Left with the sea

Subject: Left with the sea.

How stupid how short sighted I was last year to grumble about the inconvenience of a walk into the town centre.  Now, only 12 months later I can't walk the distance or even drive after dark because one eye has stopped working, which makes night driving difficult and my ankle has packed up, making the walk painful. 
"The Tyranny of expectations" one could call it.  The expectation that things will go on as before without giving much thought as to the components in ones life that make it so.
Health is a particular component on which most other things hinge. One can accommodate the economic variables fairly easily, one can adjust ones spending or modify the assumption that holidays or a new TV are necessary, one can even find pleasure in simplifying ones life style, discarding the old for a new edition of what is meaningful. But health is on a whole different level of importance it's the linchpin pin to who we are and the way we see ourselves.  A lifetime of walking without a thought as to the physical parts which come into play when you get the thought into your mind, 'I want to go there'. The assumption that you will always be able to is fundamental to our sense of self, take away the ability and one loses part of ones esteem.
Now I'm not talking of the Steven Hawkins's dreadful incapacity, Motor Neurones Disease or the equally dreadful Asbestosis where every breath is an effort of survival and there are many people wracked with such pain I can't  imagine how they continue to want to live, or the millions cast into a dark place by mental illness. No I am thinking more of an inconvenience, a curtailment of past accomplishments, a realignment of ones thinking and especially of ones "expectations".
The old adage, 'do it while you can' is never taken seriously since we are blessed to see ourselves in the clothes of the past, doing and achieving, much as before until some how, undefined, we can't. For instance dementia like cancer creeps up out of nowhere, the signs are minimal, almost understandable as we adjust to ageing, the difficulty in remembering or making sense of the progression of thoughts in some sort of cognisant way is normal to ageing but it's when the normal slips into the abnormal then ones expectations take on a whole new meaning.
So one day you are the old version of you, the one who wore many name tags, (not all of them to your liking) but who could trace a history of achievement and failure and who, if you are lucky, you quite liked and defended. Suddenly the mechanism missed a beat and then another, nothing much to worry about that day but as the days progressed the old becomes replaced by the new and even the new is is a work in progress. Deep down the system is beginning to fail. Like the main engine on a ship, the sum of all its parts enables it to reach port, its loosing more steam than it is generating, its having to work harder to overcome the friction in the prop shaft and  as the ship slows to a halt in mid ocean a tiny ship amidst a huge ocean, its unerring ability to cross the sea questioned, and in the end, you are left with the sea.