Life In The Fast Lane

I used to walk with a neighbor in Cambridge every morning for an hour or more and we covered several miles in our perambulations.  That was a twenty or thirty year sojourn in my life in which earlier I had taken up swimming daily for one hour in whatever university Olympic-sized pool I had access to by virtue of my professorship.  In the last six months I have lost the ability to walk seriously because of what they call "balance issues."  I can do it on a treadmill at the gym although here I am compromised by my poorly healing broken wrist which makes holding on to the side rails painful after ten or fifteen minutes.  I can take the car and go over to the nearby mall and walk around endlessly looking at the display windows of Talbots, Abercrombie & Fitch, etc. and wonder if I should slit my wrists from boredom.  I was just in New York City where I walked through countless museums with my cane, and my friend and hostess said I had certainly done the equivalent of serious treadmill exercise.  A couple of days ago I woke up after a very poor night of sleeping and did not go to the gym with my husband.  I suffered agonies of guilt and stress because I did not get exercise.  I sat in a chair this morning reading The Times and later a history of the Mitford family.  What is to become of me?  I am not exercising enough.  How is it that I am supposed to walk my butt off when my mother-in-law who lived to 98 never did more than walk from the back door to the garage door?  And what about Queen Victoria who never budged from her chair in all her umpteen years of widowhood?  (Don't you love the image of her on a treadmill, widows weeds and cape and all?)  I am beside myself with anxiety over a failure to exercise properly, and, of course, always conscious of the fact that the treadmill was invented to require prisoners to suffer from walking on it many hours of the day.  Think of Oscar Wilde in the play "Gross Indecency," and I have to say to my shame that when I saw the piece in the theater, my ever compulsively ameliorating mind, could only concentrate on the health benefits accruing to tubby Oscar as he suffered through the induced walking.  Now it is time for a nap.  Shall I starve myself to compensate for lack of physical exercise?  But then there are the glasses of wine with lunch.  Certainly does not help.  Maybe I will just fade away and die.  Isn't that what's supposed to happen?  Slowly giving up on exercise and then just expiring?