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Brain Health, Bringing It Home: Sunday musings…3/17/2024

There’s really an awful lot going on today, St. Patrick’s Day, 2024. So much that I am finding it a bit daunting to narrow down my focus for todays musings. Why so much? Well, actually, that question feeds right into the final piece of advice for my friend who has been so concerned about their risk to develop dementia given a strong family history and the recent death of a family member so afflicted. I am writing as I watch the 4th round of the 50 edition of the Player’s Championship while I rest up for another evening of dinner with Beth and the couple we met almost 39 years ago on our respective honeymoons.

The final piece of the puzzle, the last tactic to bullet proof your brain as you age is to forge and maintain close personal relationships.

We had a free weekend earlier this year when Beth and I were plotting out our calendar. Nothing really special about the dates, we just knew that this weekend fell between any other commitments and work, and that we could sneak away for 4 or 5 days to someplace warm. Our friends Dave and Suzi were free, too, so off we’ve gone together. While Beth and Suzi have been flexing their photographic muscles all over our little seaside spot, Dave and I have been going over our efforts to improve and prolong our respective healthspans. Turns out Dave has spent a bit more time on the financial planning, and I a tad more on the longevity and health thing. Lots of numbers from Dave and a bunch of science from me.

We spent quite a bit of time on questions of testing. Full-body scans? Sure, if you can stand the claustrophobia of the tube. Genetic testing for cancers (Galleri)? Maybe. Gotta get a little better on the false positives since each positive test sends you off on a testing odyssey to find, and hopefully find an early cure, for whatever cancer you may have. Apropos of our brain health project, what about the APOE gene? This is a big one for Peter Attia the longevity doc. You can have zero, one, or two copies of this gene, with increasing risk for the disease as you have more copies. We are torn by this one. If you have done nothing to mitigate your risk for dementia taking this test and finding high risk gives you lots to work on (nutrition, sleep, exercise, alcohol consumption, etc.). But for Dave and for me the only thing really left would be abstaining from alcohol. Less joy, there. We tabled the test for the moment.

Which leaves the excellent research on health and happiness that began with a study of the men of the Harvard class of 1955 and the subsequent addition of high school boys in a lower economic area of Boston, now know as The Good Life Project. A book of the same name authored by the current custodians of the still ongoing study Drs. Robert Waldinger and Marc Shulz lays out the last piece of the puzzle that can be played: make and maintain close personal relationships. The original study on men of Harvard ’55 concluded that the presence of 3 or more friends (your wife did not count) was the key to lifelong happiness. It turns out that 3 (or more) is probably still a key number, but the updated research on the original subjects, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren has concluded that it can really be anyone. Friend, spouse, child, doesn’t matter. What you need is a deep, close relationship.

From the earliest results to the most recent, happiness has correlated most strongly with friendship. More than professional success or wealth. Fame. All of the things we think must certainly be the prime drivers. All of them are dwarfed by the positive effect of making, maintaining and nurturing close relationships. Men and women alike like longer and live better, and experience less dementia than those who aren’t so fortunate.

And that, my friends, is why I find myself banging away at my keyboard late on this Sunday afternoon, rushing to finish the task I promised my friend I would take on so that I can post this before Beth and I meet Dave and Suzi for another great evening at a killer restaurant in paradise. But that’s not what makes it all so great, right? What makes this weekend so wonderful is that I am with the most important person in my life, and we are with close friends with whom we have a deep, abiding bond, and we are enveloped in the embrace of our friendship.

We are, all four of us, happy.

To that friend to whom I promised this series on brain health, I hope this has all been helpful. I hope that you are at least a bit comforted having read it. I know that most of what I’ve shared is stuff that you already have covered, and I hope that knowing this eases your mind, at least a bit. To those like Dave and Suzi who have long surrounded me with their friendship and accepted mine in turn, thank you. I’ll be calling you soon.

And as always, I’ll see all of you next week…

A Coda For Life Revisited: Sunday musings…3/102024

1 Thirsty. To want something very badly.

“He was thirsty for revenge.”

2 Sweaty. HT Brooks Barnes, Sunday NYT “Shop Talk”.

To be desperate for something. To want something so badly that the wanting becomes anxiety. A term from gaming culture which describes players who compete with a level of intensity that is so beyond the pale that their gaming controllers become covered in sweat. Trying too hard. The opposite of cool.

Not Sprezzatura.

3 Review. While lazing around at home, miserable weather, all chores completed. Beth: “Do you want to watch a movie?” And so we came to watch “Mr. Holmes”, a movie from 2015 now playing on Prime and the topic of this week’s report/review. Sherlock Holmes has retired. His memory is failing him, and he can’t bear to be even a little a lesser version on who he once was. He has retired to his bees in what appears to be a country estate in Dover. Assisted by a housekeeper and her 12ish year old son Roger, he obsesses over a quest to stall the loss of his still considerable. His search has brought him through Royal Jelly to an obscure Japanese plant called Prickly Ash.

Mr. Holmes is tortured by his final case. He cannot remember its final disposition, only that the version of the case written and published by his trusty companion John Watson is inaccurate. Encouraged by Roger who is eagerly reading each installment so painstakingly retrieved from Holmes’ memory, he creeps toward the true story. His final triumph not so much the outcome but the realization that his efforts to find a magic elixir that will restore his memories is but a dream destined to be unfulfilled (more in a moment). Still, we the audience see so much more as we watch his tortured efforts. I’ll not spoil your pleasure by revealing any more, but will only say that “Mr. Holmes” is worthy or your time.

And your tears.

4 Brain Health Part 3. My friend, the person to whom I have been writing this latest series on battling the scourges of aging, lost their mother last week. She succumbed to the most common variety of dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease. Like so many before, her family had long been mourning the loss of their matriarch. Emptied of her essence, her physical being was an increasingly empty vessel that once held within that which made her so special. Despite the months and years of “pre-mourning”, like so many of us my friend was nonetheless knocked off their feet by the loss.

And so I bring to them, and to you, Part 3 of my little series on brain health and the effort to bomb-proof yourself against dementia of all types. I should mention if I haven’t already that genetic tests exist to add a degree of quantification to one’s quest to stave off this terrible loss. For me knowing or not knowing will not really change my approach or my effort; knowing that my risk is X% higher would, for me, simply create a cloud over every hour I lived, putting at risk my ability to find the joy inherent in the fact that I was still alive and still me. You may feel otherwise, and will have to choose accordingly.

Thus far we have covered nutrition and sleep. Next up is exercise. Physical fitness. Conceptually this is actually probably the easiest of the four areas we will eventually cover. Get your buttocks off the bench and get in the game. Like to run? Run. Does lifting heavy stuff off the ground move you? Feel free to grunt all you want and drop your bumper plates with abandon. Pretty much everything in between probably works, too. Seriously, when it comes to brain health the data just doesn’t convince me that any one particular type of exercise is the magic prescription that will inoculate you against dementia. VO2 Max vs. Max Deadlift? Nobody knows if one is better than the other, but you and I both know that in one way or another you will be better off overall if you do some of both.

My CrossFit buddies of yore will argue in favor of CVFMHI, and the editors of Outside Magazine et al will argue for Triathalons and Ultras, with a tiny chorus of folks off to the side sitting on their stones and their loaded barbells and shaking their heads at all of the low BFI folks crowding the room. I think what you do is a distant second to that you do, indeed, do it. Make exercise the third leg of your lifestyle intervention stool. Everything I’ve read and seen and done tells me that exercise is powerful preventative medicine to ward off dementia.

Just as everything I’ve read and see and done confirms for me, as it did for Holmes, that no magic potion or pill exists that will do it for us.

5 Coda. I came across a bit of correspondence between a friend I’ve known for 35 years in which we remembered advice I offered almost all of those years ago. It got me to thinking and reminiscing about the 3 core guiding principles that helped me (and in many ways him) make it through our training and early professional careers. All 3 have stood the test of time, have continued to inform my best decisions both professional and personal, and over the 35 years now since I first said them out loud I’ve only needed to add one additional guideline.

“Knowledge is power.” One is at such a profound disadvantage if there is asymmetry in the amount of information they possess relative to those with whom they interact that at a certain point they cease to be independent entities. Without knowledge, awareness of the ground as Sun Tzu would say, you are at the mercy of another and must depend upon their kindness for, well, almost everything.

“Perception is more important than reality.” The explanation of this, of course, is that perception is the reality of perceiver. While you could say that this is simply an extension of the first guideline–creating the perception is in some way controlling the knowledge–I would simply say that one need only look at the deeply held worldview of some of the U.S. voting public, their perception of what is real and what is important, to illustrate that perception comes from within. Understanding this should inform your approach to any situation whatsoever. What does this individual perceive at this moment? That becomes the reality with which you will deal, your version notwithstanding.

“Evolution is better than revolution.” I first made this statement in a public forum on CrossFit.com, the home of a truly disruptive revolution in fitness. Here is where my conversation with my friend was so helpful, for he was (and still is) a man in a hurry to effect change for the better: evolution involves a conscious attempt to minimize unnecessary collateral damage. Sometimes that damage is directed at oneself, and thinking more along the lines of the “long game” is also sometimes a very reasonable approach to self-preservation. The fire of revolution burns brighter the nearer it gets to the revolutionary. My friend, nearly exactly my age, continues to seeks change in the cool contemplative glow somewhat removed from the fire, conscious always of the need to care for, and be careful for, the growing flock that has surrounded him as he grew older.

These 3 guidelines have served me well, lo these 35 years or so. They may or may not work for you; they may be nothing more than tinder to light the fire of your own guiding principles, or even less, simply the empty musings of an older man much too impressed with his own ideas. I have shared the epiphanies of 9/11 and Heinlein that underly the tactical application of these 3 strategies, and perhaps it is time for me to spend a moment or two reexamining them, as they may or may not apply today. But I believe that there remains plenty to think about in these simple suggestions. “Knowledge is power.” “Perception is more important than reality.” “Evolution is better than revolution.”

They have been a formidable foundation for the coda that guides me, still.

I’ll see you next week…

Sprezzatura: Sunday musings…3/3/2024

This is just perfect. It’s as if the titans of journalism, the wizards behind the curtain at the Wall Street Journal and the New York times, looked into the ether, found the thread that contained my musings, and ordered me up a fully formed essay. Gift wrapped and delivered to my doorstep yesterday and today. My newspapers were even delivered on time, not a particularly frequent event. After reading yesterday’s WSJ Off Duty section on men who became icons of style without any sense that they cared one way or the other about style, my Sunday NYT arrived with a Men’s Fashion of the Times magazine laden with images of men bent double in the effort.

Seriously. Batting practice fastball. They even pre-installed the vocabulary.

The greats, the true icons of yore and near-yore fairly ooze style without seeming to make any effort whatsoever. Italians have a word for that: sprezzatura. It means the art of dressing in a nonchalant, tradition-flouting way (wording from WSJ). I like the use of flout, too. To openly disregard convention. Think James Dean and Steve McQueen. James Baldwin. Younger, more current examples per WSJ might be Brad Pitt or Keanu Reeves. I buy ’em all. Each of these men look like they’ve long ago run out of f^ck$ to give when they go in the closet to pull out the day’s look.

Which of course brings up the obvious question since nonchalant is the sine qua non of sprezzatura: is “chalant” a word and is it the opposite of nonchalant? I’m a words guy as you know and this is just fascinating. It turns out that the answer is no, chalant is not a word. Nonchalant is what is known as an unpaired word, one that sounds as if it should have an opposite, an antonym, but in fact does not (HT Quora). Our English word comes to us via the French “non” (not) “chaloir” (caring). Hence “nonchalant” is “not caring”.

Like I said, one f^ck short…

To be schooled in the polar opposite one could do worse than picking up today’s Men’s Fashion of the Times. Seriously, it is just littered with “too hard”, pretentious nonsense like transparent pants. And I’m not talking just the right wrong light transparent like the debacle that is the new MLB uniforms, I mean like cellophane trousers transparent. Where the sprezzatura stars might embellish their worn-in chinos with a thin chain worn over their tee shirt or a vintage wristwatch (think Paul Newman), the models in the articles and the celebrities in the ads are adorned with enough hardware to make Mr. T. blush. Michael Stipe wearing a bracelet that my Gama, she of the elegant jade bracelets, would find impossibly garish. A model wearing a string of white flowers in place of a tie to accompany a white suit coat and matching shorts.

And the logos. Oh my heavens, the logos! Again, in the WSJ a few folks on the street were interviewed and one of them just nailed the whole logo thing. JF, a 61 year old guy who offered that at his age “big logos just look kind of foolish”. Like me he prefers tiny logos, or even better, no logos at all. When I traveled to Ireland to embarrass myself on the golf course I discovered that I no longer owned any long-sleeve golf shirts. To my delight I was able to find a purveyor of men’s clothes that makes super high quality polos without feeling the need to let everyone know about it. They were perfect, looking like they were made by “somebody”, an implied logo (HT: JF). What a great phrase, “implied logo”.

The chaloir in the NYT? Goodness, they are literally buried in logos. I’m a huge fan of LeBron James. Not just the athlete but the man in full. But really? All those “LV’s” on whatever you call that outfit? If you looked quickly he just blended in with the luggage. Yup, all those logos and you had to look twice to see that they were worn by one of the most famous men in the world.

Now, you could reasonably say that I, a middle-aged White male, have no business looking at a fashion magazine filled with images of naked male models cavorting in nothing but a pea coat, and I would find your position reasonable. You could also say that I am hopelessly out of fashion, or that I have no understanding of modern fashion or the fashion mores of the young or the hip or the wealthy. Again, I would agree that you are on solid ground. I mean, come on, my professional sartorial calling card is a bow tie. Not exactly the strongest foundation from which to lob opinions in the direction of the “chaloir”, I’ll admit.

On the cover of today’s weekly NYT magazine is a picture of a model wearing the denim version of MC Hammer’s parachute pants and a statement that these pants says something about “us”. As you can imagine, this part of “us” won’t be trying that hard. And yet, I find myself somehow validated. Seen, you could even say. I grew up wearing tan pants made by Dickies and thought they were chinos. After an adult lifetime of searching for my next version of the perfect khakis, of wearing logo-free, sun-bleached monochrome polos until they are threadbare to the point of almost qualifying for a pic on a model in the NYT. Of disappearing from my professional self as easily as Harry Potter and his cloak, simply by removing my bow tie. I have found what for me stands for fashion, however aspirational it may be to become nonchalant to the point of truly not caring.

Perhaps, if I can somehow try very hard not to try at all, I, too, might be sprezzatura.

I’ll see you next week…

Bedside Manner: Sunday musings…2/25/2024

1 Flow. Sort of the opposite of “block”. You know, like the writer’s block I thought I had until I sat down and looked over some notes I’d jotted down and the words started to flow so fast I can’t get a handle of which ones go where.

Is this what it’s like to be Steven King sitting at his keyboard?

2 Euderimonia. From Aristotle. A deep sense of well-being in which one feels that a life has meaning and purpose.

Think pre-EMR, pre-Meaningful Use, pre-Affordable Health Care Act private practice physician.

3 Brand. Why do vaccines have brand names? Wasn’t there just, like, one vaccine at a time back when we dinosaurs were the first wave of kids to get MMR, Polio, DPT and the like? Were there brands that were marketed to your friendly neighborhood pediatrician back then?

Sorry. Just seems super weird.

4 Book Report. My daughter in law Tes (TEZ) has this huge book club. Like a couple of hundred women reading books together huge. I should pay closer attention sometimes; she might be the admin member of her group, which would be a pretty big deal (I’ll ask when she arrives tonight to tipple with her hubby and her in-laws). Anyway, I’d started to read rather than have my books fed to me primarily via Netflix et al, and people ask about what I’ve read. So here’s another report: “A Monk Swimming” -Malachi McCourt.

Those of you who know me know that I spend an awful lot of time with “brain candy” like The Grey Man and the Jack Carr “Terminal List” series, alternating with Sci-fi that skews hard toward quantum physics and the multiverse. But every now and again I stumble across a book that latches onto my funny bone and just won’t let go. “A Monk Swimming” is one of those. Invariably I end up with one of these books while on a plane, usually while in the company of Beth, much to her chagrin. I am infamous for snorting when I laugh out loud, and this was one of those books that Beth literally made me put away while we were flying.

Malachi McCourt was the black sheep of the McCourt clan that also included Frank, author of “Angela’s Ashes”. Not a funny book. Malachi, on the other hand, made quite a life for himself by being the funniest guy in a room filled with all manner of people. He quite famously was one of the unnamed crew that aided and abetted the original Rat Pack (Sinatra, Martin, Davis Jr., Lewis, etc.). The guy’s stories are side-splitting funny, whether or not you are on a plane. He turned 91 last year and is probably pouring Manhattans at the retirement home this afternoon.

Do yourself a favor and pick up this gem. Be careful though. You want to drink your coffee or whatever while you are not actually reading. The book starts off hilariously with an explanation of the title (I snarfed on the plane) and just gets funnier from there.

5 Bedside. As in “Bedside Manner”, the antiquated term once used to describe a physician who had an easy way about themself while they communicated with their patients. It’s a term that’s been relegated to the historical junk heap, tarred by incriminations that it was little more than paternalistic and patronizing pulled off with panache. Of course, unlike days of yore during which so much of healing actually took place at the side of a sick bed, there’s not a whole lot of bed going on in modern healthcare.

I digress…

Bedside manner really means nothing more than openly showing that a physician cares about how a patient is feeling. Yes, sure, there was always that little bit of shade attached, an implication that the doc with a great bedside manner was actually hiding the fact that their medical acumen was rather thready, like describing your date as “a really good dancer”, but the reality is more likely that a “good” doctor with a “good bedside manner” was just like anyone else whose job made it necessary for them to be outwardly focused, focused on the patient/customer more than inwardly focused on what would ultimately lead to personal benefit.

In last week’s weekend edition of the WSJ there was a long piece on so-called “supercommunicators.” These individuals did something that I’ve translated as “active listening”: fully concentrating on what another is saying, and then validating that other’s thoughts/position/feeling by repeating the gist of what they said back to them. Even more so, after doing so they intuitively then ask if what they received was at least close to what the other person was sending. The front side of this is really nothing that your grandmother didn’t teach you when your were a kid: listen without interrupting when it’s not your turn to talk. It’s the second part of the equation, paraphrasing and confirmation, that elevate these folks to the “super” category.

Now this article was discussing communication in general, not focusing on the nuances of medical communication. Still, I kinda paid attention to my own habits in the exam room this last week when it was my time to “listen”. There’s a little caveat, of course, because a patient typically tells their story to a nurse or technician first, but paraphrasing the story obtained by another and seeking confirmation that your take is accurate is legit. Being a medical supercommunicator takes a bit more, though. There is an inherent information inequality due simply to the nature of the experience; no matter how much time you’ve spent with Dr. Google or messing around with ChatGPT or other AI’s, it is overwhelmingly more likely that I still know more about why you are in the office than you do.

The crux of having a good Bedside Manner is in how you take the next step in the conversation. How you demonstrate that you care about what your patient has told you. That you heard how much a problem is affecting them, and that you are committed to finding a solution. You, the doctor, may feel this deeply; your Bedside Manner is how you now project this. It is my contention that both House and Marcus Welby cared equally about the patients who presented themselves to be healed. Both were appreciated for their brilliance and the successes it wrought; only one was beloved.

I wish I had a newer, better term to describe a supercommunicator in healthcare. It’s my opinion that “Bedside Manner” has gotten a bad rap, honestly, but I get it. In the rest of the world’s non-medical communications there are some lessons to be learned from those docs who did/do have a “good Bedside Manner” for sure. Be an “active listener”, offering your communication partner the floor when it’s their turn to speak, paraphrasing and seeking confirmation so that they know that they’ve been heard. Like a doctor who sometimes has to prescribe a solution that is not really what a patient wants to hear, confirming that you’ve heard another does not require that you agree with them. Your response, agree or disagree, simply affirms that how they feel has value, too.

In the end we could all use a little bit of Marcus Welby’s manner at any “bedside”.

The One True National Holiday: Sunday musings…2/17/2024

1 Upstander. Better than bystander.

2 Tare. To zero a measuring instrument. I was today year’s old when I learned this.

3 Patrick Adams. While flying home from a meeting I struck up a conversation with my row mate (I routinely talk to strangers), a gentleman named Patrick Adams. Seems Mr. Adams is semi-famous in the general way, but rather genuinely famous among the music cognoscenti of Nashville where he is a songwriter and performer. We shared the last leg of his trip home from performing.

Do yourself a favor, look this guy up on Spotify or wherever you do such things. Listen to his lyrics. Maybe choose, as I did, a playlist of others playing music he wrote. Think of it as talking to strangers by proxy.

4 Book Report. “We get given our faces, but we inherit our lives.” Michael Robotham, “Life or Death”.

Often, when I finish a book, something that happens with some frequency I’m glad to say, I think that perhaps I should have a little space in “Sunday musings…” or “Random Thoughts” that serves as a kind of book report. I dunno, might be a bit presumptuous but when has that ever stopped me, eh? Anyway, a fair portion of what shows up here comes from stuff I’ve read, including the above-mentioned “Life or Death.” It’s a fantastic story, a thriller, and honestly I just couldn’t put it down. A guy has spent 10 years in prison and on the day before he is scheduled to be released at the end of his sentence he escapes from prison.

It’s a story about fortitude. About single-mindedly doing the right thing, no matter how often or how violently you are thwarted. Asked about the wild swings of luck he experiences the hero answers with a bit of southwestern poetry: “I guess I broke a mirror and found a horseshoe on the same day.” While not as filled with the invitation to deepest thinking I enjoyed in “Dark Matter”, it is nonetheless one of the better reads of the 20’s.

5 Holiday. The one, true universal holiday in the United States is Super Bowl Sunday (SBS). Seriously. Is there truly another day in which a super majority of our nation’s citizens unite more completely, with a greater cross-section of the population engaged than the championship game of the National Football League? Seriously. It supersedes Christmas, New Year’s Day and the Fourth of July (which I’ll bet most people do not know is really called Independence Day) for participation. Some 130 million folks tuned in to watch it live, if only to see the commercials (at $7 Million for 30 seconds) they would talk about even more than the game itself.

Some folks tuned in solely for the commercials, using the action in the game as a bathroom break.

“Did you see The Game?” “Where did you watch The Game?” “How about that commercial for XYZ? Wasn’t it awesome/awful?” For days on end both pre- and post-SBS these questions were never more than 30 seconds in to any conversation in my decidedly middle-class world. Man or woman, young or old. Didn’t matter. I’m still processing what it means for such an event to be the singular thing on which a country agrees. It doesn’t matter which team you rooted for, or this year if you were rooting for a team at all.

You know EXACTLY what I’m referring to.

What really struck me, convincing me that SBS is, indeed, that one single universal commonality was reading a couple of newspapers and watching the network morning shows on Monday (I was on vacation, chilling with Beth and Hero as they trained in a more horse friendly clime than Cleveburg in February). The topic at hand was whether the Monday following SBS should be a national holiday. Really. Folks were having serious conversations about whether the nation should cure SBS flu by simply declaring the day a holiday. In a country that can’t somehow find a way to make Election Day a national holiday, shutting down on the Monday after SBS was fodder for serious discussion.

I found myself counting up the national holidays we do have. Days when schools, government offices and the financial markets are closed. Heck, maybe we even celebrate some of them. Christmas and Thanksgiving. New Year’s Day. Independence Day, Memorial Day and Labor Day. Veteran’s Day, President’s Day and MLK Day. Did you know that VE Day (Victory in Europe) and VJ Day (Victory over Japan) were once national holidays? No one remembers VE Day, and Rhode Island is the only VJ holdout remaining. Where once we lived under the umbrella of “Blue Laws” that forbade commerce on Sundays, you can now buy a sofa on Easter.

Do we need another national holiday? Beats me. Looking at our list of holidays we have now they all seem to have, I dunno, maybe a tiny bit of nobility, or something to that tune. Maybe that’s a stretch, the nobility part. I guess I’m thinking that collapsing Washington and Lincolns’ birthday celebrations into a single day while adding MLK Day contains at least a whiff of nobility, no? Anyway, the days we DO have all seem to be backed by long-standing, almost eternal significance (looking at you, New Year’s Day), national impact, or the like.

Like Easter, Super Bowl Sunday does not require that we set aside a day off work for the celebration. Is SBS itself a holiday? Sure. Any day that brings together almost half of the country is some way, shape, or form fits the definition, at least my version of the definition. Indeed, Super Bowl Sunday and all that goes along with it may be the single thing that we can all agree on. That we can all congregate around without major conflict or controversy. Those who celebrate the day pretty much have a live and let live attitude toward those who don’t and vice versa, and really, how many things in our modern America can you say THAT about.

As I talk myself through this I think I’m cool with Super Bowl Sunday as quasi-national holiday. But the Monday after? Nah. Not buying it. In a country that de-holidayed the day commemorating Columbus and the “first” Europeans to set foot in the Western Hemisphere we’re gonna shut down City Hall, local schools and the nation’s banking system so that SBS “celebrants” can suffer their hangovers at home? I’m afraid that I just can’t find the nobility, reverence, historical or civic significance, necessary to make that call.

I’m willing to keep an open mind, though. I mean, if a certain guy had dropped to one knee and you-know-who said “yes”, well, maybe just that once.

I’ll see you next week…

Curating Culture

“When you decline to create or to curate a culture in your spaces, you’re responsible for what spawns in the vacuum.” –Leigh Alexander

Nature abhors a vacuum. In all ways and in all places. While I have never seen this immutable law applied to group culture that only speaks to my own lack of imagination and insight, and by extension Alexander’s surfeit of both. I use “spaces” a bit differently, preferring the term as a reference to internal or personal geography (timespace, brainspace, emotionalspace). Alexander’s choice of “space” rather than “place” adds to the brilliance, the “aha”-ness of the insight in that it specifically includes the virtual as well as the physical.

Some people exert, or could exert, enormous influence over very large spaces by either actively tending to the culture or by standing aside and simply observing what fills the vacuum. The CEO of our local medical behemoth has imposed his will at a very granular level on an organization that employs 10’s of thousands. Rules and regulations abound there. In the CrossFit world, the culture arose primarily from the founder’s philosophy and worldview. Greg Glassman is a classic libertarian: your business starts and everyone else’s ends at the tip of your nose. Pretty freewheeling, rough and tumble culture for the entirety of Greg’s reign.

My present location is a folding chair off to the side at the Florida horse barn where Beth is enjoying the life of a full-time equestrian. One of her barn mates, a younger woman who occasionally engages me in deeper thoughts, asked about the cultures in the spaces that make up my life. Think for a moment about your own spaces, maybe looking initially at the ones over which you might have a bit of control or influence. Work. Home. CrossFit Box or horse barn, whether owner or member. What has your role been in the creation and ongoing curation of the culture of those spaces? It’s a rather Taoist proposition, I think: to act is precisely equal to not acting, because one or the other course must be chosen. At my day job we actually did go about the task of creating a culture (A Tribe of Adults), and we knowingly curate that space by culling the tribe of those who don’t, won’t, or can’t acculturate.

In the end this is probably just another entreaty to consciously examine your own spaces, your world, and seek to exert whatever control you can wherever you can in order to live well. Whatever “well” means to you. Again, Lao Tse and the Tao te Ching gives us some useful vocabulary, imagery we might reference. In the end we are all more like the pebble in the stream than the reed in the field. We may aspire to live as the reed, flexible and ever able to flow with whatever breeze may blow through. The reality is that an untended culture surrounding us flows so powerfully that it, like the water in a stream, eventually reshapes us as it inevitably sculpts the stone in the stream.

The difference, as both Lao-tse and Leigh Alexander teach us, is that you have within you the ability to control the flow.

Sunday Musings…1/28/2024

1 Vituperative. Abusive, bitter, sarcastic. One guess who the subject of the article was when I read that word.

2 Calumniating. Synonym for vituperative. Imagine you found this one first and the definition was “vituperative”. Webster’s rathole.

3 Contumelious. Oh why not…one more in the family tree. I’ll be grading the pundits that are offering pundications about you know who on the quality of their adjectives.

4 Yellow. “The big yellow one is the sun!” –Brian Reagan

We fled to Florida in pursuit of Hero, Beth’s loyal steed, and stumbled upon “the big yellow one” when we arrived. I sat down to write under its magnificent glow only to have it disappear behind the clouds that have begin to lubricate my laptop from above.

Cleveland has followed us to the locale formerly known as “The Sunshine State”.

5 Pill. My friends Brett and Lynne reached out a couple of days ago to invite me and Beth to visit their home in the mountains. Brett, like most of the surgeons I know (and if I’m honest, much of the time me as well), is quietly convinced that he is a true polymath, with enough innate smarts and acquired “data” to offer educated and perspicacious commentary of most of what he encounters in life.

Including, in this case, last week’s “Sunday musings…” LOL!

Brett thinks that I left out the most important part of the longevity formula, the plan to increase the quantity and quality of your lifespan. Again, like many (most?) of us in the club, he jumps the gun a bit, offering to give me the “secret sauce” before I finished the “cookbook”! No worries of course. I previewed what’s on the way while letting him know that we would get back to him and Lynne about their generous invite.

For the last several years I’ve done a little thought experiment in January. I’d run across an article on WSJ.com in which a fascinating hypothetical was proposed: If you could stop the aging process at a particular point in time, at what age would you do that? At what age do you feel that you are close enough to your physical peak that you are comfortable balancing that against your intellectual capacities and maturity? Great question, that.

My physical fitness has been slipping for at least several years. Despite this, until the months just before my first hip replacement in 2019 I remained generally stronger than I was at any time other than my years as a college football player. When did I peak? At what time was my overall physical fitness, when my capabilities across the 10 general characteristics of fitness CrossFitters chase at its highest level? Although I didn’t know it at the time I probably peaked somewhere in medical school. My buddies and I managed to cram in marathon hoops sessions, round robin squash fests, and an admittedly conflict of interest laden exploration of 1980’s aerobics classes (most of my friends were single) while we finished up school. I supplemented this with pretty standard issue weight training (Beth liked lifting, even back then). Make that peak age 25 or 26.

Believe it or not, from there the slow age and career inflicted decline began in earnest. Had it not been for that Men’s Journal article in December 2005 I’d likely be a typical 64 year old desk jockey, broken by my job and the various and sundry weekend warrior injuries I would have doubtless suffered. Ah, but this CrossFit thing not only saved me from that but also gave me another peak somewhere around age 48. To be truthful I’m back on the descent now, especially following the 18 month ordeal of my second hip replacement, but at least summited another (slightly lower) peak before starting the slide.

How about the other half of the equation? The part where you have a certain amount of intelligence, experience, and maturity? Well, for sure I was whip smart at 26. Every doctor (like me and my buddy Brett) is simply brilliant on med school graduation day; we have no idea what we don’t know, and no idea how to actually be a doctor, but hey, we just crammed for 4 straight years and our brains are busting at the seems with, you know, smart stuff.

You know where this part is going, of course. At 26 I’d yet to acquire the maturity and experience that is necessary to create what I’d like to call “actionable intellect”. Such a thing could also be called “judgment”, and in short the ingredients you add to the mix are mileage and the accumulated humility that one acquires “on the road”. Like every other 26 year old I was pretty sure I knew it all already we finished up school,but we all know how much longer the story is at that point, don’t we.

So it must be age 48 then. Another physical peak achieved. lost of miles under my belt including the humility of a struggling business and the grounding effect of nearly losing a child. Must be 48, right? Well, to be quite honest, I would really love to return to age 48 in a physical sense. My 64 year old bones are more than weary, at least the ones that have carried me for all 64 years, and I’ll admit right now that I’m slow-rolling writing this because I’m dreading the thought of ruining a perfectly good lazy Sunday with a workout that’s gonna happen sometime after I finish this. A funny thing happened again on the way to my “final answer” though: just like my first answer at age 58 I realized that my non-physical growth over the last 6 years has been extraordinary.

This weekend, in the company of quite a few men and women who like me quite a lot, and a couple who truly love me, I discovered the “second flaw” in the thought experiment I first came across 6 years ago: there are THREE essential characteristics that can grow, or atrophy, over the course of a lifetime, not two. Yes, the two noted in the WSJ, physical and mental prowess, are both the obvious and arguably the more important, at least on the surface. If we look solely at these two metrics, and if I was truly forced to take the pill one day or another, I might very well have taken it on my 59th birthday. Especially if I’d known what my hips had in store for me going forward. If I’m being brutally honest, I have likely plateaued intellectually, too.

Can you continue to gather wisdom if you’ve hit your intellectual peak?

Ah, well, the answer to that (and the next lesson in bullet-proofing your brain against dementia) is also the response to Brett’s observation that I’d missed the key to both the quality and quantity of your lifespan. You see, the third measure, the third aspect of our being that can grow over time, is our emotional health. How we are able to both feel emotionally, and how we are able to respond to the emotions of those around us. The answer, the third leg of the stool for all of this is our ability to be emotionally open to close friendships, and our willingness to simultaneously seek more close friendships while we deepen those we are already blessed to have.

My weekend began with a bit of a detour on my way to connect with Hero in Florida. My professional side gig as a consultant and educator sent me to Dallas and the company of colleagues both old and newly met. Among them were those folks who like me, and the couple of very good friends who would say that I am a friend they love. It was so very, very nice to be there. Like being in the warmest topical pool imaginable, and realizing that you’ve become a much better swimmer than you’d ever been in your life. In the company of my friends I was just better at being their friend. Like learning a new swimming stroke, in the company of people I’d never met it was just easier to meet them, find that which we shared, and start a new journey toward friendship.

So yes, Brett, I hadn’t gotten to close friendships yet but they are key to living both longer and living better and happier. And yes to my friend who is so very concerned about the risk for dementia after watching a close family member succumb, the quantity and quality of your close friendships also helps to inoculate you against the scourge of dementia. Emotional growth might be the third pillar, the missing load bearing element in the classic WSJ thought experiment. Physical and mental prowess only? Maybe I’d have taken the pill on my birthday in 2019. Does your EQ, the emotional equivalent of your IQ also diminish as part of the aging process? No idea. But I’m better at the whole of things with 5 more years of gains in my EQ, and with that prowess that much better at the core of my friendships.

So I will head back to the gym. I’ll continue my pursuit of another language, deeper knowledge about wine, and perhaps an intellectually challenging game to learn and play with my Man Cub and his sibs and cousins. In April I’ll be off to the mountains to give a wonderful friendship fuel to grow.

And if our EQ is part of the equation, and if mine is still increasing, well then I shall leave the pill on the counter for at least one more year.

I’ll see you next week…

Sunday musings…1/21/2024

1 Zebra. I might as well be sitting at a window in Ice Station Zebra. While I can’t walk to Canada, from where I’m sitting it does look like all I’d need to do is pull a little row boat behind me to scoot across the open areas in the ice that spans out before me further than I can see without binoculars.

Kinda reminds me of the famous novel (and inevitable movie) Ice Station Zebra from the 1970’s. You young’uns have no memory of this, of course, but the 1970’s were awash with end-of-times tales of a world plunged back into another Ice Age after the relatively warm and placid climate of the early 20th Century. That’s right, with all of the industrial growth in the mid-20th Century the climate cooled and people called for science to save humanity from the incipient frost.

Just another reminder me Droogies that cold kills.

2 Brain Health. Part 2: sleep. Turns out that both duration and quality of sleep is a key factor in protecting your squash from rotting. Sleep in mid-life plays an important role in preserving the health of your brain and lowering your risk of developing, or the severity of the dementia that you develop.

Let’s start with a little bit of the basics of sleep. Humans sleep in cycles that last approximately 90 minutes, plus or minus a little bit. Each cycle contains 4 discrete sections broken down into Rapid Eye Movement (REM) and Non-REM sections of which there are 3. NR-1 is very light sleep during which you are still partly aware of your surroundings; this is the stage in which we are most wakeful and from which we most naturally awaken spontaneously. N-2 is when we truly fall asleep and is the longest stage. Delta waves begin to appear on our EEG and both our heart rate and respiratory rates slow down. N-3 is deep sleep, the stage from which it is most difficult to awaken. REM sleep is when the most vivid dreams occur. The N-3 and REM stages each last about 25% of a cycle.

Our best, healthiest sleep occurs when we sleep for X complete cycles, awakening just after REM sleep and before N-1 is over. This is a bit counter intuitive. For instance, if you do the math you will have a higher quality night of sleep if you awaken after 6 hours (4 90-minute cycles) than if you wake up or are awakened after 7 hours, right in the middle of N-3 or deep sleep. In general we also tend to function better in the long term if we retire at night and awaken in the morning at roughly the same time each day. Limiting exposure to bright light, especially blue or violet light, makes it easier to fall asleep (transition from N-1 to N-2). Following on last week’s thoughts on alcohol, a drink close to bedtime will move you from N-1 to N-2 more quickly, but alcohol disrupts the completion of cycles; we often fail to enter REM sleep before returning to N-1.

Bottom line? Quality sleep including a healthy REM stage, with the quantity of sleep driven by how many CYCLES, not hours, that you have slept, is an important tool to help prevent or delay the onset of dementia. Next week: autonomic nervous system and exercise.

3 Sports Illustrated. One entire wall of the bedroom I shared with my brother growing up was papered with classic full-page illustrations from Sports Illustrated.

This week the sports world was greeted with the news that Sports Illustrated, the venerable magazine that transformed the world of sports reporting from an essentially local endeavor into one of national interest, was soon to be no more. For reasons that frankly aren’t all that well explained, something financial has caused the group that has been publishing SI to “lose its license”. The news that we all heard was that this group would lay-off either most or all of the what remains of SI’s staff, both on the publishing (business) and editorial (writing/photography) sides. Those of you who have loved SI, like me, remember the halcyon days pre-private equity buy-out and the post-sale initial purge that jettisoned most of what remained of the star-studded roster of writers.

Internet wags have been all about how this was inevitable, not because of the finances that resulted in the private equity group’s pillaging of SI’s assets but because of the annual SI Swimsuit Issue. I found it interesting that a super-majority of folks in high dungeon over this referenced the swimsuit issue as “one of the 12 annual issues”, labeling themselves immediately as Johhny/Janey-come-latelies with no real emotional skin in the game; until 2020 or so SI was published weekly beginning in the 1950’s, and the swimsuit issue was not published as a separate, stand-alone issue until the 1990’s or so (there was reporting on the previous week’s significant sporting events in the first half of the issue).

No, it was the cold-hearted stripping of assets coupled with a complete tone-deafness by the financial cowboys that did in what had become a cultural landmark in our sports-obsessed country. SI was an icon that drove conversation across almost all divides in our society, at least among sports fans. To be sure, the opera-obsessed or the high fashion followers were as likely to read SI as an Alabama football fan was to pick up The New Yorker, but if you read SI you had strong opinions about all kinds of stuff sports related, and equally strong opinions about SI and its reporting. Seriously, the letters to the editor after an article on chess or bowling were almost as fun to read as the ones 2 weeks after the swimsuit issue.

If you were an SI reader you still remember what day yours came in the mail each week. Mine came every Thursday when I was young and had yet to fledge the nest. My folks gave each of us a subscription of our own when we headed off to college; mine still arrived in my mailbox on Thursday at school. It took me months to get used to the Friday delivery day here in Cleveland, my home for some 33 years now. You had a pattern, how you read each issue. Purists started by opening the front page and starting at the start. Others, like me, went directly to the last page and “Point After” by Rick Reilly. My only letter to SI was actually addressed to Reilly. Sadly, neither SI’s editors nor Rick considered my thoughts worthy or either publication or a reply.

At their peak it would have been hard to determine which end of the year award was more eagerly awaited and discussed, Time Magazine’s Man (now Person) of the Year or Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman (now Sportsperson) of the year. With all of the international upheaval these days including two wars and Artificial Intelligence’s 12 month Debutante Ball, this year Time named Taylor Swift Person of the Year, perhaps the least surprising and controversial choice in recent memory. Ah, but not Sports Illustrated. Nope, this year they went off the proverbial board and made the kind of nearly unfathomable choice that always made you sit on the edge of the throne waiting for the announcement: Deion Sanders, most recently head coach of the University of Colorado’s football team.

It almost seems like someone on the editorial side got tipped off about the coming bad news and decided to go out big.

Now please understand, I have nothing against either Mr. Sanders or the University of Colorado. But please, after a really fun first few weeks of the season in which the Buffaloes upset a couple of reasonably good teams, they cratered, finishing with a 4-8 record and a 6 game losing streak. Yes, sure, Coach Sanders brought in a huge amount of PR, raised the profile of a once-proud program, and was masterful at manipulating the new administrative landscape of big-time college football (transfer portals, NIL, etc.). But still, 4-8.

This is a magazine that once declared Mario Andretti SOTY after winning a single F1 Race. In a year in which Max Verstappen won 14 races and clinched the F1 title with 6 races yet to be run, we get Deion Sanders. Sports Illustrated has long made room for sports with a smaller footprint like tennis and golf. This year the Saudi government’s Public Investment Fund-backed LIV golf and its public face Greg Norman continued to upset the professional golf apple cart, while Novak Djokovic won 3 of the 4 tennis majors, coming within one set of the first calendar Grand Slam in modern tennis history; we get Deion Sanders. SI has arguably done as much as ABC Sports in building the Olympic Games into the behemoth they have become. In the year that multi-gold medal winning skier Micaela Shiffrin became the all-time leader in World Cup wins, we get Deion Sanders. Two-way sensation Shohei Ohtani is the unanimous winner of Major League Baseball and…

You get the picture.

Perhaps the saddest part of all of this is that we are talking about the tragedy of the travesty visited upon a cultural icon that once sat astride one of the intersections of American culture rather than yet another culture clashing cluster of a choice for its signature award. Where once I would have spent literally hours hashing out the editors’ decision to anoint Deion Sanders at SOTY in 2023, now we dissect the meaning of the cryptic droppings from the financial toilet bowl that owns SI. There really is a conversation to be had just about Deion Sanders for goodness sake. Lost in all of the gold chains and golden mirrored sunglasses is the fact that once upon a time he was a legit candidate for SOTY when he was an active professional athlete in both the NFL and MLB.

It’s a shame. All of it. The long, slow, painful decline of this once great publication, from weekly must-read to monthly curio, and now oblivion. We should have gnashing of teeth, beating of breasts and wailing. Tears should be shed by the proverbial Gatorade bucketful. Like the famous poem about an athlete dying young we should be imploring someone, anyone, to rage against the dying of SI’s light.

For all that is so very wrong, we should all plead for someone to keep the last Sportsperson of the Year from being a college football coach with a losing record.

I’ll see you next week…

Longer or Better? Sunday musings…1/14/24

1 Climate. 5 degrees Fahrenheit this AM in Cleveburg. Cities across the country are sending support people onto the streets seeking the undomiciled. This is your annual missive from my keyboard that it is COLD that kills.

2 Magic. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” –Arthur C. Clarke

Another day, another deluge of articles on AI in the newspapers. So advanced it seems like magic, eh? Still, one doesn’t need to invoke an all-powerful new entity with the potential to end life as we know it to be blown away by technology.

Heck, it’s still a bit magical every time I pull a hot bowl of formerly cold soup out of the microwave.

3 Chronicles. Not gonna lie, I kinda miss my CrossFit community. Especially during January, the month where I would post an explanation of each day’s WOD for the inevitable questions that would come up when CrossFit.com was inundated with New Year’s Resolutionaries. It was fun, and I felt useful.

More than that, though, was the sense of being part of a tribe, one with shared values and shared goals. At least in the earlier, less commercial days of the movement. The FRAT, Usual Suspects, and various other groups on the Main Page and Message Board became my gym mates, and several are still close friends.

Anything that lasts changes. Still, on Sundays, especially in January, I miss the CrossFit that was.

4 Longevity. Welp, I’ve finally gotten bummed enough about my love handles that I have made a major change in how I eat. 3 weeks ago I stopped eating breakfast and began doing time-regulated eating. Also known as intermittent fasting, I am now eating between the hours of 12:00 noon and 8:00 PM. Most days, of course, my last PM nutrition occurs earlier, but the no breakfast thing is my first significant, meaningful change since I embarked on many years of Zoning in January 2006.

Why? Why now? Not gonna lie, vanity is a big factor. My mid-life CrossFit bod, while not in any way impressive or noteworthy, was nonetheless not noteworthy for looking like a guy in mid-life. Plus, all of my clothes were the same size as they’d been for decades, and they all still fit. Since the 6 or 7 months prior to my first hip surgery in 2019 my ability to stick with any exercise program, never mind my preferred CrossFitty program, has been severely curtailed. To be sure it is my publicly stated intention to get back into a physical routine, but even with that, my apparently plummeting basal metabolism demands some changes in what passes through my pie-hole and when.

Why longevity as the marker for #3? 2022 was the year of my second hip surgery, and my “deep dive” topic while I was laid up was the science of longevity. While there is a ton of really cool stuff to learn and to know, every single author and expert I’ve listened to or read before or since begins their thesis with some sort of review of the effects of caloric restriction on lifespan. Depending on the severity of the restriction most research predicts anywhere between 10 (reasonable) and 20% (unlikely) longer life simply from caloric restriction. What is fascinating is that time-restricted eating produces an increased lifespan independent of any caloric restriction that might arise from that strategy.

So count me among the IF adherents. My weight is less a target than inches, not unlike my CF goals back in the day.

5 Mind. As in trying not to lose one’s mind. If one is going to make an effort to live longer, one should make an effort to be aware of what’s going on while you’re still around.

I had a brief, heartbreaking interaction with a friend who was in the office for a visit. They needed a very minor (to me) procedure to prevent a potentially cataclysmic problem that could occur. Diagnosing, discussing, and doing the treatment is literally a daily occurrence in our office. Once identified we very matter-of-factly move on to a procedure with >95% success preventing the cataclysm. The procedure itself is a nothingburger experience; thinking about it is 1000X worse than having it done. Most folks arrive for their post-procedure visit relaxed and ready to move on.

Not my friend, though. They were teary eyed from the get-go that next day, something we almost never see. Although younger than I, needing this procedure made them feel old. Made them terribly worried about getting older. When I noted how different their reaction was and asked them why they thought it might be, they told me about their mother. Once a strong, independent, vibrant woman, their mom had been laid low by dementia so severe that she no longer recognized her children. Everything about this terrifies my friend. Was this to be their fate? Despite everything they have done to remain healthy, is their destiny to outlive their consciousness?

It was truly heartbreaking to listen and to see how visceral their fear is.

Along with my deep dive into longevity there was no way to avoid the parallel discourse on brain health and the pursuit of a strategy to “bomb proof” your brain against dementia. This is an impossible task, of course, since at least part of the risk for dementia of all types is genetic. A tiny time bomb hidden in our genome that increases one’s risk for one or another of the various and sundry dementias. I promised my friend that I would share some resources with them over time, the books and blogs, podcasts and other productions I’d been looking at to help me understand both my risks and what types of risk mitigation I might engage to erect some walls to contain my own risk. In addition I thought I’d pretend that I was chatting with them, here, and share some of what I’ve discovered every now and again in “musings…”

Along with time-regulated eating the other nutritional change that I am going to try very hard to incorporate is a much stricter approach to alcohol in my diet. Now, anyone who has read any of my drivel over the years including my self-declared epic adventures “Drinking with John Starr” is aware that a carefully crafted cocktail or consciously curated cuvee are simple joys that bring me happiness. I adore everything about the process of drinking a cocktail or glass of wine. The research, repartee with fellow travelers, resource gathering and final rendering of the recipe into being. I love all of that.

The alcohol part? Like most folks I am deeply conflicted about the alcohol and its effects. Regardless of what it may be on any given night the first glass doesn’t contain enough alcohol to really move my needle up or down; it’s simply a part of the potion, if you will. No, it’s the subsequent ones where the alcohol is an issue, and to be honest, not a part of the experience I enjoy. Everything gets kinda duller, at least for me. On top of that there would be the worthless calories which we all know are gonna be deposited directly on top of those love handles I so despise.

But it’s the longevity, and more than that the task of bullet-proofing your brain so that you are present to enjoy your longevity that is the issue. All of the best research of the last 10 years comes to pretty much the same conclusion: the safest amount of alcohol is zero. What of the prior studies and the findings that a “modest” amount of alcohol led to greater longevity than both drinking to excess and not drinking at all? Honestly, I don’t know what to think about that. Each one of us probably has some sort of internal gauge we can’t see. Maybe a little is OK for a lot of folks. I kinda think so, or maybe just hope so. But if your main concern is to do everything you can possibly do to prevent the onset of dementia, like my friend, dramatically reducing your alcohol intake or forswearing it altogether is one obvious place to start.

For every Winston Churchill (Champagne at lunch, wine with dinner, whiskey or brandy at bedtime), arguably still as sharp as a tack at life’s end, there are probably 1000 Foster Grants stumbling through the endgame.

Over the next few weeks I will carry on this “conversation” with my friend here on “musings…”. I’ll try to touch on some of the other important things I’ve learned that any of us can do like get better quality sleep and enough of it, foster a healthy relationship with exercise, and think about the newest frontier, our microbiome. It turns out that I am fairly decent at taking huge gobs in information at distilling them down into digestible nuggets. Kinda like I used to do for the fitness newbies each January over on CrossFit.com.

I’d sure like my friend to rest easier.

I’ll see you next week…

When I’m 64: Sunday musings…1/7/2024

Well, that happened. Just like that I woke up and became part of a Beatles song. You know the one. Funny, I actually woke up with it playing in my head:

Will you still need me/will you still feed me/when I’m 64?

It’s a silly little song, really. A young man is playfully asking his mate if she will be around when he is old and “wasting away”. When you think about it, when John and Paul wrote it around, what, 1966, they were in their mid-20’s. 64 must have looked like 104 to them in the days when men had a life expectancy of around 68 and a strong majority of the men they’d grown up around had been laborers, worn away to the bone by their jobs. It’s a funny number even now, 64, at least in the U.S., the age just before one is eligible to join the Medicare crowd. Otherwise, 64 might as well be 34 or 84: nothing much going on from a milestone standpoint.

With a birthday that falls within the Christmas/New Year’s season (today is the Feast of the Epiphany, the real 12th day of Christmas) one can’t help but ascribe a bit more significance to a birthday. Especially the New Year’s thing, right? Looking back and taking stock. Assessing the present, checking your own pulse, going through your pre-launch sequence as you prepare to lift-off for another orbit around the sun for you and everyone else on the Roman calendar. Whether you are a “Comma Guy” or a “full-stop, period on 12/31” kinda gal, the temptation to fold your birthday into the “new beginning” is a bit stronger for those of us who have holiday-adjacent days.

How about that song? Any insights? A bit of wisdom? I mean, the Beatles were kinda deep, especially Paul and John at the peak of their song smithing. It’s really pretty much about those special relationships, central relationships with the ones you love, right? Especially, if you are really lucky, that one most special person. All of the things that you will need to be happy and healthy when you are older. Like 64. Will you still need me? We all thrive when we have purpose. The singer is not so much describing how he might be useful as much as asking if it will ok if he is there to be of use. Will you still feed me? Will you be the one or ones who are there when I am the one in need? It’s scary to be getting older baseline; thinking about getting older without someone or someones who will be there when you need them is downright terrifying.

As young men John Lennon and Paul McCartney looked into the future and saw 64 as the definition of old. I sure don’t feel that way today. At least not about the number anyway. 64 is a made up milestone, conjured into existence by two young Liverpudlians wise beyond their years, yet incapable of looking too very far beyond them. I awakened today at Mile Marker 64 and took a long, slow look around at where I am today and realized, again, that the only “new beginning” I need is another sunrise. Filled with purpose, surrounded by people who need me. Fed in every way possible by those who love me. What I feel is gratitude for the wonderful gift of their simple being, here, today, “when I’m 64”.

And if I am very lucky they will all remain “mine, forever more.”

I’ll see you next week…

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