A Beginner's Guide to Falling Apart

(physically)

The lower-middle-aged + can do themselves a mischief in the most unremarkable of ways. Daily life is now a plodding assault course of potential mishaps. These feats of career-ending athleticism don’t appear at all risky, through a young man’s eyes. But, then again, a young man’s eyes can see. 

In your herky-jerky-thirties, that final stair step might become a monument to your ankle’s last stand. Something as harmless as a comedic double-take could leave you with acute whiplash. Young fogeys warm up for the warm-up of an introductory boxercise class - or reinjure an injury preventing an injury. 

Happy 30th Birthday,

Today is the day your body stops working for you and starts working against you.

Yours mockingly,

God x

In fact, thirty - hundred-somethings can pull a muscle without so much as moving one. Sitting is the new smoking, and sleeping is the new bull-riding. A toss or a turn can leave your shoulder fried like a cheap chicken wing. Half a night on an arched sofa bed warps a spine beyond repair. A slightly steeper pillow will see you rise with the lolling crick of a death-worn zombie.

There comes a time in a person’s life when they must accept their last sprint has been sprant. 

Even if outrunning a flesh-peckish skin-clad hammer-murderer, survival instinct would keep that stride at a three-quarter pace. Or else, those hammies will twang off the bone like guitar strings. Only saving the pursuer time on slaying and filleting, and flaying and slaaaaaaying.

For each twinge, the skeleton’s range of motion gives up a few crunching degrees. Use it or lose it, or use it and lose it. The choice is yours.

All the knocks and knobbles of a well-spent youth calcify around the joints. I went 9 rounds with a tree in Cardiff town centre - and lived to tell the tale - now I can’t open a jar of pickles. Not with one jot of pantry bravado.  

On the long and lurching road to falling apart, our tissues become unsprung one tendon at a time. For now, I’m still young enough that it’s funny when I fall - yet still old enough that I might stay down there a whiles. Bed in, feel the cool of the ground against my cheek, and come to terms with the fact that I’ll sustain this injury over a lifetime.

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