Just the other day, I was sitting around in the afternoon, thinking to myself — wow, I’m tired! Even though I’m vaccinated, I absolutely play “is it Covid or an allergy?” as well as wondering if muscle soreness, fatigue, and the other occasional perfectly normal things that happen might also be a warning sign.

And then it hit me. I’d walked nearly 4 miles in the heat, come home, physically pulled the riding mower out of the garage, mowed the yard, pushed the mower back into the garage, and then jumped in the pool to give it a thorough cleaning and vacuuming. And that was just the morning.

No wonder I felt tired! I am just shy of two months away from being 60 years old. And quite honestly, I feel a lot better, physically, at 60 than I did at 50. Some parts of me are new (knees) and other parts of me are… well… less (the rest of me). And while I’ve had a pretty darned busy summer — with extra weight I need to re-lose to prove it — where I am is where I hoped I’d be at this point in my life.

I feel very fortunate. Not only to be able to say that I’ve lost just about all the weight I wanted to lose, and have kept it off (a big anniversary next week, in fact!), but I’ve regained so much of what I thought I’d lost forever. I honestly didn’t think it was possible to do any of the things I did the other day, let alone all three back to back. And really, I was just trying to get some stuff done around the house that needed doing, not trying to make a point to myself.

I had another such moment when we were on vacation in the Dominican Republic; we had taken a private charter out to snorkel and just generally puttering around the beautiful tropical waters. I was a little hesitant about getting off the boat because I’ve had some embarrassing times in the past getting back up the ladder; not just because of body strength, but because I dislocated a finger back in the spring on my dominant hand and I didn’t have a strong grip. But I eventually got down in the water and without thinking much about it, followed one of the crew to snorkel. No life preserver; I hadn’t thought about it. And then I popped my head up after taking underwater pics, realizing that I was swimming in around 15 feet of water and not thinking a thing about it. (Well. Until then! I was fine; it was just a bit startling.)

Or, let’s face it, my own goofy stupidity when I stumbled out my own back door and dislocated that finger in the first place. I had dislocated another finger many years ago, so I was pretty sure what I’d done. I screamed obscenities and then realized that I could hardly just sit around and wait on someone to help me; I got up, went inside, grabbed an ice pack, and after my doc’s office said I would need to head to the emergency room at the hospital, I grabbed my keys and drove myself. By the way, it’s roughly 25 miles from my house to that particular ER.

At my highest weight, any of the things I just described would have either taken time to figure out how to go about it because of physical limitations, or I simply would have just frozen and not done them. I would have just deprived myself of something I enjoyed doing, or needed to do, and convinced myself that it just wasn’t possible instead of facing the truth of the matter. Or, in the case of injury, completely frozen.

I had hoped for all of these things, but actually getting them was totally unexpected.