Was I taking any prescription medications? Nope. Had I ever had vascular, spinal or joint replacement surgery? Nope. When I got to the doctor’s office, I would be given a long health survey to fill out. The check-up process turned out to be tedious. On my fiftieth birthday, though, my wife said that it was time for me to start getting annual check-ups, so I did. I not only recovered but enjoyed robust health for the next half century. My mother said that as a baby, I had nearly died of pneumonia. Over the course of the next year, I got old.
And since I was fifty, it had dawned on me that with some luck, I would live long enough to face the challenges presented by the ageing process.įor the next seventeen years, these challenges remained in the background. Could I, for example, learn not to get upset when I got all the way to my car before realising that I had forgotten my car keys? Could I learn to keep my cool when my computer inexplicably froze up, just as I was coming up on a deadline? I also wanted to prepare myself for some of life’s bigger challenges, like breaking a leg or losing a job. I wanted to improve my handling of the minor challenges presented by daily living. As the result of a low-grade midlife crisis at age fifty, I became a practicing Stoic.
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