At the ripe old age of 85, it seems that many of my daily routine chores are taking longer to perform and are exhausting me more quickly than ever before. The very act of getting out of bed, showering and dressing leaves me panting like a runner who has just completed a marathon. It is getting difficult to reach down to pull my socks over my feet and so breakfast time has moved, necessarily from 7:30, just a few short years ago, to 9 or even later.
The night’s sleep, from which I just awoke, was disturbed, as usual, by a number of visits to the bathroom and frustrating dreams, in which I find I am totally unable to control the situations in which I find myself.
Many times during the night and now, more frequently during the daytime, someone is traversing my body and sticking red hot pins into different parts of my anatomy. A pain suddenly occurs in my hip or lower back, and hand, neck and leg cramps happen all too frequently.
So the days go by. I try to exercise as much as I can, get out in the fresh air and help with minor chores around the house, but none of these activities goes by without some sort of complaint by my physical being.
It is so frustrating to find out that you cannot perform some of the simple tasks you used to breeze through. I have difficulty focusing when cutting my finger nails. I now have to pay a foot nurse to cut my toe nails. I cannot determine what type of screw head is on a loose screw, before getting the right screwdriver to tighten it.
Hitting a nail on the head with a hammer is now a dangerous exercise!
Reading has always been an enjoyable pastime for me, but now I need a magnifying glass for some of the smaller print books. Labels on medication bottles are impossible to decipher without the use of such an implement.
To cap it all, the world is going crazy.
No longer can we hold a conversation with many people, before their cell phone rings and they “have” to answer it or send a return text. Common sense and good manners seem to be disappearing rapidly, especially in the field of politics. A promise is no longer a promise to be kept, but to be broken. The sanctity of human life is constantly abused by gun-toting idiots or terrorists and the “good life” seems to be just one endless quest to make more money!
The United Nations and the major religions seem to be clueless and unable to deal with the unrest in many parts of the world and the refugee crisis. The Pope recently told a gathering of half-a-million people in Poland to “pray for the refugees.”
It would have been much more appropriate to ask each person to donate five dollars to a fund to help the most poverty stricken refugees and that the church would start the fund off with a $10-million donation from its own coffers!
The cost of living, and especially the cost of housing, has gone berserk. The average young couple wanting to get married, buy a home and raise a family are totally frustrated by the current market situation, whereby millionaires from other countries are paying exorbitant prices for real estate and leaving it vacant, using it as an investment tool and dodging taxes in the process, so that the whole market in housing prices is way out of kilter and due for an almighty crash.
Families, municipalities, cities and countries are accumulating more and more debt, instead of living within their means, thus placing a horrendous burden of debt on future generations. Outrageous salaries for professional sports personalities and entertainers are making the cost of going to an event more unattainable for the average fan. Salaries and pension payments for CEOs are disgustingly out of proportion to what they actually “earn,” whereas the wages of the workers are failing to keep pace with the rapidly escalating cost of living.
New discoveries, beneath the oceans and in outer space, are exciting and immensely interesting. Let us hope that one day these discoveries will make us see just how small we are in the total picture of things. The importance in the love of family and friends is paramount to a feeling of well-being. Nature is beautiful and we are still able to enjoy the pleasures it gives: trees, beautiful flowers, birds and other phenomena, so that this then becomes the most important aspect of our lives as we near the end.
