Aging Up

This all started last night, when I awoke to the alarming little sensation of my calf tying itself into a knot. Half-awake, I jammed my thumb into the knot’s epicenter and tried to massage it out. I reached for something on the nightstand—who knows now what it was. But in doing so, I knocked something else off. Better pick it up, I thought without really thinking. So I leaned out of bed and, rummaging around, managed to clock myself on the head with the edge of the nightstand.

Now I was fully awake and laughing at myself. It was 2 a.m. That means it’s my birthday. Welcome to the 35-39 age group, oh ye of the knotted calf and bumpy head!

I had hoped to ease into this new number, which I figure puts me halfway to 70—or, for those keeping track in a multisport way, halfway to Sister Madonna Buder. And may we all have the good fortune to be in her shape at 70. That’s my goal, anyway.

For some reason, creeping up on this number 35 has made me think about the march of time—maybe it’s the step into a new (and, I am told, tougher!) age group, maybe it’s that I’m now only five years away from 40. Then Tuesday brought the sad news of Jim Ward’s death, and my musings grew.

This is not like me. Usually I have cake, blow out candles and look ahead to a new year. The last time I was this thoughtful about a birthday was when I turned 29, and that was because 30 was just around the corner.

I’d mainly been looking back in a wistful way, and that’s rarely a good thing to do. Looking forward is much better. I’d been regretting that I let my fitness fall away when I was in college. Wishing I’d found the multisport world a little sooner. Wondering why it is I never learned to surf and whether it’s too late.

But as we all know, the past is the past and dwelling on stuff like that is silly and pointless. I did a lot of interesting and fun things back in the day, anyway. I don’t think I’d trade but a few of ’em.

While pondering in this way, I discovered something else: Because I was not a great athlete in the past, I can only go onward and upward from here. That is one big lesson I take from Jim Ward’s life: Of course it’s never too late to pursue anything with a passion. He showed us that.

So I have a few birthday wishes for all of you: May you see the calendar pages fly by and hear doors opening, never closing. May you always embrace the chance to take a first step. And may you pursue your dreams with passion on a horizon wide and boundless as a Technicolor Western.

As for me, well, a surfboard couldn’t take up that much space, could it?

TO LANTERNE ROUGE HOME