The feeling of nearing 30+

Statuary Warning - If you are in the age bracket of 30-45 please do not read this!

Well it hits everyone… and this time the victim goes by the name of Manish Dabas! It is hard to define this feeling, but I have finally got the answer… a hard way though because this feeling makes you wonder how far you have come in life and how much more is remaining of it… it makes you wonder if you need to set or change your priorities, above all it makes you see life in a different way for sure… and yet you sort of wonder when did it hit you the first time!

When we were kids, we looked around and wondered how these 30+ uncles and aunties are going through the routines of life… how they were getting stuck in to the long and eternal circle of one day to another and how they were meant to be that way for a long-long time! Thanks to the changes in the recent Macro-economic environment we no more suffer from that syndrome. But there is one thing that still needs to be taken care off… your body! Youth! Ah this age :) - Probably most of you would agree that 25-30 are the best years of anyone's life… true some people succeed earlier than that and some later, but I am not talking about success here, I am talking about the capacity to enjoy that success. How fit you are and how much energies you have to enjoy life… okay weird… let me take a step back. In childhood, one hardly cares about what one has to do… eat, drink, sleep, run, play… you have so much to do… then as you keep increasing the candle on the birthday cakes, as you keep loosing hairs, as you keep increasing those inches to your waist… wait a second…

Not that I haven't experienced some of these syndromes, adding inches to my wait was certainly not my idea to grow old. Still as I move towards the 30+ side, I am growing more and more concerned about it. When you are 18 and you are drinking those beers, you don’t care, there is a lot of time to be back in shape. When you are 22, you just start working, sitting on the office desk for 14 hours and in front of TV for next 4, you don’t care either… when you are 25, you are still good to go for another 5 years and you feel so full of energies like never before… and then suddenly one fine day you look at your recent photograph and see a little overgrown tummy bulging out… you are concerned now… you go for a jog for 3 days and you are back to square one… then one fine day, you are looking at that Album from yesteryears and you seem puzzled, although you haven’t noticed it all this while, you used to look so skinny in your college days - "I was always healthy man, how can this be…" you wonder!!! You make sure you take that Gym membership while coming back from office and months goes by… you fill your Gas from the Gas Station one block away, you do your groceries in the same compound, still you don’t have time to go to Gym… what are you up to? You try to make sure you get good shirts to make you look slim, you try to hold your breath while getting photographed (trust me it is difficult to do so while smiling at the same time), still one day one of your friend scraps you on Orkut - "Dude you have put on so much Weight"!!! Time has come to take that Gym membership!

Three months pass and you have still struggled to go to the Gym beyond the first week and now you do the ultimate thing… your start uploading your upper profile only by clipping those pictures… and that to me is the right way of defining the feeling of nearing 30+ for me … Now some of us may choose to accept this fate and carry on with their lives… and by the time they reach 40+ think about walking in the park to avoid any more heart related problems… some of us even choose to cut down on those high calorie diets and keep their blood sugars in control… and some brave ones among us can chose to change this, actively delay this aging process and start hitting that mat on the tread mill the next day, and the next day and keep on hitting it until the joints start to pain… I have decided to take the last option and I think I am ready for it NOW!

Oh by the way, its not that this thought has come to me for the first time - no this is no Eureka moment - I had been an ir-regular at gym at Evalueserve (doing all sort of exercises for 2 days and then repenting for those the next 5 days)… I in fact went to a Gym for about 2 week in Telesoft in bangalore and even odd exercises at during Logic Eastern days… but all this while I never thought it is now or never. There was always next six months to look ahead for those six-packs. There was always something gravely serious for me to have any time in life. There was always that small window of hope… not this time and I know this is serious stuff.

So the plan right now - Well to burn this fatty tyre around me in the next 2 months. I wonder how easy it has been off late to run for 3 miles on the tread mill - I still recall the race organized by Hindustan National Glass in Bahadurgarh and how I didn’t have enough fuel to take me full distance… I ran pretty well for almost 3/4th of the race before falling behind on second place as my Dad looked at me - He was the judge for the final leg and I could not keep it up :( well no longer dad… and that’s a promise!