I will have the best legs in town around November this year! I’ll have the meanest, leanest ‘bod’ an older lady could wish for – but I will go completely unnoticed amongst the crowd! Why? And how can I be so assuredly vain?
Well, friends, it won’t be because I’m an older Aussie sheila although we DO suffer from invisibility as we age in this culture, don’t we? And it won’t be because what I wrote in the first par isn’t true – it will be true all right!
It’s just that there will be a whole cathedral full of spankingly fit people of all ages and I shall just have to mingle with the madding crowd. And I love it!
If I’m there in the cathedral in November then it will mean that I, a woman in her mid-fifties, have succeeded in walking one thousand kilometres from Sevilla to Santiago – on foot by myself. No mean feat!
This has been a dream of mine since I was about 15 in high school. Back then, friends heard from me that I wanted to walk from Toowoomba to Dalby or Warwick! Nothing ever happened about it – but it was almost a physical longing.
It stayed buried over the years and reading Robyn Davidson’s famous account of her own massive trek, Tracks, only reminded me of my own desire. But where she was brave and strong and fearless and courageous, all those sort of adjectives personified in her adventure. I was anxious, insecure, cowardly and caught up in whatever ‘angstified’ chapter of my life was playing out.
I had always been an anxious child. I was an anxious young woman, and I’m still anxious in my mid-50s. In fact, panic attacks have nestled in my hair over the last few years with increasing comfort.
But! Something in me has changed so that despite the panic and feelings of anxiety, I have finally taken the plunge, given myself a sabbatical of time – three-quarters of a year to prepare for and fulfil my dream and I’ve actually bought the damn plane ticket! So I have to go! (And lest you think I’m rich, the answer is no, I’m not rich – I was bullied at the beginning of the year, I have taken the rest of the year off to heal my own physician and, courtesy of reaching my Preservation Age, I am accessing some of my future money to live off and make my dream a reality.)
And I should also add, I’m no great physical specimen of fitness either! With the mid-50s also come the attendant aches, pains, arthritic joints that hate the rain, the back that cracks itself whenever it likes and so on. Crap ankles, idiot knees and nonsensical hips! But you already know all that.
So here I am in May, with my exercise regime – how do you walk 1000 kays? – a plane ticket and a growing sense of anticipation. Both excitement and terror are building – I am a coward of many years practice! But my resilience is also strong, I’ve never been one to forgo foolishness – my whole life is fairly Mills & Boon!
By November, all things being equal, I will have walked that long and winding road and arrived at the place I began from – me! But, oh, the difference!
Do you have an unfulfilled personal ambition?