The only choice I've ever had about how I was gonna die and the conditions of my death have been to consider suicide. All the same, I have always tried to keep in mind that I would eventually die of something, I just didn't and still don't know what. In any case I've never felt comfortable with the idea of stretching life out as much as I could with a long, slow, painful death. I may have had that option taken away from me with this rheumatoid arthritis gig.
The free movement of my body is gone. There is hardly anything I can do that don't hurt something but sitting still, and that's truly a blessing. My doctor warned me there is a problem with that. I don't get any aerobic exercise and that's not good for my heart health.
I've been thinking about how I can get some aerobic action that doesn't hurt to much, and it appears as though my best option is singing. I've been doing that fairly regularly for the last week or so.
I went out for a walk earlier just to move things around a little. It was not a long walk nor speedy. I realized I was breathing real shallow, and started singing some chants and voice exercises I learned during my voice training lessons back in my twenties and thirties to get my breathing rate up. It worked a little too well, and I got tired and headed back to my front deck where I have a chair to sit in.
I sat in that folding chair and practiced singing any tune I could remember any part of. Finally I remembered a tune that I knew all the words to the first verse and chorus. The problem with that was that it was a popular song, and anybody who might be listening would know whether I was hitting the right notes or not.
It wasn't like I was giving a concert and been expected to have practiced enough not to make simple mistakes. I was singing to move a bunch of air through my lungs, and thus get some oxygen to my heart so it would work right. I forget most of the time now that I've quit smoking tobacco, that is until I sing. It's been over a year now, and my lungs are a lot cleaner than they've been in a long time. Comparatively, I can take some pretty deep breaths.
Another thing about my taking up singing regularly again is how the range and depth of my voice increases. Now that I have my digital piano to practice with I can tell just how much lower or higher I can reach up and down the scales as time goes by. This gives my voice a lot more flexibility for imitating other people's voices. If I do it right, and they don't see me moving my lips, it's possible that they will hear me say what I utter, as if it were them talking to themselves in a segue situation. Granted, for this to happen, I have to abandon my own idea of self and be-co-me with their own impressions of they self in real ti-me (tie-to-me). Tricky business, but something to do when there is nothing I can do but that.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
