April's CR Diary

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July 20, 2005

If You Had Had More Time

One of the songs that made a huge impression on me as a child was Supertramp's "Take the Long Way Home." In fact, I'd say that second to "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic," it is my favorite song in the world. We used to listen to it in the car on our way to nursery school when I was about four, and my then-step-father would ask me if I wanted to go the long way or the short way. I always wanted to take the long way, both because I loved the Supertramp song and because I didn't particularly care for nursery school.

Yes, even as a four year old, I made all major decisions in my life by consulting the pop music radio station.

There's a line in the song that I found disturbing even on the way to nursery school:

When you look through the years
And see what you could have been
What you might have been
If you had had more time

I remember thinking to myself something along the lines of: Grown-ups clearly feel some kind of regret about not doing something they had wanted to do. I can't let that happen to me.

That fear of regret has led me to live by some principles I hold sacred. I'll write them out for you. Don't worry, number 1 is not "Eat 70 g protein a day."

1. When in doubt, do it. Jump on the plane, take the job, send the email, buy the dress, adopt the kitten. Feel the fear and do it anyway, as some magnet I saw on a fridge once said.

2. Ignore social pressure as much as possible. (Note that I have not married, had children, or given into this hideous revival of preppy pink and green.)

3. Live as long as possible.

It's taken a lot of work to live by these principles. It can also be quite expensive, especially the jumping on the plane and adopting the kitten part (that kitten is now a nineteen pound cat whose food costs more than mine does.) But it's always been well worth it.

Principle #3 is the one that brings us here together today. I took quite literally Supertramp's words about "if you had had more time," and I thought it would be horrifying to get to the end of life and realize that there were things I really wanted to do but just didn't have time for.

I think that a lot of people deal with the very same fear, but instead of searching for ways to acquire more time (ie CR, supporting the Mprize, etc.) they scale back their expectations. Instead of finding a way to remain young and healthy as long as possible, they decide that they didn't really want to do all those neat things anyway. The scaling back of expectations seems to start shortly after college, and is really rolling by the time the babies start to arrive. Then there's one convenient excuse after another: the kids are too small, we have to pay for college, I'm too fat, I'm too sick, I'm too old.

I'd rather just get more time. It takes a whole lot less effort for me to do CR and pay my Three Hundred commitment than it would take to talk myself out of my dreams.

In my work, I see a lot of people who have scaled back their expectations. Sometimes they have scaled back so much that they can't imagine getting a bathroom break in a twelve hour shift, much less living their dreams. It serves as a constant reminder to me to stick to my principles, even when I risk getting hurt, feeling scared, or being publicly ridiculed for not owning the proper purse.

Breaking through the denial that people live in about the horror of aging and death is one of the principle tasks of people like Aubrey de Grey and my very own MR who are called to educate the public about the possibility of real anti-aging biomedicine. It isn't easy breaking through the knee-jerk apologism for the aging process: as my mother used to say, "Denial is more than a river in Egypt." (If you don't get that, sound it out with a heavy southern accent.) If you want to see denial in action, look at how many ICU nurses smoke. Lying in the bed, hooked up to a heart monitor, breathing through a ventilator, is the patient dying of lung cancer. On her two minute break, the nurse goes outside for a smoke. That two minutes worth of pleasure is, in that moment, worth the sacrifice of life and health.

But it's not worth sacrificing your dreams. For me to do anything other than CR would be slow-motion suicide, and even on my worst days, I've never been suicidal. (I have rarely even been homicidal, though I have occasionally wanted to hand out index cards that read "Have a nice day elsewhere.")

CR has given me hope... hope of a longer life, hope of better health, and the every day reality of living in a body that I love and that feels good almost all the time. Even when I'm painting walls until ten at night and then out the door by six the next morning to meet a nurse at a convenience store to give her a union card. Even as I'm watching a zillion SUV owners pull up to the convenience store in search of coffee. Even when I'm wondering how you can possibly like Wawa coffee. Even when I'm pondering the fact that my own mother likes Wawa coffee. Even then, I feel good in my body. And the whistling of construction workers as they get their bad coffee at the convenience store at 6 am also reminds me of the benefits of CR, though I hear that not all CR practitioners get whistled at by construction workers. Might be one of those side-effects that breaks down on gender lines.

If it weren't for CR, and the change it has made in my life, I doubt that I would be able to grasp the concept of a radically biomedically extended youthful life. I might understand it intellectually, of course, as I am pretty smart. But I wouldn't feel it the way I do, as a serious possibility for which I am willing to sacrifice my time and money. Faith is easy when you can feel the power working in your own cells. CR is nowhere near enough, and we can't even be sure that it will carry us far enough to make it to escape velocity (if you don't know what I'm talking about read this.) But because I can feel CR working, and my bloodwork confirms that I'm doing pretty well, I no longer feel that aging is inevitable.

Who decides how long we live, how healthy we are? I've never been one to give into social pressure, so I'm not about to defer to those who say that aging is "natural" and therefore acceptable. Dying of consumption used to be natural too, and we got rid of that. Pain in childbirth is natural, and I know a lot of people who say that's for the birds. I certainly am not going to give into those who say that it's not natural for a woman to be thin and beautiful way into her thirties (and forties, and fifties, and nineties! And one-twenties!) It's so rare that one can, with complete assurance, say, "You're just jealous!" but this is the other one of those times.

To the extent I am able, I will take control over my own life and health. I practice CR as intensely as I can manage, and I donate as much time and money as I can to the Mprize. I refuse to wear little shirts with alligators on them with the collars up.

It takes time and money and work, but it sure is easier than giving up my dreams.

Posted by april at July 20, 2005 9:51 AM

Comments

Posted by: Judith at July 20, 2005 11:28 AM

Posted by: Elizabeth at July 20, 2005 1:56 PM

Posted by: Mary at July 20, 2005 8:30 PM

Posted by: MR at July 21, 2005 8:48 PM

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