Getting Old Ain't For Sissies 2

Getting my ducks in a row has been my chief defining phrase over the last eight years or so.  I think I first saw it in the Globe and Mail.  I thought, how cute.  A lovely little row of duckies following me everywhere.  White ones, mallards, teal, wood ducks and mandarins, wigeons.  I don't know what changed or developed in my brain chemistry as I entered my fifties but suddenly I was super disciplined and organized.  Not to an extreme.  My kitchen drawers and closet will always tend towards the untidy.  But I try to know where everything is.  I have a number of routines and little disciplines to keep my life in order.  I have to.  I feel somehow incomplete without a cohesive sense of routine.  It helps keep my brain in place.  I might also be a little bid OCB.

Every morning its the same thing.  I get up, brush my teeth, shave, trim my hair, shower, clean my apartment, dress, make coffee, pour orange juice, do my devotional readings, then check my email and have breakfast.  In the evenings I make sure I have something new and pithy written on these pages for your entertainment, pleasure and enlightenment, Gentle Reader.  During the day I try to get some art done, either a drawing in my sketchbook (often inside a café between clients at work) or a painting on my easel.  Saturday mornings I make bread, buy the weekend Globe and Mail, then breakfast on a cheese omelette before taking a long walk through the wealthy neighbourhoods before ending up in a favourite café where I, of course, draw.  Then I walk back as far as No Frills in Kitsilano to buy groceries from where I bus the rest of the way home.  Sunday mornings I do laundry, and then go meet a friend for coffee, or go for a walk, or sometimes even attend church (I've done this just once in the last year.  Maybe I'll go back in another year.)  Every March 1 I fly off to somewhere in Latin America for a month.  I always return 1 April.

When I was young I would have been horrified by such routine.  I would have found it stultifying.  I would have felt like a dragonfly trapped in amber.  I wanted to be free and untrammelled.  When I was young I eschewed discipline and routine as a prison.  Now I find them liberating.  It must be part of ageing well.  This doesn't mean that I have thrown all spontaneity out the window, but I do tend to plan and book my adventures in advance. During my first international trips (I was thirty-five when I went to Europe, thirty-eight for my first trip to Costa Rica) I didn't even think of booking a hotel.  I got off the planr, got a cab, and looked for something.  Easy as pie.  Outside of my plane trips I booked absolutely nothing.

I now appreciate the security in having things in order.  It seems to liberate my mind to think more clearly and more freely.  I take this as an exercise in ageing well.