It presents with stealth and subtle warning. Mathematically, the accrual began a few years sooner but now the reckoning and the adjustments to the stigma of achieving, reaching, getting, and accumulating heartbeats begins in earnest. Its just heartbeats and synapses, like a tachometer for the cardiovascular/nervous system. That is important because the need to pump blood and think thoughts is the real value measured by the number 60.
I am now in the business of downsizing the number of heartbeats because there are a finite number before my warranty runs out. Someone once lamented to me that jogging causes the heart rate to rise, spending the lifetime allotment of beats prematurely. It is known that the resting heart rate or pulse is slower in a runner and the heart pumps more blood per stroke, conserving strokes while fulfilling volume. I want it below 60 bpm. So I run but I need sneakers every 500 miles and iPod updates more often than that. If it were not for age I would have no CV risk factors at all so I am working on raising HDL above sixty (60) so I can claim one less risk factor, namely a couple years. The drug* I sell can do that; In partnership with my good doctor, good diet and regular exercise, like running 3 miles and using stairs, I am the poster man for reverse cholesterol transport. I am now dangerously close to the promotional brink here and it is a little tacky, I know, but I was the same way when I quit smoking and became a militant anti-puffer so indulge me its my birthday Live with it or die from it!
"I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now", says Bob Dylan and friends who are beyond 60 and still idling. Neil Young, Mick Jagger & the premature deaths of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin educated me. Clapton experienced the death of a child and survived it by immersion into the Blues and I went with him without the tragedy but with compassion still. Layla rings on my phone.
My much younger wife has sponsored my energy and cooked up a strategy to purge rocking chairs from our lives. Together on the porch we'll be seen staining it or shucking corn but not rocking in a chair. The hammock is quarantined by the fallen branch episode so my John Deere has become my lounge and the lawn my canvas. And the kayaks keep us afloat.
Try to keep up. The moral of this story is that my best gift is my good health and its value improves with age.
* Niaspan
