A nap can be the highlight of a good day. Tired from exercise or chores, cool sheets, and the fuzz of a favorite stuffed bear, or two, is just the thing. No more words required. We all love a good nap.

This is a repost of an evocative interaction with a young couple in crisis. Men and women are different. Duh. We have to learn to live together and learn communication, throughout our relationships. Hopefully we gave this young couple something to remember, something to go back to in times of difficulty.

Bob:

“You don’t fu….. care about me!” It came from a young woman sitting in a car beside Turtle. “You don’t treat me like you did before. You don’t treat me the same fu….. way you did before we got married.” A young man, stood tall beside her window, hands at his sides, outer calm mirrored in his desert camouflage uniform, defending himself in an even tone. “It’s not me. It’s you,” he said.

His tone and demeanor seemed to make her even angrier. The recriminations continued, she shrill and emotional, he controlled, uncommunicative.

Claire and I looked at each other. We both had tears in our eyes. It was our twentieth anniversary, and we were witnessing the beginning of the end of a young marriage. It didn’t take words between us to know what we would do. We held hands and walked around the motorhome to them.

Claire: I was really nervous about this type of encounter; domestic disputes are one of the most dangerous calls for police, but we could tell from the vague, repetitive accusations that they had reached an impasse.

Bob: “It’s our twentieth anniversary,” I said. “And we just had to say something. We couldn’t help but overhear.” I nodded toward Turtle. “I hope you don’t mind.” He acknowledged us, “No.” She quickly put the car in reverse and said “It’s okay, I was just leaving.” But she didn’t.

I looked at him. “You don’t understand her emotions. You will when you are older, but for now, just listen. She’s hurting, and you need to hear her” And to her through the window I said, “You don’t understand why he’s so calm, so unresponsive to your hurt.” She nodded, still looking down. “He’s just doing what men are taught. We’re not supposed to show emotion. Fathers and football coaches,” I acknowledged his uniform, “the military, none of them reward a show of emotion.” I clapped him on the shoulder, there were still tears in my eyes, “When you are 66 you will know that it’s okay to cry, but not yet. I understand.”  “But you have to understand her need to see you show her your love.”

She stole a furtive look at him, her mascara left marks of her tears. “You’re being a man, and she’s being a woman.” He smiled just a tiny bit.

Claire: “It’s what men do, it’s called freezing up, it happens when they are feeling bombarded, so they just clam up. Trust me, this happens to men and women all over the world, but it just causes the women to yell more because they think they’re not being heard.”

Bob: “You gotta work together. That’s the hard part of marriage, but it’s the rewarding part too.” I turned to him. “We travel, just the two of us, on our tandem bicycle all over the world.” His eyebrows went up. “Last year we rode over the Tibetan Plateau, through Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, three thousand miles.” He was really listening now; man stuff I guess. “A few years before, we went from Beijing to Istanbul.” I touched his arm. “Across Central Asia; I hope you don’t have to go there.” I didn’t expect him to be as attentive as he had become; he was really hearing what an old man (to him) had to say. “A couple doesn’t do something like that without knowing how to work together.”  I smiled at what I’d just said. “There’s nothing like it.” “But, it takes some time, and a lot of listening.”

Claire: The writer in me spoke to her: “If you aren’t able to communicate what you need, try writing it down, write what’s wrong and write what you think would fix it, but don’t give up.” She cracked the window a bit more and went back to twisting the beautiful wedding and engagement rings.

Bob: She rolled her window down further and looked up at him, he down at her. “Touch each other,” I gently insisted. They slowly reached out to touch hands and lock eyes. “We’ll go away now.”

We hurried to Turtle, threw things where they wouldn’t fall and started the engine. As we drove away, he was leaning through the window and they were kissing.

We could have gifted ourselves a cruise to Alaska, celebrated at the Captain’s table with expensive Champagne, and seen Alaskans at a safe remove. Instead, we had leftovers and box wine in Turtle in a library parking lot, and maybe, just maybe, made a difference in two young lives. No contest.

Merrill Rovang, our brother-in-law, has Parkinson’s. Like Larry he won’t give up and is an inspiration to us all. Ride with Larry is worth watching whether you know someone with Parkinson’s or not. These two men show us how to live life, one day at a time.

Leftover snow with underlying ice made the going a tad slow in places. Seven miles and 3,000 vertical feet to Linda Vista, a good hike for my feet. Nice to be breathing in the fresh scents of the desert plants and stimulating  conversation with friends. A new trail for me. Maybe next time,after the ice melts, The Finger, a thousand or so feet higher.

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This year, Claire and I will dance our fool hearts out to the great swing tunes of sixty years ago, and we’ll dance into the new year.
New Year’s Day, we will do what we have done each of the New Year’s Days of our relationship: we’ll do one of our several favorite forms of exercise, probably bicycle, eat one of our (healthy) favorite foods, take a nap, and enjoy the pleasures of married life, not necessarily in that order. We used to take a dip in the cold ocean, but that doesn’t work too well here in Arizona. Our tradition is to start the New Year off together doing the things we look forward to doing all the coming year. It is for us, a long and honored tradition.

It’s good to have traditions for the New Year, but not all traditions are positive. One I have done without for many years is to make a New Year’s resolution. Here’s why:

You will break it. Sad to say, nearly all New Year’s resolutions are broken, probably within a few weeks to a couple of months of their making. Oh, the motivation is pure. Say, you really, really resolve to lose that ten pounds you gained over the holidays, not to mention the three to five pounds that crept up on you over the year, like they have each year since you passed twenty-five. Don’t be too hard on yourself, it happens to the purest among us. It’s just the natural aging process, our wealthy society, our holiday binging philosophy, and just plain human nature.

The New Years resolution dilemma has one big weak link. Everyone makes resolutions at the same time each year, and when one weak soul breaks their resolution, we break ours in commiseration, because: 1. We are so compassionate. 2. We’re just waiting for an excuse to break our own resolution. I go with number two. Regardless, we all end up breaking all our resolutions and becoming each other’s co-dependents. Now we’re worse off than if we hadn’t made a resolution in the first place; no improvement and several new co-dependent relationships. Bad. Bad.

I propose the following approach to resolutions: Make resolutions; just don’t make them at the New Year. Any time of year is fine, just not the New Year.

Resolutions are best achieved when they are: realistic, backed by research, shared with a very few, and followed up with daily thought and action. Now all this is not so hard as it might appear.

Realistic: means 20 pounds over two months, not 20 pounds before the dance next week.

Backed by research: means you learn all you can about where you can cut unnecessary calories from your diet, and know exactly how many hours a week of what kind of exercise will take to reach your goal.

Share with a very few: means to share with your significant other, and at most a small group of supportive friends; don’t share with anyone who might want you to fail out of jealousy.

Take daily thought and action toward your goal: this is both the most difficult part of the equation, and the most productive. Make a chart for food intake and exercise hours, and keep it current. This is not a torture. This is a motivation.

Now you are set for achieving your goal; just wait until everyone has broken his or her New Years resolutions, and then you’ll be free of pressure and can concentrate on actually achieving yours.

Then comes the sweet part. You can brag.

Claire and I live a lifestyle of fitness and healthy eating, including Dr. Weil’s anti-inflammatory diet (type it in your search engine) and believe in the concept, though we certainly can’t afford to access it at Miraval.

We have our own, non-credentialed version, at Far Horizons Tucson Village. We call it The Health Nuts club. We meet and discuss various ways to encourage each other in healthy lifestyle changes. Maybe people would take our free version of a wellness program seriously if Oprah came here instead of Miraval? Somehow I doubt we’ll see her at our humble and inexpensive (compared to Miraval) resort. Both Dr. Weil’s model, and our simpler one, have considerable merit for those facing declining fitness, weight gain, heart, blood sugar and other wellness issues. Pills don’t solve all problems.

Nobody thinks the health insurance companies will embrace this model soon, but that probably won’t stop Dr. Weil, Dr. Nicolai and Mirival from making a buck. For the rest of us, it’s up to us to get together and help each other with our wellness goals. It doesn’t cost any more than a little time, and the willingness to listen to, share, and care for each other.

We get interesting reactions from Chinese. These were at yet another pass, this one about 14,339, and a summit several hundred feet higher a few kilometers on. The road was good to the top, and looked like a beautiful 40 kilometer downhill, but, it was not to be. The road was severely frost heaved. It was fun at first to ride the moguls, but got old after a few kilometers. Here are some pictures from the day:

Claire: We’re getting to the stage where we think about food a lot, and we tried to make a decent dent in the big bucket of rice, but we failed to come close to finishing it. Yes, we’re eating pork now, or any kind of protein for that matter, and we eat whatever vegetables they bring us. At the grocery stores, we study and poke the packages and hope they’ll sustain us through a night of camping. Yogurt and cookies (a whole roll) is a before bed tradition of carbohydrate loading and we even bought Tang for our water bottles tomorrow. Wish I had some Cheerios, they always charge me up. If you’re out pedaling today or tomorrow, push a pedal stroke for us, we’ll need it; tomorrow; (tonight for you) we climb 7,000 feet to well over 15,000 feet and hope to get down in elevation to find a camping spot low enough to allow for sleep, before dark.

Hiked a 5 mileRT/2000 ft. trail with Bob’s sister Anna Bowlds today. At the summit we watched locals float over forests and meadows and slowly guide their fascinating craft to a gentle landing far below. Looks like fun. Nice Claire photos!