Dear Reader, I think you’ll agree that generalities often border on platitude. Yet the fortuity of one’s day is largely unpredictable. This is particularly so when estimating one’s personal well-being as opposed to assessment of global patterns. My day today, for example, began uneventfully, one might reasonably say disappointingly. Noticeably the diminished strength of Tylenol Regular – as opposed to Tylenol Arthritis to which I formerly subscribed – was causing me ineludible annoyance. The drug wasn’t moderating the lingering arthritic pain in my abdomen (wherein reside my broken ribs).

Pain – so I am reminded with disturbing regularity – blurs everything. Pain is a remorseless and independent affliction, not easily accommodated or dissuaded. Notwithstanding the impediment, pain can be compromised. Being seated in the car exhausted the strained manipulation of my spine (which illustratively I had endured earlier when hobbling about to initiate my morning tricycle penance). Once restored to the tranquil leather seat of my EV, with the windows open, I was happily sailing along the county highways.

Indeed I am moved to a more poetic account of today’s venture.  It was a brilliant day! The sky was the masterful rendition of an artist’s canvass. The reduced Sunday traffic no doubt contributed to the deliverance. All characteristics of the drive were cooperating. I was neither tempted nor required to search for obstruction. Instead the facility of the vehicle and the desirability of the travel spoke to me without evasion or equivocation. I confess that automotive perfection is at times shadowed by over-indulgence. But today I was alive to its ingredients.

I attribute some – though not all – of today’s serenity to a good sleep last night and to a good breakfast this morning. These elemental stimuli cannot be ignored. But the undeniable replenishment I experienced today was too a product of my on-going analysis. In spite of all that is written concerning aging, I have yet to read anything which isn’t either obvious or useless. The talk should not be only about where in the world to travel; it should include the remedial confinement to home. The blunt reality of that conversation is that, after a certain age (and each of us feels that certainty), removing oneself from the immediacy of one’s territory is work. Work, like pain, survives independently; and, in the process it contaminates the whole. Sometimes for reasons impossible to delineate, the imposing perception is that travel suffers the debate, “Is that all there is?”  Similarly it must be admitted that, after an age, limitation is the key. Learning to live happily within those restrictions is the answer.