Why I Went to the Living Room

I went to the living room because I had been living deliberately, I had lived deep and sucked out all the marrow of life, and I had come to Discover that I had screwed up my hip.

Yes, after a life of climbing, hiking, skiing, snowboarding, running, biking and swimming, I had well and truly borked my left hip. At the advanced age of 40, I had been diagnosed with arthritis. Wow. I had lived well and my body was paying the price.

In fairness, I guess it isn't totally because of the abuse I put my body through. The first words out of my doctor's mouth after seeing my X-ray was "you're a German Shepherd!" You see, I have hip dysplasia. Although I never knew it, I have had it all my life, and it eventually led to arthritis. Of course, all the running probably didn't help.

Eventually it was decided I would have frightening surgery on my hip to make things better. And that meant I would be immobile for a while. As my hip healed, there would be no running or hiking or skiing or, well, walking. I was, therefore, going to have to spend a lot of time sitting in my living room. Probably weeks, if not months.

This made me nervous. Of course, I had sat in my living room before, but never for such an extended period of time. How would I survive? What would I do all day? I needed to prepare. I needed to research the living room environment. The difficulties would have to be identified. Equipment would have to be bought. Skills would have to be learned; a plan of attack developed. It struck me that I was preparing for this living room experience in much the same way I would plan a climbing trip, or prepare for a triathlon. I realized I was mounting an expedition to my living room.

When I was a kid, one of the things I was assigned to read in my English class was Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Wood. I had always admired Thoreau. Not because of his deep pastoralist philosophy or his vocal opposition to slavery; although those things were nice. No, I admired how he had managed to make navel-gazing pay off for himself. He was totally broke and had to live in a little shack his friends donated to him in exchange for doing odd jobs, and he turned the experience into a paying book deal.

So I figure I'll do the same thing. While I'm stuck recovering from surgery, I'm going to use this blog to record my experience of converting from an active life to a life of sitting on my butt in a recliner. Hopefully, just like Thoreau, I'll get a book deal out of it and become one of the leading forces in American philosophical thought. I don't see why not. I might even grow a sweet neck beard like Thoreau did.