Today, plus or minus some dateline randomness, I turn 49.
It’s goodbye to the 40’s and hello to the 50’s.
Thinking about it, I have spent the past 10 years moving and adjusting to life in the big old USA. It seems strangely odd to me that it so neatly fit into that part of my life.
In those 10 years both my kids have seemingly grown up from kids, to teenagers to adults, all in the span of 10 years.
Going into it, I would have said that the 40s were for settling into life, not having it ripped apart into so many teeny tiny pieces and having every little bit opened up and examined and found lacking in some way.
In one quick read, that might sound like a bad thing, but it is far from the truth. Just take a look at my health…. in my 30’s I would have thought I was pretty much in the prime of my life. I had been doing mountain biking and thought I was pretty fit. Truth is, once that part is pulled apart (thanks to a diet, a forced life style, of sugar or high fructose corn syrup in everything) you get to see it in a new light and so I find myself going into my 50’s in the best shape of my entire life (all of it added together). There is no way that at any stage, even as a kid when I did some ‘running’, could I have run a half marathon (13 miles, 21 k’s), now I can bust one out before breakfast, go to work, run 4-5 miles with the guys at work and think nothing of it. Sure, I can’t do it every day, but once a week is not too much to ask.
5 days a week I crank out 150 pushups and 50 pullups. Amazing. Never ever thought I would be able to do that. And yet, here we are.
Granted, not all aspects of my life are so ‘pretty’ after the cold light of day has shone on the deep bits….. But after all I have been through, I see little point in trying to put it back together the way it was, or to try and hide it under the carpet. It needs to be fixed, it needs to be rebuilt better than it was, just like my fitness.
I guess that’s what my 50’s are going to be about.
How in the world I got to the point where you start looking at having to ‘grow up’ at age 50 is beyond me, but there you have it, if you could sum it all up, that’s what I feel I will be doing.
So it’s goodbye to the 40’s hello 50’s.
The house rule has alway been you get to chose dinner and a movie on your birthday. That’s it. No presents or cards or parties. Just a recognition of the date with a good feed with some entertainment.
So I am having an entree of 3 small cheesecakes (berry, caramel and chocolate), washed down with a shot of my favorite Crystal Skull Vodka. Mains is flat iron steak with veggies and a Mount Veeder cab sav. Dessert is lemon meringue pie. (If there is time, we might enjoy a Rocky Patel cigar and some 15 year old single malt).
The movie? Tron Legacy, what else. (I hope the inner geek never grows up!)
