1,000 miles

The 1993 film "Benny and Joon" featured the song "I'm Gonna Be (500 miles).  Occasionally, I'll be riding my bike and the chorus repeats itself over and over in my brain:


              But I would walk 500 miles
              And I would walk 500 more
              Just to be the man who walks a thousand miles
              To fall down at your door

Well this week, your Mom hit that 1,000 mile mark.  On Thursday, she broke the 1,000-mile bike barrier and upped her annual total to 1,019.87[today it reached 1,035.02] NOT including the several hundred miles she accumulated before she started using the Forerunner.


WELL DONE, MARIE!

Forever Young

You may find this odd, but here it is.  Yesterday morning in the darkness of the church, I had this calm, but very clear vision/sensation/feeling -- and I even mentioned it to Mom in the evening -- that I was going to live to be a healthy and productive 100-years old.  Maybe it's because the narrator of my new manuscript is 100.  Regardless, when I got up this morning, Brad sent me an email with a quote from the book he's currently reading.

"...this 95 year old man came hiking twenty five miles over the mountain. Know why he could do it? Because no one ever told him he couldn't. No one ever told him he oughta be off dying somewhere in an old age home."

from Born to Run by Christopher McDougall

Prayer for the Grace to Age Well

We are all engaged in the process of aging regardless of the count of our years.  This afternoon, I came across this wonderful prayer by Jesuit priest and French Philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.  If memory serves me, the good father also made the well known statement, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.  We are spiritual beings having a human experience."  I want to share with you his "Prayer for the Grace to Age Well."  As Sister Joan Chittister wisely says, you have to begin to prepare now how you want to be when you are 80.

Prayer for the Grace to Age Well

"When the signs of age begin to make my body
(and still more when they touch my mind);

"when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off
strikes from without or is born within me;

"when the painful moment comes
in which I suddenly awaken
to the fact that I am ill or growing old;

"and above all at the last moment
when I feel I am losing hold of myself
and am absolutely passive within the hands
of the great unknown forces that have formed me;

"in all those dark moments, O God,
grant that I may understand that it is you
(provided only my faith is strong enough)
who are painfully parting the fibres of my being
in order to penetrate to the very marrow
of my substance and bear me away within myself."

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S..J. (1881-1955)