Here I am at 6:30 a.m. this morning right before our workout. We get out in the park early before the heat and humidity slams the area and saps up our best energy.
Everyone knows by now that physical fitness is important because it’s a de- stressor and generally preserves health. Well, duh! But many people don’t act like they know that. Darren and I do a rigorous workout at least 4-5 days every week. We don’t always do it together though. It depends on our schedule for the day. We actively encourage each other to engage in exercise though and we compliment each others’ appearance. Did you do your workout yet? It might rain later, so you’d better go now. Or he’ll come upstairs and say: Come on! Let’s get over to the park before it gets too late. Or I’ll say: I’m going over to the park. You want to ride with me?
And there’s nothing like her man complimenting her figure to make most women want to work out. Lol Even when he doesn’t exactly come out and explicitly say it, she knows he likes what he sees when he looks at her. Likewise with men.
Darren always inline skates (roller blades), but I skate, bike, and sometimes walk. In these pics, I am on a different type of skate, 
and wow, do these skates get a lot of attention! One person in a dark car with tinted windows kept turning around to come back to look–3 times! There’s something about skating that grabs a lot of eyes. But the funniest part is that some people who are walking will try to have a conversation with you while you’re whizzing past them at 25 mph. Lol I usually just smile, mumble something and keep moving.
I also roller blade sometimes. I have an annual gym membership for rainy or cold days or days when it’s just too humid outside. Darren doesn’t like the gym; he’s normally very active, working outside at a million and one things or prefers the naturalness of walking around the acreage here at the farm.
AFTER-55 SEGMENT
I’m in that 55-85 age set now, so I’ll sometimes address it–here and maybe over on YouTube, but without comments turned on. I can talk for free forever over there but not here.
I’m loving the life I live because I’m thankful to say, I live an elevated life where I have multiple choices in various things. So, I’ll sometimes talk about life AFTER 55 because it’s critically important for women, especially younger black American (and similarly situated women) to catch a glimpse of what life is like after a certain age for some of us, and what it’s not like for others of us, depending almost totally on the choices made earlier in life. Remember that the quality of: Your Life Depends on Your Choices–the subtitle of my Book 2. An honest discussion about this can go a long way to help some to avoid certain pitfalls. I’ve always known that life is not fair or forgiving, but I’ve lived now a long cycle of life and I can see now that it’s worse than I even dared to think. Some of what I’ve heard and observed during the last 6 months about the lives of degree-holding, professional or formerly professional black American and similarly-positioned black women between the ages of 50-75 has been scary. Very upsetting! In their pre-golden and golden years, they lack a quality life and are some are outright suffering, for a number of reasons I’ll go into, later in this series.
Life is not forgiving of bad choices!
Much of it could have been predicted, but most don’t want to believe it can happen to them. Lacking any wiser head to guide them or anyone wise they could or would listen to, these women bombed in making certain choices. Life never forgets the choices you make. Life greatly rewards good choices, but you can be the most wonderful person, the most kind, the most generous, the most selfless, loving person on earth, but if you make the wrong choices–particularly certain ones, you will pay a high price. And when black women make bad choices, there is no safety net to catch them. They seldom get a second chance, and these women I’ll discuss are now too old to rewind.
I have grandchildren. Hopefully, someone will strongly step in in time, if their parents or others are not there to guide them away from bad choices.
I am joyful to be my age. I have so much more freedom now and many perks. I have no complaints about my life circumstances because of the choices I made, the men I chose or positioned myself to be chosen by, or any other critical decisions. The verdict is in. Fortunately, my decisions were good enough due to the information and advice I got and followed earlier in life.
In those days when old school black American CULTURE ruled, I had no choice but to listen. I could not argue. I had to listen and if I didn’t put the advice into practice and if any word of my disobedience got back to my family members or community or anyone who even knew any of them, I was quickly confronted by a few of them. That was the old school way. Lol They didn’t mince words, didn’t care about hurting your feelings or embarrassing you. That is exactly what kept many of us from going off the cliff. But these days, if someone like me tries to do that with a younger person, I’m viewed as a busy-body person who is overstepping my boundaries and verbally attacked. Or might be worse.
But a lot of specific knowledge about being this age could not be provided to me by my mother or grandmother, or elderly female relatives because I’ve lived in a different social and economic world than them. Their lives after-55 had no similarity to mine. Due to the social shifts in society, they barely had any of my adult experiences. They shared their valuable common sense with me but they never experienced any of the upsides or downsides of my social or income set. What they did do, was give me enough general, immensely valuable old knowledge.
This after-55 segment is important to provide because there has been a collapse of black American CULTURE during my adult years. This means that vital transmission of a vast amount of the best, most proven-beneficial and practical knowledge that black Americans used to have, practice, and pass on to the younger generation, no longer occurs, for the most part. Many younger black American women and even their mothers did not and do not have access to lots of this knowledge that greatly benefitted–and in many cases elevated, their fore-mothers into better social and financial circumstances. I personally benefitted and still benefit from a lot of that old CULTURAL knowledge. Many millennial women can’t even imagine it.
CULTURE is like a vessel that carries valuable knowledge from one generation to the next, and when that vessel is not safeguarded, is cracked or broken, or gets lost, then the people who come after, don’t have access to that knowledge. Or sometimes, only the worst dregs are left in the vessel. Only the worst dregs, the most empty, useless and even destructive aspects of the previous black American culture are left now. Every culture has its cultural dreggy aspects.
This is why I stress the supreme importance of CULTURE in so much of my writings. I’ll be talking a lot more about CULTURE’s supreme importance to survival and its connection to each generation living a more elevated or evolved life in my discussions on Anthropology, and not just CULTURE among humans, but among other hominids like our cousins, the Great Apes. Yes, the Apes have a CULTURE they practice. I capitalize CULTURE because I’m not talking about it in the ordinary sense. I view CULTURE as a matter of life and death because without a RUCOSS (reasonably uplifting culture of some sort), the group will become extinct. This applies to all hominids. YOU may survive, but via erosion, your group will not. This is guaranteed because this is in accordance with nature. There is no way around it. I know this because of the Anthropological record.
I’ve always had a passionate interest in all branches of Anthropology, whether cultural, biological, forensic, archaeological, etc. Anthropology encompasses cultural practices, traditions, beliefs, natural structures of life, and the remains of the past. It zooms in on that which is old but continues into the new, the past that is still with us in the present. It’s like a thread that goes from the ancient to the future. I majored in cultural Anthropology in undergrad school. I’ve always read a lot on the subject and applied the knowledge I’ve learned to my life. Some of that knowledge is bound up in what I’ve referred to as uncommon “common sense” but some old, priceless knowledge predates common sense. Those gems are in the anthropological record.
Whatever anyone might call this type of knowledge, it is still supremely valuable. I want my grandchildren to tune into it. It’s not perfect or totally accurate all the time, and can’t fit all present day situations perfectly, but it has an extraordinarily high applicability if the gems can be spotted and used.
Furthermore, a lot of human distorted thinking and terrible mistakes among human beings (homo sapiens) could be avoided if humans took their lead from the culled knowledge contained in the anthropological record.
One simple example: All the leading bio-anthropologists have stressed that there is no such thing as race. Their position is supported by geneticists who have proven that there is more diversity among Congolese people, for ex., than there is between a typical person from the Congo and a Danish person from Denmark.
Yet, the average ordinary human prefers to cling to their distorted thinking about supposed distinct, discrete races of people and prefers to highlight differences when they could just as well focus on the commonalities, of which there are so many more. Most human beings prefer to remain in the dark about this. Thanks to Anthropology, I was able to access a knowledge base, starting at 18, that helped me to avoid lots of darkness.
I have a reverence for old things because old things are more natural or closer to nature and the origin of life. They came before. I’ve always liked old people or senior citizens because they came out of nature before younger people. This is why older people, in general, are highly regarded and respected in African, Asian, Indian, and other old cultures. Despite the shortcomings of individual oldsters, their knowledge/wisdom, in aggregate, is of great value in those cultures. I’ve always preferred to focus on commonalities among people for the same reason. Those commonalities come from a more natural, holistic time. But I’m not an ordinary thinker. I haven’t lived an ordinary life.
Since I’ve never been a fan of ordinary and since I wallow as much as possible in old priceless knowledge, I will focus, in this series, on certain upper hominid (humans, Great Ape) female behaviors that have been studied and recorded in detail in the anthropological record. The hominids have been in the world for a long time. From Anthropology, we know that the hominid females include humans females and the female hominids among the 4 great ape species. Some of you may know that the 4 species of great apes are bonobos, chimps, gorillas, and orangutans, though some people believe that bonobos and chimps are the same species (they aren’t any longer). Biological anthropologists and geneticists have proven that there is a microscopically small difference between human beings and the great apes, like bonobos and chimps. We are animals just like they are. I know that many human beings have a lofty notion about being superior to all other animals. This is because other human beings and other socio-cultural elements have constantly heard and repeated that humans are superior. Any statement that is repeated often enough will eventually be believed by most human beings.
The behavior shown by these 5 species of hominids prove that the behaviors that they have internalized and used, have fostered not only their survival, but their elevation to the top of the food chain for thousands of years. Any life form–insect, plant, or animal–can survive on a basic level, but as a member of the human female species, the soci-cultural anthropological record shows what it takes to not only eke out survival, but to reach and live an elevated life. Any group of hominid females that does not subscribe and practice these ways will not survive. No group of hominids or any other life form can oppose nature for long, and win. Some species, groups, and subgroups have tried to oppose nature due to special environmental situations or because they couldn’t or refused to adapt or change. They are gone forever.
______________________________________________________
If you’re not careful, you’ll have an ordinary life.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.