Embrace Only Love

This month I celebrate a birthday.  Like the Paul Simon song says, “I’m older than I once was, and younger than I’ll be…that’s not unusual.”  For tens of thousands of years, folks just like me have been getting older minute by minute, day by day and year by year.  I remember when I thought forty eight was not just old, but truly well advanced, seasoned…even sage and wizened.  Not so long ago this was true.   A caveman in his twenties was already an old caveman.  Just a hundred years ago (there are a few people from that period still around) the average expected life span of an adult male was forty two years of age.  By 2010 that number had doubled.  While there are many contributing factors, the Center for Disease Control in the USA credits the fact that we, as a society, tend to strive toward less activity that has a directly adverse affect on our health, and tend to focus more on mental stimulation and well being.  It wasn’t too very long ago when we sweated and sacrificed our lungs to the coal mines, broke our backs on the unrelenting steel of the industrial revolution or suffered the criminal indignity of slavery.

It’s ironic then, maybe, that in the year 399BC, Socrates who was age seventy when he died, did not die of old age but was instead executed.  In twenty four centuries we are only just learning that which the Ancient Greeks already knew. 

Also sharing a sense of irony is the notion that folks like you and me now work very hard to find the time and resources to buy fancy, shiny equipment to “flog” ourselves into shape, in the hopes that we may arrive at a time in our not too distant future when, if we manage to get there mostly unscathed and intact, we can retire with enough health and wealth in the retirement silo to enjoy ourselves, our partners and the rewards of our labor.

Admittedly, I haven’t been all that kind to my body.  I suffered from the very same delusion as just about every boy of my generation; the belief that I was as indestructible as the cartoon hero’s of black and white television.  Howard (my childhood friend) and I worked our weekends and summers at his dad’s limestone and dolomite mine.  We made a game of everything, from throwing massive dirt clods and rocks at each other to sneaking up and striking each other with the flat steel backs of our shovels.  We were strangers to fear, and never cowered from pain.  Our toughness, as it grew, became part of our identity, and we apart of it.  As time has passed I have often ignored injury, sometimes as serious as broken bones, reset my own dislocations, sewed my own stitches and often chose a beer and a meal at a Mexican restaurant when a trip to the emergency room may in fact have been much more prudent.  WD40 has always been a great substitute for Bactine or a tetanus shot, and  electrical tape has held parts on when perhaps, had I known better, it would not have worked as well as it did. 

Once, the afternoon before a concert at our local State Theater in which I was to perform on guitar, I cut the tip of my finger off with a table saw.  I was in a rush to finish a project so that I could get ready for the evening.  As a temporary repair, I used wax to make a negative mold of the missing piece of flesh, and then filled the mold with J.B. Weld (a two part epoxy).  When the new piece was set, I super-glued the new piece onto the damaged digit (to the absolute horror of those around).  It worked like a champ.  I played the full concert and enjoyed the evening.  Only the constant throbbing and pain was any reminder of what had happened earlier in the day.

Before anyone assumes that I am bragging…I am not.  Oh…how times have changed.  You know…it turns out that I am not made of steel after all.  I'm a little pissed off about that.  I don’t heal like I used to, and the aches and pains I so readily ignored in my youth have come back to haunt me like the ghost of a civil war veteran wandering his still smoking battlefield. 

Likewise,  the garbage I stuffed in my unhappy and miserably lonely face has also been an injury I have ignored for much too long.  Like the shovel blows I so foolishly enjoyed as a teen, every “lovin’ spoonful” has taken a slow and regretful toll.  However, as fat falls from body like the miles behind my beloved bicycle, so to every pedal stroke rushes toward a healthier me.  I have said to a couple of friends that if I had known how many thousands of miles I would have to ride to get back into shape, I would never have eaten half of the hurtful and dangerous packaged food stuffs I so greedily inhaled over the years….but I don’t think it’s really true.  It sounds cliché, but a healthy body is just another obscene display of self centeredness without a healthy mind to go along with it. 

My yoga teacher likes to read from something she has saved on her phone as the rest of us hold or try to relax into a restorative “asana” or yoga pose.  The passages she reads from focus on the specific pose, its purpose and desired intent, but almost always finish with the phrase…”and embrace only love.”  I don’t think it’s unimportant or coincidental that “embrace only love” should be the direction we want to tune our inward intention toward.  Embracing, and to be embraced by, who we love has always been the greatest reward no matter how hard we have worked or what we have earned.  Embracing what we love is less about ones internal self, but is much more about sharing with those close to us that which truly makes us happier and healthier.

If it wasn’t for Eileen, and her ability to “embrace” my musical, mechanical, extroverted yet deeply internal, creative and often contradictory self, I would still be 260 pounds of “wishing like hell I felt better.”  Her love is something I treasure.  I now “really know” what it is to value something over everything I own, instead of just the romantic idea I have written so often about it my own poetry and music.   In “embracing only love…” I am happier, healthier and more secure than I have ever been.  A lifetime of “10%” in an offertory plate could not purchase that which has been given to my so freely. 

In a few more days, I’ll be “officially” a little older.  It’s hard to admit that it’s taken me this long to learn a few simple life truths.  I am in a great place in my life to be learning, however, I still have a long, long way to go.  In my life with Eileen, we are both truly on a path to reach our personal goals, together, in support of each other.  In yoga, every time I’m instructed to “clear my mind and think of nothing…” I immediately think of Ice-cream.  I don’t know why…It’s like a switch…  I'm working on it though...  In cycling, well, I still have a long way to go, but I just can’t seem to get the damn smile off my face!!