Indeed so. These years are difficult to manage and offer little reward for our efforts. Confronted with a pandemic, an irrational president, a changing work environment and a period of unusually intense generational shift, such broad confrontational experience makes us experts.

Everyone probably rehearses what to say or not if anything about politics, religion, the old days or the in-laws pops up during the holiday gathering. As an aid, mariner provides a quote about arguing. Credited to Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University, it’s an analogy about the effects of arguing by using a rider on an elephant:

“Think of the rider as your rational mind and the elephant as everything else about you, the automatic processes, the 99 percent of what’s going on in your mind that you’re not aware of.”

Most of us spend our time trying to reach the rider. This is us forwarding fact-checks, arguing about the integrity of Dominion voting machines, or debating the evidence in the Rittenhouse trial. But Haidt notes, “if the elephant doesn’t want to move, then no rider in the world can force him into motion. The elephant simply overpowers the rider.”

So don’t waste time arguing. The elephant isn’t going to move. Further, don’t take it personally – the elephant doesn’t.

Tomorrow is a day of consuming, not only of great cuisine but of the joy of family, friends and the pleasure of being in a caring environment.

Make it last; the world still will be there on Monday.

Ancient Mariner

Mariner’s wife has traveled west to visit our children and grandchildren. Mariner is left in a quiet home. Cold weather has shut down outside activity. Still, there are chores to be done, Amaryllis to be forced and some apples to process. Later there will be repair to outside furniture and garden trellises.

But Thanksgiving approaches, spirits will be lifted as we celebrate the humanness within us via our families and friends. Then there’s Christmas and New Year. It truly is a time to huddle and martial our awareness to important spiritual strengths and to restore common civility – feelings that have been bruised by our society.

There are certain physical tasks that we must perform to assure wellness in a time when wellness is hard to come by. Each of us must physically in person perform a charitable act, not just one but as many as we can muster. There is a vast number of poor and destitute who are forgotten by government, by the income-secure among us and by those of us claiming a successful life. Many thousands of US citizens don’t know where the next meal will occur and many of those have dependent children. Do some research to help target your affirmation as a civil human being. Meet their need. Be the Good Samaritan.

In these days of turmoil across all facets of our society, it is important to strengthen our sense of self. We must organize our positive civil abilities to be centered and strong as we struggle with an unstable society. Nothing speaks to personal confidence and security more than sharing.

Ancient Mariner

Mariner is growing older – well, a lot of growing older already has occurred but still, he is growing yet even older than that. Like many elders, he has aches and pains that lead him to a rehab center where he is led through a series of namby-pamby stretching exercises. Mariner agrees that the stretching drills do relax the skeleton’s pressure points and ease pain a bit  but when one is out in the garden and has one foot under an azalea bush and the other foot is in midair and must execute a one-legged bunny hop to land outside the garden, the little stretching drills do not help.

The reality is that, because humans have invented things like chairs, tables, chainsaws and elevators, we don’t use the muscles as they were intended. You know the trope: use it or lose it. As we age, stretching is important but it doesn’t help keep a body that is serviceable for daily life. If one is to be spiritually alert, strong and have a good feeling about one’s self, one must have muscle that works in the real world. So mariner proposes a muscle-based exercise rather than a joint-stretching one. The legal caveat: these exercises may not be helpful when recovering from injuries or operations.

If the reader has ever found themselves on the floor and literally can’t get up, e.g., mounting a lawnmower deck under the tractor or reaching the baby’s pacifier under the sofa or are prone to losing balance whenever the legs are off center, the following exercises performed every other morning may help:

1. Squat thrust – Keeping your body over your knees, squat as close to the ground as possible. Place your hands on the floor and using them for balance, kick your legs back until they are straight behind you and your toes land on the floor. Once landed, quickly return to the original squat position and without hesitating kick the legs back again two more times. Then stand up, take a breath and repeat. Do this repetition five times as a beginner and work up to ten easily performed. In all exercises do not stop breathing and exhale at the point of maximum exertion. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4511oTkNls
2. Weight-assisted squat – Find an object that you can hold easily and weighs five to ten pounds. Stand with legs ready to squat and hold the object at arm’s length in front of you. Squat as deeply as you can and immediately return to an upright position. Do ten squats at a slow pace. For a sample squat without the weight see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aclHkVaku9U
3. Pushups – Compulsive jocks may do a full pushup hands to toes but mariner recommends using the milder version, hands to knees because many individuals have injuries and arthritis that may be aggravated. Lying flat on the floor, use your arms to lift the body off the floor so that only the hands and knees remain in contact with the floor. Lift until the arms are straight and keep the body straight throughout the lift. Work your way up to ten; do more to show off in front of friends. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyCG_5l3XLk

For upper back and posture issues, e.g., peeling potatoes without pain and remaining a fully erect hominid, here are a few exercises to help:

1. Middle back. Have at hand a pair of small hand weights weighing two to five pounds each. Lay flat on your stomach with body straight to the feet. Stretch your arms out so you look like an airplane. Slowly lift the weights as high as possible without bending at the elbows, hold for two seconds then slowly drop back to the floor. Start with five repetitions but quickly build up to ten repetitions.
2. Back and Shoulders. Find something that is easy to hold onto that can hang from your hands and down your back; a hand weight weighing ten to fifteen pounds would be perfect. Grasp the weight overhead and let it pull your arms down from over your head, letting the weight hang down your back. Very slowly lift the weight until your arms are straight above you. Very slowly allow the weight to fall down the back. Slow is better in this exercise. Do ten times; do more if you don’t feel satisfactory stretching of the upper back and arms.
3. Shoe tie. This is all about balance. Put on a pair of string tie shoes; tennis shoes would be perfect. To tie the shoe, stand on the opposite leg fully straightened. Raise the target shoe to knee level but do not rest it on the other leg. Keeping the foot at knee level, tie the shoe. Repeat for the other shoe.

General posture is important and requires similar muscle-building exercises. These exercises are more difficult only because it requires constant attention to accomplish them:

1. Easiest of these exercises is to walk at a comfortable pace for thirty minutes without stopping. Walk outside, not inside or on a treadmill. Walk every day; this exercise has meditative aspects to it. Distance is not the issue; mariner’s wife walks twice as fast as mariner. Walking together for exercise possibly may not be a shared experience.
2. This is the most difficult exercise because you must do it constantly while awake for the entire day. Pretend there is an attached string at the center of the top of your head. Pretend that it kept in tension to hold your head as high as you can while keeping the chin in. Maybe God is pulling it or four eagles or an F-15.
3. The strut. At the same time, push your chest out in front of your shoulders – all day whether sitting, standing, walking, etc.

You will find these posture exercises to be the most difficult because you must train your brain to pay attention constantly. It is important, however, because posture is what keeps the skeletal frame in place and enables muscle-centric health.

Mariner finds that the quads are the most diminished and need exercise if one is to be active or keep balance. The rewards are subtle but guarantee an enjoyable life in distant years. If the reader can sustain the effort, the posture exercises alone can improve one’s general well being.

Ancient Mariner

Among many words that describe the lifestyle of older folks, mariner feels the word ‘gumption’ is a major descriptor. Researching the usage of gumption suggests that the general meaning of the word is to have ambition, motivation or, colloquially, ‘get-up-and-go’. But being old can’t be captured by one behavior; it takes a lot to be old – or conversely it takes losing a lot to be old.

Gumption has a lot to do with energy. As folks grow older, their power supply becomes worn and becomes harder to generate. Using an old automobile as an analogy, the engine’s piston rings aren’t as tight as they used to be; it takes more gas, oil and electric current to create the same horsepower; the carburetor, sparkplugs, distributor and air filter aren’t as finely tuned. Translate the analogy to a human being and the parts become internal organs, angina, aneurysm, lost muscle and less resiliency.

Gumption is more complex than just having energy. Older folks don’t have much to motivate them. Society leaves them behind; their careers are over, family members have passed on, all leaving little social purpose and little need to ‘get up and go’. There is no need other than a compulsive disorder to jump out of bed at 6 AM before the alarm clock has finished its chime. As the trite phrase says, “use it or lose it”. Motivation can wane just as muscles do.

The brain has a large influence on gumption. Using the automobile analogy again, brains are like tires: the tread wears out. Without tires the automobile may have a brand new engine and still not be able to function. The brain isn’t called the brain for nothing – it controls every aspect of a person’s physiology from the shape of toenails to the ability to think. Unfortunately, such a complex organ is easily affected by wear and tear.

Most notable about brain dysfunction are concentration and short term memory. It is hard to have gumption if a person is easily distracted. It is hard to perform tasks if they can’t be remembered long enough to be completed.

The advice to oldsters is to have gumption to experience life in whatever intellectual or physical way that sustains a relationship with life in general.

The advice to youngsters is to have respect for folks who can live day after day without fancy mental tools, any power tools or any reason to have tools but they continue performing as a human being. That requires its own definition of gumption.

Ancient Mariner