The Sum of It

 

1973. Long before QR codes, text codes, passport chips, passwords, HEIC/JPG/ PDF’s, online ticketing without a human in sight—in short, all the things that didn’t work for me last night and had me bellowing in rage. Topped off by a Premier Inn reading light that didn’t work, no new bulb at the front desk, my suggestion to use an extension cord to move the desk lamp by my bedside and then discovering the lamp was bolted to the desk. So many last straws that broke the back of my patience that I was imagining writing a suicide note:

 

“Sorry. I just couldn’t bear one more password that didn’t work. Farewell, cruel world!”

 

And then thinking I should re-charge my phone before killing myself in case St. Peter required a QR Code before entering the pearly gates. 

 

But back in 1973, I had no inkling of the insanity to come. I was 22 years old and awash with wonder as I went to Europe for the first time with my college choir. In between singing sacred 15^th century masses in the great cathedrals of France and Italy, going to art museums, attending wine tastings (yes, really!), I spent my free time wandering the streets and alleys of cities, often ending up in a park or garden. There I would sit on a bench, open my journal and try to catch a bit of the multiple joys as they were flying. Mortality was a distant city at which I imagined I would never arrive and the whole world lay before me—tangible, tantalizing and tasty. Sheer bliss.

 

Now it’s 2026. So much of that world that lay ahead unwritten now lies behind. My contemporary life, like just about everyone’s, is wholly ensnared in the tangled trip-wires of technology. I appear to need my phone for my hearing aids, maps, menus, messages, aps, Uber, banking, wake-up calls, e-mails, photos, etc. etc. and again etc. When things don’t work, I’m mostly out of luck. When they do, I benefit. But do I really? It’s just too much constantly clamoring for attention and drawing me away from the wonder of wandering free.

 

And yet. I still can taste that earlier sense of adventure in three- dimensions, savor the textures, tastes, sounds, smells and sights. I still can set off on my own two legs and go where I choose to direct them or be led by them- and apparently, for as far as 9.5 miles, as I did the other day. I still head for benches in parks to write with a pen in my journal. * 

 

And that’s where I am now, in a little garden near the Fashion Museum in London, with its fragrant and colorful roses, the pleasure of a little sunshine, the distant sounds of children playing. It’s still possible to live like this. Not easy. But possible.

 

As for mortality, that shadowy companion that reminds me to savor each moment yet more fully, my response is a simple vow that arose when a friend commented on a Facebook post sharing photos from our walk in the Yorkshire Dales. She said: 

 

“Living your best life!”

 

And I replied: 

 

“Doing what I can with whom I can when I can while I can.”

 

Which read to me like a pretty good Elder’s Mission Statement. 

 

So again: “Doing what I can with whom I can when I can while I can.”

 

That’s the sum of it.

* I actually did write the above in my handwritten journal and liked it enough to type it over here.