Generation X, Y and ZEKE

God has given us wonderful illuminations called memories. Somehow as I grow older, I try to flip this wonderful switch to rooms called Learn, Love and Move-on. Yes, that switch is interesting because it also controls the doors which open and close to a plethora of gratitude. These rooms allow me the freedom to be childlike without being childish and that cannot be all bad. So, here I sit in my easy chair, a cup of anodyne refreshment and a scooch more of my memorabilia: “Here’s to Life.” Door 1: Make Room for Wisdom

Walking, a pleasurable past time, left me with a false since of supercilious pride. I was made to believe by my imagination that walking a 5-mile track was the same as walking incline hills. Now I knew that could not logistically be right, but these days I am happy just to have the strength to rise up and walk in the morning. So, recline I in the beauty of accomplished naivety until it happened—yes, it happened to me. It was called the “Awakening” in the small economical size. While visiting my son in Ansbach, Germany, I awoke every morning to my beautiful granddaughter saying, “Auyen, Auyen!” I had no idea what she meant at first; veiled to me was that later she would put me through her own personal “Boot Camp.” Yes, my son was an officer and according to her, I was unranked, a ‘Private.’ My sole duties consisted of Waking and Walking, usually both synonymous activities of fun. I can do this, or so I thought; what could be wrong with a little exercise? I was enlightened after a month of training and had made a complete 180 degree change about the big easy. Those hills became mountains, the scenery was null and void, and happiness was an afterthought. Please, whatever happened to ‘I can do this’?

I invested in all the necessary discomfort of murmuring and complaining. What was lost and hidden to me as an educator was the newly found enthusiasm and purpose of my tiny phoneme. How did she know this was just what the Doctor ordered? Months later in Rothenberg, my son and daughter-in-law yelled, “Wait up, you’re walking too fast. We’re trying to keep up, and you have the stroller!” It dawns on me that I had been walking up and down those hills of the city for hours sight-seeing. I never thought about it until that moment. Funny thing though, I wasn’t even winded, even in December. Listen, the miracle of exercise done through the simplicity of walking appeared as an Amazing Light! Yet, that wasn’t the end of my education that day; ah no! Class had just begun, but my expectations were heightened. I could not wait to learn something new when I gave up being an instructor.