In Defiance of Becoming Feeble

When I was younger, I would hang out with my sister and when we saw someone feeble and old, we would comment how this was NOT going to happen to us.  We were defiant and committed in this declaration.  We could not even imagine this being a possibility.

We are now older and our tune has changed.  We now say things like “I HOPE I don’t become like that”.   The defiance is gone and has been replaced with almost a whisper, almost a prayer...please, oh please, oh please.  We now see there is the possibility we could indeed become feeble as we age.

If we really were serious about defying the odds, we would start making choices to prevent this possibility. We would defy the automatic processing and routine of our lives.  We would, for example,  choose to take the elevator rather than stairs, or choose to take a walk rather than watch TV to unwind, or even choose to cook vegies rather than the easy route of stopping through the drive-through.

These are just little daily decisions that by now don't even feel like a choice, but they are.  These are little daily decisions that add up over the years and become silently painted on our life portrait.  Over time, these types of choices are like little tiny brush strokes showing us as more sedentary, mentally rigid, and even becoming feeble.

Making different little daily decisions may help lead us to a different outcome and even paint a better life portrait of who we really are.  After all, aging just happens, but everything else is an accumulation of our daily choices.  Maybe with time, we can not just age, but we can even become better than we ever dreamed possible.

In Defiance of Becoming Feeble