Since we have been in France several people have commented that I am still young. I have not and do not believe them. I do not see myself as young. I don’t feel that I have two decades left. I feel increasingly decrepit.
The average UK male life expectancy in the UK might be 84 but I have smoked a lot, drunk a lot and have early stage COPD. The government web site “thinks” on average that I will make the state pension age of age of 67. I am less sure. Various anti-tobacco web sites suggest that I have taken around ten years off my life expectancy. Someone like Boris Johnson is the same age as me. There is no way I could countenance his reported familial circumstance. I simply could not hack it. Some of my erstwhile peers are still having useful and successful careers. My overt socio-political career effectively stopped nearly two decades ago. I am done in that context.
The end-game trajectory looks pretty simple.
Many of the things which are advertised as activities for the aged are of no interest to me. The sanguine advertisers’ pictures of garden centre visits, SAGA river cruises, stairlifts, cremation plans and incontinence pants don’t really light my candle. Weirdly old farts like me are pictured using smart phones like a teenager! I will not be a grey-fox male model nor a complicit cripple smiling to camera and simpering in a wheel chair, thanking my lucky stars.
There is a disconnect in perception. People see sixty-year olds differently from how I experience it.
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There is nothing on my bucket list and no residual ambition. I am not keen on bingo nor lawn bowls. I do not want to play bridge nor socialise with my fellow gummy-bear toothless.
I don’t really have much of anything to offer which people might want and/or pay for. I know some things but the things I know are not that which people desire or want. These will go up the crematorium chimney with me.
I know that on the warrior’s path anything might and can happen. So, if something hugely life-changing happened I would not be overly surprised. It looks mightily unlikely now.
I could treat myself to a new camera and renew my photography. I am 90% sure that I could write a truly terrifying occult based psycho-terror novel. Exorcism might feature. Cancer epidemiology and life expectancy / month graphs could be included. I could add some chem-bio-gene terror to the plot, maybe throw in a few mutations.
It remains a hypothesis that other people have karma to work out in respect of me and that I can in no way facilitate this process. Either they will do it in time or I will pop my clogs first. I am powerless to help, incommunicado and our circles are unlikely to cross again this life.
If we down-size the garden a lot. I will need something to do.
I don’t really have a vision of where to from here…the current horizons however are not large…
Dreamyoga 