‘Make three wishes for yourself tonight at 10:22 p.m.,’ my mother told me on February 22, 2022.
‘Yeah, right,’ I said, briefly, to avoid a rational ‘superstitions, fairy tales, don’t go by everything on the net’ discussion.
‘I’ll make my own, all three wishes will be about health,’ she continued.
I was silent, at a loss for words. I couldn’t say anything else. There are times like this when you want to bend, you’re not in pain about something, but it’s hard to sit still in the face of other people’s pain.
When we don’t feel well, when we are suffering, then all our desires are channeled into the area of health.
But healthy people can have thousands of wishes of all kinds, all kinds of ideas, fantasies and hopes. When we are healthy, we dream of the moon and the stars. We often forget to take care of ourselves. We pull ourselves together, we sleep little, sometimes we work ourselves to death, we try to live each day as if there were no ‘tomorrow’, we burn ourselves out like a candle burning at two ends.
Why? Because we have the madness of youth, we have the energy and enthusiasm of beautiful fools who believe they can change the world. Sure, we change some things, some more, some less. How do we know that change starts with us? And even if someone tells us, who has ears to hear and listen to another elder?
Recent studies show that lifespans have increased for both women and men. There is talk of increasing retirement ages in a few years’ time. A book called Lifespan has come out that teaches us how to stop getting older, how to live longer.
Perhaps there is also a need for a book called Healthspan, teaching us how to live healthily, how to take care to eat a balanced diet, how to move to maintain our joints, our spine, how to eliminate frustration and avoid somatization, how to get rid of what is not good for us, how to receive and give love, how to get less angry, how to laugh more, how to rejoice and bring joy around us.
Lifespan makes sense then. But only after we take care of our health, just as we take care of our car, our house, our phone, the possessions we love. Let’s also like ourselves and treat ourselves with care.
Then, at 75, let’s make lots of wishes of all kinds.
