Ossification

In my 100th post, which now seems so long ago, I quoted Leibniz's words: "Whatever acts cannot be destroyed." If a thing has motion, it exists and continues to do so.

As I grow older, this has become more and more important. When not in motion, muscles tire from inactivity and get stiff. When stiff, they seem harder to coax back to life. I am turning into a rock, a fossil, an ossuary of my own bones.

I need to keep moving. It is not elegantly expressed, that thought. I do not want to become an abandoned house while still alive, I do not want to become a waterfall of stone.

Tennyson expressed it with more passion, more beauty:

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone...

I must keep moving. I must.