At 70

Might be a case of hubris, but I'm anticipating celebrating--very, very quietly--my 70th birthday tomorrow. Should I wake. But, so far, so good right up to the cusp of 70 years. We shall see. Or maybe I won't.

In my early to mid-fifties, I started using the phrase "Upright is all right" to signify my sense of how waking to another day, bed covers tossed aside, feet on the floor, marked a victory of a sort. Hey, look, still alive, and now on with the day. 

I did trot out the phrase occasionally when asked how I was doing by my students. Sometimes some were put off a bit by what they judged to be a cavalier dismissal of life's grandest possibilities. Some chuckled. Well, few, actually very few were amused. Probably just as well. 

Certainly I didn't intend to be dismissive of life, just trying to suggest life is not to be taken for granted. Perhaps too glibly for the subject matter. 

But, in fact, I am for want of a better term a life-ist. How incredible to be alive, to be an individual on this planet, this tilt-a-world that we think of as a home. Amazing. And then the solar system, the galaxy, and certainly even more preposterous, the universe.

And there may be soon 8 billion of us. Each one so highly improbable, and yet so very many of us--that notion, too, preposterous.

Now I am not going to stake any claim to living each day fully. I am not on any grand mission. Even as time hurtles forward, and I without much that demands being hurried. Even as I know--I can feel it--time, my days ahead, dwindle. True for all, but I do not remember making much of this notion in my teens or thirties or for that matter in my fifties. Despite my clever little aphorism.

Life-ism, I propose, is a head-shaking incredulity at us all. Our foibles, our triumphs, our cruelties, our passions, our disasters, our very being. How strange and marvelous to be alive.

Perhaps for a few more breaths, a last run of heartbeats. Or 20 years more. Now how could that possibly be?

Perhaps, time for a bucket list.

How about whatever the day should bring, should it come.