Daily Archives: March 27, 2009

Art and Culture, Friends

Ordinary Catastrophes

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Spring            New Moon (Seed Moon)

My preparation for sheepshead foundered on two factors:  1.  I could not discipline myself to count points and keep track of trump.  I tended to lapse back into not counting.  2.  I had poor hands and bad luck in addition.  A tough combination to overcome.  Still, I can learn. I’m sure.

Two tours tomorrow then over the weekend I will have time to work on setting up my new Gateway.  Must be the way guys used to feel when they went out to the garage to work on the car.

Busy Busy Busy.  Not enough time to blog. Good tours today.  Interested kids and chaperons.  Ate lunch with three docent friends between tours.  One woman has a daughter on the east coast who just gave birth after a dangerous operation to remove a benign growth on her liver that could, the doctors felt, hemorrhage during the pregnancy.  Mother and baby are doing fine, but the birth, just this weekend was a long affair and left grandma tired.  This was in DC.  Meanwhile in LA a second daughter has begun another round of chemo to take down some metastases from the lung cancer she developed, at 31, last year.  She’s a non-smoker.

Grandma seems exhausted, strong but emotionally wasted.

Came home and took a two hour nap.  Now ready for the treadmill.

Aging

Doubt

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Spring          New Moon (Seed Moon)

A week that seems to have passed in something of a blur.  Evenings and mornings occupied away from home, preparation for this and that, then suddenly, Friday evening.

There are times, one of them was a couple of years ago in the spring when I took a course on Paul Tillich, a philosophically oriented theologian, when I felt in over my head, a foreign experience for me and not pleasant.  I’ve had a little of that feeling this week, as if I’ve extended myself beyond my current capacity.  Again, not a pleasant feeling.

These are games we begin to play with ourselves as we age.  It goes like this.  “Gee, I found my work on that e-mail action alert clunky, not on point.”  Then my work gets modified, in fact discarded.  “Uh-oh.  I don’t have it anymore.  I can’t develop new skills, be there when something new is required.  Am I losing a step?  Or, worse, have I lost more steps than I know?”  Age.  The wormy demon of doubt begins to creep through the mind.  “I’m sure I could have gone through this no trouble–when I was 40.”  Note:  there is no certainty that this statement, or any of these are true, but doubt now becomes age linked.  Is it permanent?

This is not the kind of pre-dementia fear that some folks experience.  I’m saying I’m used to a high level of functioning and I’m no longer sure I’m as capable as I used to be.  This labyrinth has no Ariadne save the Self, no one to guide me since the measurer and the measured are identical.

My real hunch is this:  I tire more easily.  On these weeks when I feel so busy, pressed I’m actually weary.  My capacities aren’t as crisp when I’m tired; that’s true for all of us.  So, exhaustion is the real culprit.  But.  Exhaustion is to some extent an age related phenomenon. In that sense my self-doubt does have a trigger related to aging.

The good news is the week ahead has much less excitement.  Time for some R&R.