“Life is movement. The more life there is, the more flexibility there is. The more fluid you are, the more you are alive.”
-Arnaud Desjardins
If you don’t move in life, life will move you. This has been my experience although I don’t always like this reality. One thing I have learned about myself is that I don’t like to be disturbed. Most days I wish the world would just leave me alone. Rather than move in life, I prefer to hide from it or just observe it from a solitary hideaway. I don’t always want to be moving. If you don’t think that life moves you, how do you explain where you are now? I am not talking about the fact that you might be in the office today. How did you come to even work here? Did you consciously plan to work here or did you end up here without any purposeful intent to be here? I have lived in my hometown most of my life. It has changed dramatically in my lifetime. Sometimes I cannot remember how it used to look or when it changed into what is it today. In recent years the downtown landscape has changed dramatically. I have lost track of how many restaurants I used to frequent that no longer exist. The changes in landscape and buildings are very subtle and happened over time but often in ways most of us don’t notice on a day to day basis. Our lives do the same. For example, I am now 65 years old. How did that happen? I thought getting old would take much longer. Frequently as we age we constrict. The more constricted we become, the less fluid we are, and the less fluid we are, the less we are alive. I have been reading books about retirement and there is a common theme in all of them. The theme is that if you want to be happy in retirement you must keep moving. Stopping what you are doing now only to sit in your easy chair full time is an express ticket to death. If life is movement, movement is also life. Keep moving and keep living, regardless of your age. There are too many days where I feel like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz and I am searching for my oil can.