Counting every day

I ran across one of the questions people like to ask on social media: If you could give your eighteen year old self one bit of wisdom in three words, what would you say? I thought about it for a long time, and was honestly stumped. Travel the world maybe, to which I would add the unspoken—do it while you're still young and strong and your joints still work and you can fly up stairs and walk long distances without pain. I knew what I should tell my younger self. I should warn her to pay attention to the body as well as the heart and mind, to eat right and exercise, especially to exercise, but I knew it would have been futile, my younger self wouldn't have listened, because the body would work until the day it didn't, the day in my twenty-seventh year when I fell from where I was standing on top of my desk trying to dust the top of a picture frame, because the brother of the man who was not yet my husband was passing through New York and stopping by to visit, and I wanted to make a good impression. 

I fell off that desk and wrecked my left knee. I wore an immobilizer on that leg for weeks, innocently wrecking my other knee as it did all the compensating, adjusting and twisting and accommodating and putting itself in unnatural positions to keep me moving forward heedlessly. I was traveling a lot in those days, as a reporter for LIFE magazine, jumping on planes every other week, working with photographers in near and far flung places, living in hotels and motels for weeks at a time, always on the go. 

Thus my body began to shift out of sync, and I just worked around the discomfort, then the pain, for too many years, never really addressing it, and I can draw a straight line from my once youthful sense of invulnerability to where I am now, every joint complaining, none of it helped by the below freezing temperatures in the city, the cold sneaking in through the seams of windows and the vents of AC units and settling in my bones. And then, there's an extra portion of lingering pain from my recent dance with Covid, I am definitely not imagining the aches that have not gone away. My son tells me he feels them, too, and I pray the fact that he does eat right and exercise will spare him from the arthritis I inherited from my mother. It seems Covid finds the places where your body is weakest, and burrows in there, and for me, that is most definitely the joints and the scaffold of no longer young and never invulnerable bones. 

Anyway, this wasn't where I thought I'd go when I opened this page. I thought I was going to report that I turned in the final draft today, and yay, team!

Also, what advice would you give your eighteen year old self? In three words