Ibn Khaldun, the immortal Tunisian historian, says that events often contradict the universal idea to which one would like them to conform, that analogies are inexact, and that experience is deceptive – A.J. Liebling, A Neutral Corner
The concept of slowing down fascinates me. Like women and writing and running.
Seeing how slowly I can slow down has become my new passion.
Getting old is a fight.
And fighting at its core is about making someone – or something – do what he doesn’t want to do.
To fight, you must choose your weapons, choose your style, choose your tactics.
You have to fight like who you are.
You have to recognize and honor who you are.
You have to adapt, you have to change.
In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu tells us, “When the body’s intelligence declines, cleverness and knowledge step forth.”
In some ways, you have to create a new identity.
The new identity is the mask of a fighter and the mask becomes the new you.
By creating the new identity, you become honest with yourself about the changing of the old identity.
The fast runner becomes the slow runner.
And so, by becoming new, you retain the old.
If you are alive, you can still grow.
If you can still grow, you are alive.
“One who moves toward the opponent destroys oneself,” Kotoda Yahei Toshisada said. “One who does not move toward the opponent is also destroyed.”
We are either prey or predator.
I see aging as a predator, like some inexorable glacier which cannot be stopped.
A sudden image of The Blob, starring Steve McQueen, just popped into mind.
I choose to stand and fight.
Today, I avow, I will not be eaten.
And today is all there is.
More Lao Tzu: “The weakest things in the world can overmatch the strongest things in the world. Nothing in the world can be compared to water for its weak and yielding nature; yet in attacking the hard and the strong nothing is better.”
Be like water. Get wet.
