One morning this week, I sat in a doctor’s office and, at the end of the consult, we shared scoliosis surgery stories. Mine, a half-century ago, that decimated my senior year, with weeks of traction, months of being completely bedridden, and more than half a year spent in a full body cast; hers, when she was barely a teenager with mere weeks of recovery time. Significant strides have been made in the treatment of curvature of the spine. Thank goodness.
The Harrington rod that fused my spine, corrected part of the curve, and prevented further progression, introduced limitations into my life. There are some things I’m simply unable to do; my body is still crooked and not pain-free. My experience made me extra diligent when my daughter began showing signs of scoliosis, and, because it was caught early, her treatment was far less drastic and didn’t require surgery.
Anyway, back to the doctor who’s fresh out of medical school. Almost every time I talk to a young person (and, being in my seventieth decade, to me they’re all young people), I feel optimistic. The news cycle would have me believe something else, but my heart knows that while, yes, horrible things are happening in the world, by far, there are many more beautiful things in life. To a large extent, we see and experience what we expect.
Yesterday afternoon, Gerry and I sat on the back deck in the only two chairs left there after readying the yard for winter, with our feet up, enjoying a warm 28C afternoon for probably the last time this year. I’ve said that before, and could be wrong, but I doubt it this time. Today, in a crazy turn of events, there’s a risk of snow in the forecast. If it manifests, it won’t amount to anything, and it certainly won’t stick. But still. 😳 (As I write this, it’s not yet dawn and there’s a deluge of rain coming down.)
Lately, we’ve been talking about the volume of change—especially in the past twenty years—and the world being left behind for our children and grandchildren. Let’s be real, there are concerns. But there are also advances being made, like what’s happened with the treatment of scoliosis, and I’m grateful for many of our modern conveniences that would have been unimaginable a generation ago to my parents (although my dad did have a hankering to own a robot one day—he would be blown away by our modern world.)
My husband’s stark predictions for the coming twenty years are not unrealistic, and make me uncomfortable the deeper we get into talking about it. I take it in measured doses. More important to me than “what if” and “maybe” is an intention to walk out the remainder of my days with wisdom and generosity toward those in my sphere of influence. The here. The now. And I hold firm in my belief that it’s a beautiful world and that we have more positive influence in our personal little corners than we sometimes realize.
(I’m not advocating paying no attention to current events. That’s foolish. OpenAI’s Sora 2 could easily keep me up at night if I let it. Oh, sure, it can do cool stuff. But, with it, we’ve officially entered the realm of “you can’t trust that anything you see anymore is true.” We’ve hovered on the brink of that for a while, but we’re there now. Be aware.)
Meanwhile, I spend a good chunk of my time in the company of words—reading or writing them. An early-in-life interest in poetry has rekindled itself into a comfortable inferno that warms and inspires me to write a bad poem every morning, invites me to collect words and phrases like pretty baubles, and lets my thoughts linger in revision mode the rest of the time. And there are still plenty of non-AI-generated books to keep me company when I’m not writing or going about my day-to-day life, which, increasingly, is offline.