Feeling Old but Good

This breath thing has hit me hard. Our walk with our friends yesterday morning was okay, but now some of us turn at a point in the trail to circle back to the car on a short route, and the others take a longer route back. In the afternoon, I regularly take Her Highness to play fetch. She doesn’t return the ball, so I walk back and forth across a huge flat beautiful grass field. It fucking kills me unless I walk very slowly to her, and then I throw the ball again and resume walking again.

This has all come on so suddenly. I realized what was happening on June 29^th—exactly a month ago. Like FND, it is another new reality that requires emotional and physical adaptation. I keep thinking back at all the things that seemed so important, but that seem so trivial to me now. Pinecone Park is my world. Everywhere else feels like the world of the living and I feel foreign there. Both my mental ill health and my physical ill health are pushing in on me, shrinking my world. I’m thinking like a dying man. However, I believe and hope, that as time passes within these new limitations imposed by my breathing, that I will lose my fatalistic predilection.

That said, I am not sad at all. I’m neutral/happy. Perhaps my greatest gift in life has been my relentless optimism and capacity for happiness. I find good in every crisis. I feel this aspect of me is God’s compensatory gift for the shit life he gave me on earth in my early years. I can’t do stairs. I can, but I do so very, very slowly, and I take rests whenever I feel the need. However: Gabriola exists on one plane. Nowhere that I go here has stairs. Another wonderful reason to be happy here.

It's a mantra of my life: accept and carry on. I planted two plants today. I have three more to go, and I hope to move one plant. I may ask Dave to do it for me. Baby steps.

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For Beth, who wants to know about ‘good’ movies. I must watch ‘safe’ movies. I try to avoid fighting, loud noises, sharp cuts, etcetera. There are many things that bother me due to my condition. And when I find one that feels lovely, but real, I often enjoy it—especially if he’s Irish, and handsome.

The Pier is non-schmaltzy, and t’s set in a small Irish coastal town. There are kids, pubs, landscapes, a curmudgeon, death and an American single woman. But the route is grand, and it’s very, very gentle. I loved it. Link to info on the film.

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It’s brilliant and sunny this morning, but a chilly 9°. I shall enjoy napping in the sunshine this afternoon. I love getting warm and cosy on my reclining chair in the sunshine to warm my body. I’ll warm up again late in the afternoon, after the torture of walking Her Highness, in the spa.