A Journey

As I was trudging up the steps to Starbucks this morning, a painful, meandering, potentially dangerous exercise, and a rather slow one too, my thoughts went back to olden days when I would walk miles to a lake for a day of fishing, or climb to the 7200 foot level of a towering hill just to see what I could see, and it did not seem a miraculous feat then, or an unusual one. It was normal, hardly worth thinking about in and of itself. What bliss it seems now to imagine trotting up these steps, for instance, and not feeling like I'm going to collapse at the top. How completely outside the realm of the wildest imagination it would have been back then in those olden days to picture myself lightheaded and out of breath at the top of these ten stairs, having to stop and rest my legs before moving on the remaining dozen yards or so to the doorway. I suppose that we all enjoy our youth and our health, but we do not fully know why. How could we? You have to be there, unfortunately. And once you're there, there's no going back. Youth, as the old saying goes, is wasted on the young. I don't know whether that is true. But I do know that it is fully appreciated only in hindsight.