Not Running ; Not healthy; Not Happy

My last post has pleased me enormously for two reasons. The first was the discovery of the poet Donald Justice. - I liked his poem so much I then bought his Collected Works. The other reason was that it gave me a reason to think about my father. I wrote briefly about him but I though much more and it gave me pleasure to think of his essential decency - he was a good man.

However recently I have been dwelling rather mawkishly on a different part of my genetic heritage - my heart. My father was 64 when he died of heart failure, his brother was a bit older and my grandfather was 70. As I get older I become more aware of this brush of the icy fingers upon the shoulder. Mostly I get on with things. I run, cycle, do yoga, and am active. Physical fitness is an important part of my internal sense of identity but at the moment this sense of myself is swaying underneath me.

The problem I had with my heart rate in the Beachy Head Marathon has not gone away. Although I rested for a couple of weeks, when I ran again I still could not keep my heart rate down. So I went to the doctor only to find that my blood pressure was also crazy high.

I have since had various test on blood and urine (all of which have come back negative, apart from marginally high cholesterol) but during the last three weeks the lowest blood pressure reading has been 166 over 94. This is not good and I am now taking pills to reduce it and will be referred to a cardiologist.

Damn I feel low! Taking pills for blood pressure puts me with the unfit and frail - the half well (this is a bit irrational but is how I think at the moment). It opens up my fears and I really have not felt like going outside for a run. Damn!

I must give myself a good talking to, get outside, get out of the slough and remember this line from Theodore Roethke, "A lively understandable spirit Once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait."

There is no reason to be despairing

P.S.
Actually as one of the reasons for running is to feel part of the landscape the whole of the section of the poem is worth quoting:

It was beginning winter,
An in-between time,
The landscape still partly brown:
The bones of weeds kept swinging in the wind,
Above the blue snow.

It was beginning winter,
The light moved slowly over the frozen field,
Over the dry seed-crowns,
The beautiful surviving bones
Swinging in the wind.

Light traveled over the wide field;
Stayed.
The weeds stopped swinging.
The mind moved, not alone,
Through the clear air, in the silence.

Was it light?
Was it light within?
Was it light within light?
Stillness becoming alive,Yet still?

A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.

Men at Forty

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practises tying
His father's tie there in secret

And the face of the father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

I recently found this poem by Donald Justice. Although I am 16 years older than the specified age I can say it is still like that - only more so. You are no longer on the landing but a few more steps up.

Every time when I get up in the morning I look in the mirror and I see my fathers face. He was only eight years older than my current age when he died and my last memories of his face mean the similarity is quite close. Every time when I get up in the morning.

My father was an active man but he never allowed himself to spend that activity in pure recreation. He was always landscaping the garden or refurbishing the house - building and improving. That was until he retired when he felt he had the time to play golf as well.

Me I spend my activity in running or cycling, with no objective beyond the sensation of the moment. I look round at all the jobs that need doing and how I could have made the house better, if only I had been more like my dad. But that is not the way it is - I have made different choices.

I run and for me that gently puts a foot in one of those closing doors and keeps it ajar.