What I’ll Be Doing in 2083

August 27, 2017 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: , , ,

I started writing this post last weekend when my rowing club went to the US Rowing Masters National Championship regatta, which was in Oak Ridge, Tennessee this year. The club has only one member who rows fast enough to win medals in such a competitive event, but the rest of us had fun anyway. My husband volunteered to tow the boat trailer with his SUV. Going through the mountains with it was an adventure; but he is a good driver, and all went well.

We have rowed at Oak Ridge before in smaller events. It is a beautiful course and very well maintained. The only problem I have is that being outdoors for a long time in the hot, humid Southern air gets to me after a while. So, while my husband watched some races on Saturday in the heat, I sat in a lounge chair by the hotel pool and stayed comfortable in the air conditioning.

Hotel pool and my tanned legs on a lounge chair.

Masters athletic events are interesting because they are such an attitude adjustment with regard to society’s views about aging. Little old ladies in rowing shorts and tank tops were walking around with 30-foot boats on their shoulders. The boats are made of carbon fiber, so they’re not all that heavy; but rowers do need to be reasonably fit.

While I sat by the pool daydreaming, I thought about what the world might be like in a future where older people could expect to stay fit and healthy. By that I don’t mean some amazing new scientific discovery to prevent aging, but just incremental advances on where we are now: better nutrition, exercise, and medical care, along with a shift in cultural expectations so that older people wouldn’t assume poor health was normal and would take better care of themselves accordingly.

Like all of us, I have my share of aging myths that grow like thorny weeds in the subconscious, whispering that every little ache or twinge is a symptom of decline. In today’s culture it may not be possible to root them all out entirely, given how pervasive they are. Still, as with any garden, a thriving mix of tall flowers and thick shrubs can overshadow the pesky weeds enough to keep them tiny and insignificant.

So—what healthy ideas could I plant in my subconscious to crowd out negative views of aging? After giving that question some thought, I decided to visualize what I’ll be doing in 2083. I picked that year because it will be a full century from when my husband and I met in college. Because some people really do live that long in the here and now, it wouldn’t require major advances in longevity science.

I wasn’t composing a bucket list or anything that I really planned to do; it was just a few random, stream-of-consciousness imaginary adventures. Because I already had rowing on my mind, I first pictured myself traveling to Australia with my husband to row a new boat with the latest 2080s technology at a regatta in Sydney. Then I thought, well, this is far enough in the future that maybe we’re booking a vacation at a hotel in a colony on Mars. Or traveling to California in a flying RV. Or working on interesting projects that involve very cool futuristic technology, getting paid lots of money to work part-time hours because of the future economy’s labor shortage.

As I see it, there’s no downside to imagining myself fit, healthy, and adventurous many decades from now. Maybe it won’t happen, and instead I will have been in the grave for a long time by then; but if it turns out that my imaginary adventures were too farfetched, I don’t suppose my ghost will care.

Rowing the Eclipse

August 22, 2017 · 4 comments · Categories: Musings · Tags: , ,

I went rowing with my husband during the eclipse, along with a few other people in the rowing club. That made it feel more like an adventure. We brought our eclipse glasses into the boat and, as the light faded, we stopped rowing from time to time and watched the eclipse’s progress. it wasn’t total where I live, but it got dark enough to look almost like nightfall was approaching.

Two pairs of eclipse glasses on a wooden table.

On the river, we had a great view of how confused the wildlife got during the eclipse. Birds flew up to trees and wires to roost, cicadas started singing, and ducks and geese climbed out of the river and started waddling off to wherever they go at night. Then the light started coming back and many of the birds just flew around in circles looking totally befuddled. Their little bird brains couldn’t deal with the fact that it had been getting dark, but all of a sudden it wasn’t anymore.

As civilized humans who spend most of our time indoors, we don’t have that sensitivity to the natural world—at least not consciously. If we hadn’t known there was an eclipse, we might easily have looked out the window and assumed the dark sky was just some clouds blowing over. Then we’d have gone back to work and thought nothing more about it.

I wonder, though, if maybe there’s a primitive part of our brains that gets just as confused as those birds about all the unnatural things in our modern environment. Maybe our inner troglodyte peeks out every now and again, muttering to itself in a very worried tone, “Hey, what are all these bright lights in the middle of the night when it’s supposed to be dark? And why are we all staring at little glowing screens instead of looking at normal stuff like trees and fields? Eek! Too freaky! I can’t cope!”

Of course, there are many other reasons why we have so much anxiety nowadays. Mainly I think it’s because the world has been changing so fast that it can be hard to keep track of what’s going on around us, whether natural or otherwise. More time spent in nature surely would do us all some good, though.

Random Adventures

July 31, 2017 · 2 comments · Categories: Musings · Tags:

This post got its title because it grew out of random thoughts, wandering from one subject to another, which started during a conversation with my husband at the river on Sunday afternoon. He was talking about modern technology and how everything changes so fast, people don’t even know what they are missing when they haven’t kept up with the changes. Meanwhile, I was looking at some wildflowers growing in the mud next to the dock and wondering what they were. My next thought was that I could post a photo on my blog and ask if anyone knows the name of these flowers.

Wildflowers on the riverbank.

Then I agreed with my husband that today’s world gives us many options we never could have imagined if we hadn’t seen them. In the ancient pre-Internet world, maybe I’d have gone to the library and looked through a book about wildflowers. I probably wouldn’t have found those particular flowers, but I’d have learned a few interesting random facts. Sometimes when I was a child wandering around in a meadow looking at wildflowers, I just made up names for them because that seemed like more fun anyway.

I have to confess, it took me a while to decide what tag to use for this post. My blog does not have a “Nature” or “Wildflowers” tag because I haven’t taken many nature photos. That left me with a decision—should I create one or pick an existing tag? While looking at the list of tags from my previous posts, I noticed one called Adventures, which hadn’t gotten much use.

Although looking at flowers on the riverbank might not be all that exciting to a grown-up, I would have thought otherwise in the days when I was a child inventing names for wildflowers and fanciful stories to go with them. So I decided to use the Adventures tag and to put the word in the title as well—just to remind myself that in a good life, there should always be time for adventures.

Update: Mystery solved—it is a mallow plant, which has herbal uses and was the origin of marshmallows. Thanks to Carolyn at Nuggets of Gold for that info!

On the Water

February 22, 2017 · 4 comments · Categories: Musings · Tags: , ,

This week’s rare February warmth made it possible to get an early start on the rowing season, so my husband and I made plans to meet at the boathouse after work. The weather didn’t turn out to be as warm or sunny as the forecast had predicted, but it was still fun to get back on the water, clouds or no clouds. Although the water is still cold and there is bridge construction going on nearby, I didn’t mind—that made it more like an adventure.

Double scull at the dock on a gray February afternoon.

I must have been secretly longing for some bright sky after the cloudy winter, though, because the picture that I put on my art display today is a photo from Sri Lanka. Next best thing to a real tropical vacation.

Trees at the shore and golden clouds in Sri Lanka.

Don’t the colors in that sky look yummy enough to eat?

Medals for Not Being Chicken

September 26, 2016 · 2 comments · Categories: Musings · Tags: ,

Over the weekend, my husband and I drove up to Toledo to row in the Frogtown regatta, named for the city’s location on land that historically was a frog-filled swamp. We didn’t see much wildlife when we put our boat in the river, probably because the windy and choppy conditions on the Maumee River were so bad that even the frogs ran for cover. Most of the small boat races were cancelled for safety reasons; and in those that weren’t called off, some of the entrants took one look at the water and decided to just go back home.

We decided to go ahead and be adventurous, so we struggled along with only two other mixed double crews that braved the course. They were much more experienced and finished well ahead of us; but we got bronze medals anyway, which we felt like we deserved just for not being chicken. (Or perhaps frog, which they say tastes like chicken, but my bravery does NOT extend to eating it, so I wouldn’t know.)

Bronze medals from Toledo Frogtown regatta.

Though I’m not likely to make a habit of doing daredevil stuff and would rather have rowed on nice calm water instead, sometimes having an unplanned adventure turns out to be fun anyway. After all, life would get pretty boring if everything went exactly as planned. Unexpected events every now and again make things a lot more interesting!

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