and no, still not my photograph…
On aging well, translated…
“Everybody MUST live until ninety-nine, NO exceptions!”, last summer, my best friend, Liangn gave me a book on “How to Age Healthily & Gracefully”, and on the insider covers, he’d written this line of encouragement, and that made me laugh. I think, everybody wants to become centurions, but, the matter of longevity is often, not up to us to decide!
In order to become a centurion, there are a ton of factors that couldn’t be ignored, that would hit us when we least expect, even if we want to live until a-hundred-and-twenty, but if the heavens are against us, we’d tripped and fallen, and, goodbye, world!
Even IF we live until ninety-nine, if we can no longer eat or drink on our own, can only stay bedridden, or even, to the point of lacking consciousness, a bad way of describing the situation is “the living dead”, then, what would be the purpose of living long?
There are a ton of friends, relatives, and family members around me, who’d lived like so, holding tight, to their dying breaths, and, I’d often felt extremely saddened every single time I’d gone to visit them, after all, they no longer recognized day from night, how would they become aware, that we’re, crying our eyes out in front of them?
At the end of August, I’d gone to Hualien for three days with my wife, there was an older couple with whom we shared our ride with, the elderly man was already ninety years-of-age, and the elderly woman, eighty-five, they were both very healthy physically, it’d made us envy. The elderly man told us, “the key here is not how old, I loved working out, staying active physically, that, was how I was able to travel all around, that, is a life of leisure, of meaning!”
Wow! The words of the elderly man, it’d become a wakeup call to us both: wanting to become centurions, that, would be a goal to work towards, but, the key is to having good health, so, our elderly years would be blessed very much!
And so, you DO realize, how important it is, to stay healthy, in the body, after you’d aged beyond a certain point right? But, it wouldn’t be easy, as by the time you reach your ages of “maturity”, you would’ve used your bodies for over eighty, ninety years, and, because we’re NOT mechanical, there would be “parts” of our bodies that would become malfunctioning, and, all we can do, is to hope, AND pray, that if we live to be a hundred, we still have our good health intact, and one way to make sure that this will happen is by eating the right diets, exercising regular, while you’re still younger, you need to build up, store up the things you will be needing later on in life.
not my photo still…
Life, the Obstacle Course 