The Awesome, Amazing Ageing Body Revealed!

Older man on swing

“Awesome, marvelous, incredible.’ They seemed to have a power of their own.

Whenever I wrote the word ‘body,’ an admiring, approving adjective would appear. To begin with, I’d delete them, thinking they were frivolous and unnecessary, but the adjectives were insistent. Time after time, phenomenal, wonderful arrived and I would delete. It was a losing battle. I started to wonder if I was being directed, given a DiscoverAge nudge? Eventually, after many more adjectival arrivals and rejections, I accepted. Who was I to disagree? Though it did take time to be wholly comfortable with the magnificent and incredible.

Now, whenever an adjectival accolade arrives, I smile, understand, and accept. Awesome and remarkable are welcome and have become an important part of DiscoverAge and my appreciation of my older body.

White Fang, the novel by Jack London, was part of my school syllabus. In it, there’s a passage I’ve always remembered. Henry, the hero, is trapped in a snow-covered forest surrounded by a howling pack of starving wolves on a cold moonlit night. The wolves are closing in, and he thinks he’s going to die, when ‘he discovered an appreciation of his own body which he had never felt before. He watched his moving muscles and was interested in the cunning mechanism of his fingers, it fascinated him, and he grew suddenly fond of this subtle flesh of his that worked so beautifully and smoothly and delicately. Then he would cast a glance of fear at the wolf-circle drawn expectantly about him.’ As in all good adventure stories, Henry is rescued in the nick of time.

I may not be surrounded by hungry wolves, but I also have ‘discovered an appreciation’ of my incredible body. Like Henry, I have grown ‘fond of this subtle flesh.’ Perhaps I always have? How else to explain the impression the passage made on the teenage me all those decades ago. That Jack London allowed the ‘body’ adjectives and appreciated the marvel of the body is reassuring. I’m in good company.

The more I know about the wonderful body, the greater the respect. This appreciation of my body and who I am is new. I spent most of my life criticizing, abusing, and ignoring. I found fault, I complained, I moaned about a pimply youth, big ears, why was I short. Later there were the deep wrinkles that shaped my face, grey hair that too quickly thinned and disappeared, my big belly, lack of energy etc and etc. There was the occasional illness and a too-slow recovery. Blotched skin, why did I look so old? I was ugly! It went on and on; very rarely was there praise, never approval.

There was never admiration, never respect and very little love. I find it very sad to admit this. A terrible admission! I never liked my body or who I was. Body blame and disappointment haunted me decade after decade.

When I first read, ‘the human body is the most advanced structure in the known universe, a marvel of biomechanical engineering and fantastically complex biology.’ (dcmp.org) I was totally surprised. It wasn’t the way I thought about my body. There’s part of me that still finds it difficult to accept, all the superlatives; little ol’ me is the most advanced structure in the known universe? The more I learn the greater the respect and wonder. I am humbled.

No wonder the adjectives were so insistent.

I am now in my seventh decade, more than 27,000 days and nights. My small, powerful heart muscle has been in perpetual motion, pulsing more than 100,000 times a day, pumping 7,500 litres of life-giving oxygenated blood through my 60,000 miles of blood vessels. Every day, 100 billion new white and 200 billion, yes, billions of red blood cells are created, replacing those that die and giving me fresh life. Awesome, amazing. Even adjectives struggle to pay tribute to the miracle that is the body.

As St Augustine famously wrote in the 5th century AD, ‘Men go abroad to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.’ Fifteen centuries later, nothing’s changed.

I’m much older now, and I hope wiser. My extraordinary body, which has survived and served so many decades, deserves the best care and appreciation; it deserves love. The body as Hero is probably the single and most precious lesson of my DscoverAge journey.

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