Some people look and feel younger than their age. I am not one of them. Most people who meet me think I’m nearly forty years old. Fortunately, I’ve been told I looked forty since I was a college freshman, and in recent years, people have told me I look exactly the same as I did as much as seven years ago. Perhaps my age will catch up to my appearance in ten years. But in high school, years before I was fat, the cool kids would call me ‘grandpa’ when they wanted to act like pricks. The truth is that I’ve been told I look and act much older than my age since I was eight years old. But what’s far worse is that I’ve always felt older than my age – sometimes much older.
I won’t pretend to know what it is in my physiognomy that’s made me feel well over the hill. But the accelerated physiological processes of my body began long before I developed, or kicked, any habits that were particularly unhealthy. In my mind, I can’t escape the fear that the acceleration in ageing began because of the strain of those years when my learning disabilities were at their most severe. Perhaps it was simply a biological response to stress, perhaps it was a medication I took, or perhaps it’s as genetically embedded as the learning disabilities themselves – and perhaps the two are inextricably linked. But whatever the reason, my physical well being has always felt a little too crappy for my age. Even when I was in shape by any standard, I would sweat with a raised pulse at the slightest provocation; I had facial tics galore, pain all around my knees, and occasional heartburn bordering on the severe for an adult in late middle age.
My parents tell me the problem is pure genes and therefore there’s nothing to worry about. My grandparents on my father’s side lived to be nearly ninety, and with a battery of long-term health problems that would kill the constitution of healthier people than they. I certainly hope they’re right.
I marvel at people who look young for their age. I can never help wondering what it is they have that I lack which keeps them young. I have no doubt that physical fitness and diet plays their important roles, but what drives them to the necessary fortitude to sustain a healthy lifestyle? There must be an excitement in living, a permanent state of stimulation and excitement which their faculties possess, a stimulation which my faculties don’t. I’m a bookish guy, and yet the intellectual and emotional stimulation I get from the humanities has never translated into a particular love of any physical activity except for playing music – an activity that’s left me with a hilariously bad back.
Forget anything emotional, I live every day of my life in various states of physical discomfort that would probably impress most people twice my age. I don’t doubt much of it is self-generated, but surely nobody can have damaged themselves this much while still having done everything I have to try to counteract it. I’m always intermittently on diets, exercise regimens, . They never seem to work, and I always seem to give up in frustration after a month, only to find myself trying a new diet/regimen a few weeks later. And yet the craving for food never stops, nor does the physical pain, nor does the fatigue.
Did I become a bookworm because of my physical shape, or did I lose my physical shape because of being a bookworm? As a child and adolescent, I was short, socially awkward, a terrible student, and something of a loose cannon. Everybody seemed to agree that I exhibited a weird sort of brilliance, but I had no more hope at that age of finding a way to fulfill my potential than the proverbial square peg could hope to fit in the round hole. I had to retreat as far into myself as a child could possibly go in order to find the meaning to life I desperately needed. I derived little pleasure from most social interaction, and still less from school. But as I matured into an adult, something about me changed definitively. I found myself feeling little better physically, yet I found myself a better student as the material I was assigned got more challenging; my former inability to make myself understood by others made me something of a self-deprecating ‘oversharer’, and therefore perhaps a person who makes friends perhaps all too easily, my anger was turned into humor and a wit that most people I know would agree can be rather lethal; I gained 80 pounds between 2000 and 2005, but I couldn’t deny that I felt better and more emotionally whole as a fat man than I ever did as a thin kid. None of the problems of my unfortunate youth disappeared, but they were counterbalanced by a whole new set of skills that grew from the very problems I’d curse every day of my life. What I formerly viewed as my weaknesses began to display their advantages, and I was no longer a freak who longed to be anyone but myself.
I was physically debilitated, but the physical pain which inevitably accompanied my violin playing and conducting made the experience of it that much more intense. The shell of my morose solitude was so hard that it hardened into a kind of performance art for parties, in which I projected an almost cartoonish public image that allowed me to be the most boisterous person in the room. I remain an inconsistent student on my best classroom days, but I compensated for it by the sort of constant reading that only a person who worries he’s an idiot would ever countenance.
Every heel has its Achilles, and it is we, nature’s stepchildren, who are tasked with the burden of finding new ways to mutate the human race so that it may accommodate us. No person who finds the world too pleasant to change will ever find it for us, and if we do not demand a path that includes us, the outcasts among us will die unacknowledged, unfulfilled, and unloved.
But let’s suppose that the circumstances of humanity were to mutate overnight. Let’s just presuppose that the world were subject to a nuclear exchange, or a chain of tsunami, or a colliding asteroid, or the world economy went into superdepression, or a third world war broke out, or half the world population turned into zombies, the entire framework for what constitutes fitness would be stood on its head. Evolution would no longer be survival of the fittest, because who could know what is fit in this new world order? However, it’s almost guaranteed that by the standards of the previous era, the people best disposed towards survival are people who’d be considered ‘unfit’ by today’s standards. To navigate an era of disaster requires a completely different skill set, and no one will know precisely which skill set is required until the disaster’s nature presents itself. It is almost as though evolution is a process of ‘survival of the unfittest’: not a process by which the fittest survive but a process by which some of the unfit become the new fit while those who were once thought fit die out. Surely, many of the previous unfit will die with them, but we should pity those who are fit by current standards, they operate at the peak performance their lives will ever attain, and therefore have nothing worth looking forward to. It is only the unfit, the debilitated, the unhappy, whose hopes for a better life may yet come true.
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