Half and Half
It sometimes feels to me as if life has two strands, and that their developmental processes are reversed. The physical strand - the health and strength of the body - deteriorates over time, while the internal life of the mind, spirit, whathaveyou - tends to grow richer over time.
If we're living Twizzlers (or oversized DNA, as I keep picturing it), one of our strands is always in a state of decline, and one is always in a state of growth.
Not sure what to make of that, but I thought I'd put it out there.
My so-called holiday week has been a bit like that. A lot of up-and-down. Spent yesterday and today largely rendered immobile after having hurt my back doing one of those ordinary activities that seem to prey on aging backs like vermicious knids on little orange men.
A friend came over yesterday (as we'd planned weeks ago) for what we were pleased to call our Anti-Christmas. We made cookies. We ate them all. (I finished the last half-dozen by myself, after she'd gone home.)
We watched a really brilliant movie. We drank a velvety, spicy wine (goes great with nutmeg-brandy sugar cookies, by the way). We ate a little of my leftover (but homemade) lentil-tomato soup, as a nod to nutritional value.
We knitted. We posed Spiderman in funny scenes. We texted and sent silly pics to friends in faraway places.
I said, at one point, that if it weren't for the horrible back pain, it'd be a perfect day. And she said, "Ah, but if someone weren't in horrible pain, it wouldn't be us, would it?"
True true.
PS. Reading back over this, I realized there's an error in logic here. It's not as simple as that one thread is always in decline and the other is always improving. In the second half of life, that pretty much describes it. In the first half, physical prowess improves until it reaches a peak, usually in young adulthood. But there's a narrowing of personal possibilities after a certain point in childhood, and then a somewhat stagnant period in young adulthood (I'm sure everyone in the world would argue that point with me, but I think there's some truth in it) before the mind/spirit starts to grow richer again. And it does seem that the body is weakest when the mind is strongest, and vice-versa. I could be completely wrong, of course. Just taking the (raw, unformed) idea out for a spin.
