Melancholy Mondays: Diminishing Returns

Can't help but feel that physically I've passed the point of no return. That I'm never going to suddenly develop into a startling muscular figure, or become the long-distance runner that I never properly trained for. I can still maintain a certain standard of physical fitness and try to keep the beer belly bulge at bay, but it's only going to get harder and take more work. Exercise that will take longer to recover from, with a body that is less flexible and resistant than it was before.

Mentally, they say that your intellectual peak can come much later, post-forty certainly, but it's also true that certain things have got harder. That my memory, previously almost faultless, is now rather defective and the possibility that I might completely forget something is more of a regular occurrence than I'd ever considered. It's frightening and more than a little embarrassing to find yourself with no memory. "I have no recollection," after all, is the statement of liar. Certainly as used by politicians, celebrities, and other criminals.

All life works towards a downward spiral. Eventually, the effort put in is not met by the active response. More has to be expended to reach what was easier to accomplish before. All things weaken, age, diminish, and finally perish. There is no eternal reoccurrence, no perpetual motion. Some things just take longer to die.

We might consider large-scale collaborative endeavours, such as Science, as somehow excluded from this basic law of entropy, but consider Civilisations. Why do they 'fail', perhaps entropy is absolute. The scientific method itself seems to accept a potential replacement with a 'better' system.

The epigenetic clock is ticking...

'The Seer' Giorgio de Chirico