Sunday Morning Reflections
When your exhaustion follows a long hike on and beyond familiar trails, you rest for a day to recover. Our bodies tell us when to hydrate and relax. We obey the signals because we have duties and plans, because we want to live.
But when your exhaustion follows several days, weeks, or months of heightened worry and roller coaster stress, your ability to recover is destabilized. Your body talks to you, your mind informs you, your family and friends express their concerns. Hydration and relaxation will alleviate some of the aches but prolonged worry and stress damage essential physical and mental capabilities. Untreated, unresolved, unanswered problems become critical problems. Critical problems lead to dangerous conditions.
Like people over 60 years old who realize their losses -- mobility, energy, activity, participation, mental acuity, creativity, health -- we face only one of two choices: fight or surrender. Attitudes like wait and see, my circumstances will change, this is how it must be, no one around me cares, that at 30 years or 40 years of age sufficed as excuses until something triggered a positive response, will no longer do. After 60, the mind must take control. The waiting and excuses and pathetic whimpering are over. Time is up. Do or die.
Yes, I am tired and weary this morning. One reason is the nagging worry about our national situation (MAGA and fascism), the additional $2000 a year that the feds are taking from my Social Security because I lost Medicaid help with health insurance, and the local effects of climate change.
I’ve a new worry. My daughters – all grown and busy – must now share the responsibilities of their dad’s failing health and financial situations. I divorced him decades ago, and his wife is suffering with dementia. They are now completely dependent on our daughters, Medicare, Medicaid, and the healthcare system.
My daughters are lovely, empathetic, intelligent women. I hate that they are now taking on these additional duties; although they are willing, most of what is transpiring was preventable. Their dad grew credit card debts and emptied his savings and pensions long before his old age. His sedentary lifestyle worsened when he took on a job as pastor of a small church, which in turn led to greater debts and deteriorating health. Our daughters, his wife, and several doctors advised him to be more active and change his unhealthy habits. But he is a misogynist, and like most right-wing True Believers, he also distrusts science. He does not listen.
The important thing is that he was not always this way. There was a time when he would take pride in his physical body and actively keep it strong. There was a time when he would discuss debatable issues, accept the limits of religious thinking, respect the sciences and arts, and actively engage in learning and creating. But that all changed.
He did not start out a liberal in his youth and turn conservative in his old age – as the trite adage suggests. He was in his youth a critical and liberal thinker who succumbed during the GW Bush era to the political pressures of Christian Nationalist ideology. The corrosion of his critical thinking skills accelerated after the nation elected Obama as its president, and he felt a personal calling to “take the country back.” Like many others of our Baby Boomer generation, he knew the white supremacy and misogyny he learned in childhood and in his early religious indoctrination was wrong. But he jumped on the Tea Party and MAGA bandwagons, rejected all the alternatives, embraced confirmation bias and right-wing media, hoped that he could personally profit from the Rights’ rise in power. Like many on the religious extreme of rational thinking, he believes that Christians should take control of government.
He was never a praying man. He eschewed the chores of ministering to people’s needs – participating in activities with people in his congregation, visiting people in hospitals, teaching children, cleaning and repairing the church buildings, working jobs alongside people who needed assistance – but relished teaching and preaching from the pulpit. He liked the stage and the audience. His religion was more academic than personal and organic.
This is why his physical and mental health declined so quickly. He had cleaved to religious absolutism while rejecting pragmatism, personal expressions of faith, and the broader critical thinking of his education.
Although I am no longer a religious woman, I understand the powers of thinking: critical and creative thought empower us to learn, grow, empathize, adapt to changes, and plan for our futures. While absolutist and narrow thinking empower us to destroy all the possibilities and ideas of Others. Unfortunately for those who feel thus empowered, absolutist and narrow thinking is also self-destructive. What a waste.
Therefore, this experience compels me to take care of myself. I refuse to become a burden to others, much less to my daughters. I will fight the ravages of old age the best ways that I know how and within my financial limitations. Daily physical activity and exercise, gardening, dancing, writing, painting, sewing, creating, reading, conversing with others, relaxing in nature, playing with pets, and helping my grandchildren. I want to travel, learn a new language, return to playing the piano and guitar, and illustrate a new book that I’m writing. Worry less, be less sad and disappointed, replace despair with hope. Whether I have one more day or three more decades, I want to be a doer who goes to bed exhausted from activity but wakes with renewed energy. This will be my new resistance.
#ResistFascism #ResistComplacence #ResistDeterioration