Olympic Gold

(from the When You Think About It Dept.)

  

Watching 16-year-old Gabby Douglas win all-around gymnastics gold at the London 2012 Olympics, I thought “What a treat!”—not only for the beautiful display of her skills, but also for the joy of seeing years of hard work rewarded.

Then my mind did a double reverse with a half twist and thought, “Well, the easy part’s over now.” And I don’t mean to disparage the amount of work Ms. Douglas and all the other Olympians have done just to get to the Games, let alone medal.

But let’s face it: if you love a sport, are at least somewhat talented and ambitious, “sacrificing everything” for the goal of qualifying for the Olympics is a fairly easy task. Like successful dieting or earning a promotion, the hardest part is making the decision to commit to the goal.

After that, would-be Olympians simply devote themselves single-mindedly to their sport. They practice it, develop skills or body mass or whatever is required. Their focus is narrowed to making the team, then to winning a medal. Every minute of their day and every aspect of their lives are shaped to contribute to that achievement.

These dedicated athletes deserve our respect and admiration for their hard work and the time spent honing their special sporting abilities. We should admire people willing to set aside everyday things to become the best they can possibly be. In gymnastics. In beach volleyball. In dancing horses. In synchronized diving. In high-jumping and hurdles, archery and skeet, rowing and boxing.

We are lucky to see the results. Yes, after years of doing only one thing, they have excelled at it.

Aside from the Olympic athletes who are allowed to compete while pursuing a professional career in their sport, such as basketball and hockey players, however, how does a person’s life look after winning an Olympic medal? Some sports allow participation at the champion level for many years, but for gymnasts and other athletes whose sport requires youth for its highest performance, the transition to a non-training life may be very difficult.

It is true that many lessons learned and skills developed during the years of serious training that world class athletes put in can translate to “ordinary” life. In post-gold interviews, the teen-aged Ms. Douglas spoke of how valuable her ability to focus would be in the future. She said that her gymnastics odyssey had taught her to push through the pain and the difficult times and declared that this lesson would allow her to achieve anything.

She is, of course, quite likely correct. Persistence is a valuable attribute for almost any achievement path.

But there are many other attributes people, including these high-level athletes, also need to make a successful transition to the real world—and there is no guarantee a single-focus lifestyle allows one to develop such abilities.

Even the focus and persistence to which Ms. Douglas alluded may not be as valuable as she hopes it to be.

Because I think it comes down to this: athletes spend years learning to control themselves—mentally and physically. That control is key to their success.

In the real world? Not so much. As us ordinary people know, the vast majority of events and results that determine our lives are beyond our control. Traffic accidents make you late to work. Career advancement may depend as much on your ability to play office politics as your ability to perform your assigned job duties. A sick relative requires your assistance—and suddenly, you’re doing laundry at 1 a.m. and wondering if you should bother trying to catch a few hours sleep or not. Does spending five hours a day tweaking hip rotation for a two-minute performance really prepare you to deliver profits for your employer day after day after day? Will Ms. Douglas know how to budget time and money and energy when she has more than one goal demanding her devotion?

Can she remember to pay the mortgage on time, make room in her schedule for that networking event and manage to get both groceries and her kid picked up before the day care closes? And can she set aside her own fatigue and concerns in order to soothe the child who is cranky and ornery when she does pick him up? Maybe.

But as I watch the astounding performances at the Olympic venues, I wonder how these hyper-focused and therefore isolated athletes are going to handle it when, 12 hours after their medal ceremony, the people they meet—in stores, at school, on the job—respond to them with “Gabby who?” Ms. Douglas’ shining moment means so little to our everyday lives of juggling self, family, job, finances, health, fashion, politics, school and more, all of which demand our devoted attention. Simultaneously.

It must be very hard to step back into reality and be swallowed up by the anonymous crowd of humanity after having worked so hard and long to stand above it for those few short moments.

Sorry to Break the News: You Don’t Get to Choose

(from the Why Aging Sucks Dept.)

Tell the truth. At one time or another, you’ve been stuck behind some old person shuffling along at glacial slowness, blocking your passage through a doorway or down an aisle and thought, “Jesus shit, get out of the way!” Followed by “Why the hell can’t they walk any faster?!  Just because they have all day… I have THINGS TO DO!”

We might deny it if asked outright, but we all know this goes through our minds when we are twenty- or thirty-, even forty-somethings. Because we are, by then, adults and at last in total charge of our lives. Our health, wealth, place of residence, kind of car—everything is what we have chosen, or the result of choices WE made. That sense of power colors all our thoughts and feelings.

Because we don’t know yet that it’s only temporary.

As adults in our prime, we secretly carry the idea that how we age is our choice, too. That whether we get dementia or lose our hearing is a decision we make, at some future point in our lives. I think there’s a half-formed idea that, just as you get a notice that your library books will be due in three days, you must get a notice that you are about to become old. Young and middle-aged adults seem to think the incipient old receive a list of symptoms and characteristics of Being Old and instructions on picking the ones they will have. Like ordering from a drive-through.

“Yes, I’ll take gray hair, hearing loss and not-keeping-up-with-music-and-movies.”

“I’d like dry wrinkled skin, a saggy butt and boobs and a hunched back.”

“Give me the painful arthritis and a heart condition that messes with my circulation so much my memory turns to soup.”

Oh PUH-LEEZE!

Nobody. Chooses. How. They. Age.

Uh-huh, uh-huh, I can hear the yeah-buts now. Yeah, but if you don’t exercise regularly—or eat healthy, or give up caffeine or smoking & drinking, or learn to reduce your stress, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah—you gotta expect bad results.

Really? We all know of the young man in his prime who went out for a jog and fell over dead at 28. We also know about the centenarian who started smoking at age 12 and drinks whiskey every day.

These are extremes, yes, but they underscore the truth that, while we may influence our individual outcomes to varying degrees, we do not actually choose our aging process.

Living righteously and following all the expert advice in the world about maintaining your health, active lifestyle, whatever, is only so helpful.

Because, though it matters how we play the hand we get, we don’t deal the cards.

To continue with that metaphor, taking care of our health might be like holding three of a kind. Maybe even a jack-high straight. But mortality is the Royal Flush; it always wins. The lucky go to bed and never wake up, or they start to say, “my head—” and before they get to “hurts,” they are gone.  Or they’re thinking about having a cold beer after this shift is over when BAM! An IED blows them to pieces before they recognize what is hap—

The problem for young and old alike is that few of us get that gift of grace known as sudden death. Note that I am not talking about the survivors’ experience in grace-full terms, only about the person whose process of aging comes to a sudden, unannounced end.

The rest of us, the unlucky majority, go through a drawn-out process of aging—and dealing with it—until we become those slow, tottering assholes, blanketed by deteriorating senses and tripped up by physical incapacities, unable to get the hell out of your way or even know you’re behind us, muttering impatiently. That’s not the worst, of course, that awaits the old. They get to look forward to being denied even the luxury of shuffling through a grocery store; their future consists of sitting alone in a warehouse for dying. If they are lucky.

Like adolescents who revel in their hormonal rushes, rush to act upon their every risk-taking impulse, indulge their ricocheting emotions and trust the underdeveloped executive decision-making region of their brains, plenty of old people embrace their infirmities and expect the rest of the world to make room and time for them.

So I’m not as steady on my feet as I used to be (thanks to changes in my inner ear due to medication I take because I worked at a plastics plant or as an exterminator to buy all my kids cars for graduation), I’ll just quit trying to merge with the “traffic” in the grocery store and trudge slower and slower and slower, now that I have fewer places I need to go.  Other people should treat me with respect and courtesy just because I’ve survived this long.

Other oldsters apply the reverse logic with which they survived marriage to an alcoholic, a lobotomizingly-dull job and/or their disappointing children. As in— I am not walking slower. YOU are in too much of a rush. MY brain has not slowed so much I can’t grasp new technology, laws or social realities. THE WORLD is changing too fast.  In other words, it’s not the aged who have changed for the worse, it is everything around them.

News flash: no matter how we address or present our deterioration, we do not like it any more than you do. In fact, I bet we dislike it a hell of a lot more than you do. Because we have to put up with it all day, every day.

Who looks forward to clearly-spoken, separate words to which you can respond wittily, devolving into fuzz and mumble, like a conversation in another room where a loud TV masks half the words? Do you seriously want to drive while joint pains weaken your grip on the steering wheel and strengthen your fear that you won’t be able to wrench the wheel fast or hard enough to avoid an accident if that idiot backs out of his parking space without looking because he’s 20 and has lightning fast reflexes and, therefore, thinks everyone else must too?

Do you want dangerously high cholesterol, even though you haven’t even looked at red meat in years? Or diverticulitis that for no reason decides to break open your intestinal wall—and a blood vessel or two—while you’re driving alone down a country road? Can’t wait for your pants to fill with blood as you search in vain for a cell signal until you pass out, still bleeding? Did a couple of grandparents who suffered from “hardening of the arteries” actually pass along Alzheimer’s genes? Or one for brain tumors? Or weak lungs that working in a hair salon during the weekly shellacked hairdos era only exacerbated? Did you know your lungs were “weak” when you chose cosmetology at age 18?

I didn’t think so.

See? That’s the rawest deal about aging, about getting old and enfeebled. We don’t choose how we age. But we have to live with what we get, until we die.

So. You’re pissed at getting stuck behind me as I totter down the aisle? How the F**K do you think I feel?!?!

More than once in every person's life, it becomes appropriate to pause, reflect on your life and consider making changes. Being at one of those points, I began looking backward at my life.

Concurrently, I came across a scrap of paper on which I'd written, "No matter how you tell your story, that's never the whole story." I'm sure that little gem of brilliant thinking (yeah, gee. nobody else ever thought of that before, did they?!) arose from an encounter with my daughter's version of our shared reality— i.e., her childhood. Her narrative and mine seem completely unrelated in many instances, another  rare occurrence between mother and daughter, right?

Anyway, as an exercise, I began to write a "memoir" that included only the events I actually remembered and left out all the stories/reminiscences the family has told through the years that become so ingrained they may pass for memory for many years.

I'm not ready to draw any hard and fast conclusions from this exercise — I'm only up to about age 5 so far — although I will say that already a pattern has emerged. This pattern consists of being abandoned in the grip of terror.

I do not, however, leap directly to searching for someone to blame. Having been blessed with some years in recovery and the opportunity to discover a whole new perspective on the people who participated intimately in my early life, I remain open-minded/undecided about whether painful abandonment is the reality or simply the way my personality rolls. It seems a good idea to let the indecision stand. Let me uncover more memories vs. stories before I make up my mind. (And perhaps the answer will be some third or fourth possibility, instead of a poor-me personality or a cold, heartless mother.)

Wait and see? No need to erect a rock-hard opinion and defend it to the death? What a change that is from the family of my childhood, who fervently believed and judged everything as right or wrong. There was only one right way to do anything, only one right way to act. Only one right way to feel, too, apparently, since I DO remember being told many times, "No, you don't" after expressing how I felt about something.

Only now, after some years in Al-Anon recovery, do I see how ridiculous, obscene, dismaying and demeaning that is. I love new clothes. No, you don't. I admire those who sacrifice to fight injustice. No, you don't. I hate winter. No, you don't.

The other thing that occurs to me now about my childhood memories of being left to drown in fear is that I didn't drown. Regardless of who or what "caused"those painful times being the only recollections of that childhood, I felt overcome...but in the end, I overcame. Maybe I was left (or left myself) to drown, but I learned to swim through my fear, to find a shore on which to stand.