a question, not of targets, but trajectories

It has been twenty days since I started on the "Paleo Diet", based on a random encounter with the book of the same name, and I am gratified at the results.

twenty pounds lost in twenty days. A good start. Nowhere near where I need to be, in the long run...but an excellent start. The positive feedback I am getting, in terms of actual results, is making it an easy diet to cling to, and the fact that I am not hungry, or even really tempted on any level, to "cheat" on this diet...well, that's just dandy.

Soon I will have lost enough to trust more my knees to a resumption of some serious roadwork (the phrase there holds me mindful of a stanza in my poem "Radiant Tigers" -

"roadwork with the soda jerk mixology of words
that effervesce with a laugh in the daft draught
of expressions caught caterwauling to glance
off the silvered glass mirrors of albedo'd radiance.")

Time to get serious. My daughter pointed out she is now a quarter of a century old. I riposte that I am half a century old. Eventually I will achieve and pass my prime and begin the decline inevitable in all things that survive their apogee. What a re-entry burn of a life that last portion shall be...but I am not content to slow and start calculating my retirement plan, yet.

Truth is, I don't believe in retirement. Oh, I believe it exists, like syphilis and rusty nails and lying suitors, I just don't want any of those in my life. Every day I make minute adjustments in my thinking, preparing me for an acceleration that I know I have already begun, but want to make the best of. I have accomplished more in the second 25 years of my life than I did in the first in almost any measure of value. The next twenty five? I'm not setting specific goals, as if I had set goals twenty five years ago, ambitious goals, and marched to them, I would not be halfway to where I am today.

So this is to be a question, not of targets, but trajectories. And how much thrust the engines I have fashioned from my heart and soul and mind are capable of. I am curious, furiously curious, to find out, whether I ride into the darkness alone, or find light to fuel a ten-fold increase in the magnitude of my joy and that of those around me.

What an exciting time in my life this is, a life of so many possibilities, of so much good fortune, of so much gratitude. To God and to those mortals who have paved my way, so far, with their hopes, needs, fears, hearts, beliefs, desires, evils, virtues and passions.

I hope, I pray, my daughter has better times than I, makes sounder judgements, trusts better people. But I do not regret my life and the honest resonances of it (I have no control over slanders, I can only affect who I am).