Greetings!
Every morning, I wake up and head to the market, church, school, library, city hall, community center, and park. And I do it without leaving my bedroom couch. I check in with the latest happenings in the lives of my friends, the concerns of community leaders, and the opportunities too many think I shouldn't miss.
With the Internet feeding an extensive wifi, connected to three computers, two mobile devices, and an entertainment system, we're pretty much in touch with the outside world.
I leave the couch to feed the fish in our pond, make breakfast and lunch, and enjoy life with my wife. We attend meetings, dine out with friends, support fundraising events, take drives to the coast and on county back roads, and I play golf.
A few times a year, we travel. Sometimes in our Airstream to places within a thousand miles, more often by plane, train, bus, and boat to all over the world.
The cockpit of my life is my hot tub. It sits outside my bedroom door, between the house and the fence around our yard. The fence is a combination of 1X6's and 1X2's between two 4X4s that affords me seven blank slates on which to prioritize my day's goals. Seven clear accomplishments that I choose while waking up my body in the warm, misty waters.
Left to right in priority (and sometimes in chronology), I place yesterday's leftovers and tomorrow's dreams amidst today's have-to-be's. Fortunately, retirement means that there are very few have-to-be's. So it really ends up with want-to-be's. And with good health and lots of money, the list can be quite large and very flexible.
But I sometimes feel like a big dinosaur. I fear no one but poor health and climate change. I've lived so long that I know I must have learned something worth giving. But there's growing distance between what I experience and the lives of most of the world. Even with extensive travel, it's becoming easier to avoid seeing how the other six and a half billion live. And formulating what I can do to help.
But it probably would help if I got up off my ass more often during the day. An article in yesterday's Press Democrat reported that sitting down for long periods of time was not helped much by playing golf twice a week, or taking hikes in parks and on the coast every few weeks. Better that I should walk down to the real market at the end of the street, or through our neighborhood to see the flowers and trees, than wither away those muscles and neurons plunking on laptop keys and straining my eyes on diminishing text.
Let's see if I make that a priority.
