It’s January 1 and the deluge has descended on the hilltop. We have a flat roof, so when it rains hard we really hear and feel it and it certainly has been raging hard this morning. There is a sort of end-of-the-world element to this morning’s rain since we cannot see even to the edges of our property with the heavy fog that is enveloping us. Last night at a simple and early gathering at our neighbor’s house, we all said we wanted to start the new year off with a nice neighborhood walk together (they have all always walked the hood daily and I am the newcomer to the sport), but we all suspected that the weather would get in the way and that it has. If we had hurricanes around here, I would say we are in the midst of a hurricane. It’s raining that hard. Naturally, you cannot sit around on a New Years Day, especially if you are not into NFL football, which we are not, without pondering what has gone on in 2025 and what might go on in 2026. It feels very different this year for a number of reasons for us.
To begin with, as evidenced by the fact that I am wondering right now about when I will go out to my garage gym to do my 30 minutes of treadmill walking and my hour of weights and exercises. That alone is a big change and I must say, one that is long overdue. I cannot explain why I haven’t gotten more serious about my fitness before this, but I just haven’t for any sustained period of time. I have certainly been more fit at times than I was before I began this, but that’s part of my problem. My constitution, through no fault of my own, is genetically pretty good. 23&Me declared me several years ago to have the genetic profile of a performance athlete, which is pretty funny, given my lifelong bulk. People have commented my whole life that I either move better on the squash court or ski slope than they had imagined or that very little seemed to stop my physically from doing almost everything others did. That was never totally true, but it sounded good and made me feel less out of place in the world, so I went with the notion. I can say without hesitation that on many trips we have taken in the last fifteen years, if there was a long or strenuous walk or activity to be had, I would either avoid it or steel my resolve to do it and limp through as best I could. I walked into and all the way through Petra, which was an accomplishment. I walked up the lofty temple steps in Kuala Lumpur and around Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom for a day in Siem Reap. But I never walked up the hill to the Delphic Oracle or everywhere I could have in Troy, Ephesus or Cappadocia in Turkey. Those days are hopefully over and I now find myself planning my trips so that I can do more rather than less walking. All of this newfound energy is a result of dropping weight, eating better and working out regularly. There is no real end objective to this all other than feeling better and feeling better about myself. I do not want to live forever and I am not trying to run any marathons, I just want not to be that guy on the bench any more than I have to be.
We have used the turn of the new year to get at our travel planning for the upcoming year. We’ve now gotten a handle on three or four small trips that we have decided to book for the near term. This morning, Kim and I decided to fill in an otherwise empty month of March with a visit to Florida. Neither of us are big fans of the Sunshine state, but we do have lots of people there to visit and we feel it is rude to let politics get in the way of that, so we made up our own excuse to plan a mini-trip there in early March. Neither of us has been all the way down the Keys to Key West, so we decided to fix that gap and fly in there for a few nights. Kim has a cabaret friend who lives there among the Palmettos, so we can have at least one collegial lunch while we remind ourselves for a day why the tropics are not for us. We will then drive up the keys, which is said to be the best part of a visit to that area. We will skirt by the busy Miami/Dade area and head up to Stuart where lots of our old AFMC motorcycling crowd spends their winters. We have many offers to stay over with friends in the area and will camp at Frank & Barbara’s condo (they have a growing array that they own and rent out or keep for visiting firemen like us). Barbara’s Martha Stewart instincts assure a comfortable stay while we are there. The really big test of this trip is in the air travel. When i went to book, I found that first class seats to go to Florida during that high-season were $7k for the two of us (SAN – Key West, PBI – SAN). By contrast, Comfort Economy was $1.5k. I usually would not consider a cross-country trip on anything other than first class, but for some reason, the grin-and-bear-it nature of a trip to Florida seemed like the right time to try out whether my reduced girth would make such a trip doable. I will be next to Kim the whole way and she is OK with me using some of her seat with us pinched together. So this will be a big test of the next improved and smaller version of Rich. My weight loss projections have me at 275-280 by then, so we’’ll see how that works out. Strangely enough, I think I’m better at gutting through a tight travel squeeze than most since I am used to being crammed into spaces and making do. I actually find, I am more resilient in that regard than many who are simply unused to any discomfort. Big people like me take discomfort for granted.
All this travel and health planning is my best way to avoid thinking about the realities of life and the world we live in. I read this morning in the Times that Americans are more cynical than ever. Few of us feel confident or good about the future. That is simply not a good sate of mind and it very much disagrees with my life philosophy. But I hat being accused of being a Pollyanna, so rather than smiling and pretending that everything will be all right, don’t worry be happy or whatever mantra helps one avoid the realities of life, I am simply ignoring the rain and deluge and focusing on what I can control. I can control what I eat. I can control how much I exercise and my fitness level (to an extent). I can control my travel plans and how I choose to spend my time in retirement. And I can thereby effectively control my state of mind. Is it avoidance? I don’t think so. I am never far away from reality and while I consume less MS Now (MSNBC) than I used to, I still read HCR, NYT, WAPO, FT, Economist and other news feeds all day every day. I know what’s what, I just choose to focus on the good things I can successfully control. Every self-healing book ever written suggests an approach similar to that whether to combat an addiction or a means to pull oneself up out of depression. I am fortunate not to suffer from either of those two extremes, but I still need some distraction to keep my spirits at their best. That is what exercise, diet and travel planning are doing for me these days and I deliberately ignore the deluge.