less complete any great work.

I’ve already had to give up so much – mostly my own expectations of how my life would be. For example, it’s almost certainly impossible for me to produce a child now and even if I could, it would be inadvisable for a couple as old as Lisa and I to do so. If we wanted children, we’d have to adopt. Even if we adopted, we’re so old that the child would become a teenager when we are in our mid to late fifties. Living long enough to see an adopted child get married? Unlikely. So, the odds of ever being a parent are very slim and that’s not how I imagined my life, back when I was in my twenties.

There are other differences, most don’t really matter now. And, I’m not complaining. Every day I’m thankful for what I have and how incredibly fortunate I am to live here, now, and have the health and community I do. So many hundreds of millions of humans live in such absolutely deplorable conditions and suffer so greatly – and due to nothing but the misfortunate of their birth – that I must consider myself one of “life’s lottery winner’s.”

But, being thankful for a good and comfortable life is not the same thing as having accomplished anything of worth and the time draws short. So, if 2010 and 40 will mean anything … it’ll have to mean a redoubling of focus and effort and the hope that, that’s enough.