Happy new year! It’s that time again–the WordPress.com bloganuary writing prompt month. The idea is to post something every day in response to daily writing prompts from WordPress.com, and to tag each post with “#bloganuary”–aside from being a fun activity for writers, it is also a way to continue honing one’s writing chops, and for some, to make progress toward establishing the writing habit, here at the beginning of the new year when resolutions are made. Doing something daily for a month is a good start toward making that thing a habit. So I will do my best to show up for this every day this month. So on with today’s prompt…
I have no shortage of challenges as a person about to enter his seventh decade of life. Most of them are the sort one would expect: coping with the natural physical and mental effects of aging is certainly a challenging aspect of having reached the “autumn” years of life. It’s becoming more and more difficult to retrieve simple things from my memory like the name of someone I’ve known for years, or what year in which a certain event in my life took place. (Those memories are still there, mostly, and they come back eventually, usually, but it’s been taking longer than it once did.)
Few people my age are exempt from joints that go stiff after half an hour of sitting, or having difficulty with deteriorating hearing or eyesight. The good health with which I’ve been blessed for most of my life is beginning to show some changes, nothing too serious yet, but the possibility of an unexpected, serious diagnosis is out there like a spectre, and one never knows when it might come.
At this stage of life, if one is fortunate enough to have the means for retirement, there are worries about whether one might outlive the nest-egg one has saved for these years, and more attention is paid to the ups and downs of the national economy. For those who don’t have such means, of course it is worse.
If I think about it a while longer, more challenges will certainly present themselves, but I’m choosing to address one particular thing that I believe will be among the biggest challenges I face in the coming year: living in the moment.
I confess that I’m not entirely sure what this means, but I know that it is something I have not done particularly well up to now–I have tended to live my life primarily in the future, spending a good deal of my imaginative energy dreaming about the way things could, should, and even might be, rather than experiencing each moment for what it is and what it brings. As the years pass on, I find myself thinking about my own mortality, about the fact that while I have no idea what the exact date is, there is nonetheless an expiration date on my life.
But while my mind is on what might be, or entertaining some hope for some particular outcome or turn of events, the present moments keep rolling by, while I’m distracted by a future that doesn’t yet exist. Like I said, I don’t really know for sure what it means to live in the moment, but my gut tells me I haven’t been doing so well at it. Thus it is a challenge, and one that I will be pursuing in 2024.
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(Posted in response to 1/1/2024 prompt)
doug heacock: words 