A Late-Life Crisis

Can you have a late-life crisis?

I’ve done the ‘middle life crisis’ thingy – and several times at that – so I guess it’s time to pull a different coloured rabbit out of the hat…

So here we, on a sultry summer’s day on the eve of the Sad Tokyo Olympics with a blossoming late-life crisis to contend with. It didn’t begin all at once as an existential hole; it began lightly…

My knee swelled up. 

I told my running mate Malcolm Balk that maybe I have water-on-the-knee…

“That’s not good,” he declared.

I sorted it out in the end – calling on every Alexscovery skill I have. Finally, I determined - by the skilful aid of my Alexander and Physio consultant Petra Kani - that the slight bias I have to one side eventually precipitated a knee crisis resulting from running 5 kilometres every day on concrete for the last three years.

Oh yes. The running. 

That is part of my “motivate myself” program when I noticed that I did not care about things so much. Metabolic rate dropping, old boy? Try speeding it up.

Because I was losing my motivation and energy, which wasn’t good for business. It predates COVID-19 but then - that didn’t exactly smooth things over.

So far, I have:

- sore knee
- lack of motivation

If I stopped there, I could rationalise it all away. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work, because along with those things comes:

- tiring more easily after teaching (no more all-day sessions)
- hair growing slowly & thinning (but not falling out, thank God)
- swelling tummy that won’t be dieted away (always could before)
- reduced libido (but let’s not go there)
- in-grown toenail (ouch!)

Put them all together, and I came to an irretrievable conclusion – it’s biological. OLD.

Anyway, why should you care?

If you’re a younger thing, no reason. YET.

But for the Boomers – it’s time to think again about the meaning of conscious, constructive thinking. Walter Carrington once remarked to me years ago that he was often in the process of updating what his imagined Self could do in relation to the actual his Self. 

It’s part of your work-on-self.

Your self-image is often a misguided match from the reality of you. 

Just ask your mother.

Of course, FM was always going on about this:

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“All the darned fools in the world believe they are actually doing what they think they are doing.”

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One of my favourite FM Aphorisms. And I bet he said “damned” not “darned”, but we’ll never know. I heard he could be quite crass at times.

Anyway, regular readers know that I end every email with a pitch for you to buy something. 

I am working up to that, but you can see what’s on offer on this page.

https://bodychance.mykajabi.com/