I detest platitudes — like learning to live in the moment — yet here I am working on that very thing in my Boston marathon training.

I put off writing this because I thought these 50 Thoughts would be bright, humorous dispatches — as if colonoscopies and forgetting words for groceries when you’re making a grocery list is downright hysterical.

Talking about depression has become all the rage since Stephane Richer admitted to trying to kill himself four days after winning a Stanley Cup, while driving his Porsche 911; since speedster Clara Hughes confessed that the black dogs have hounded her through six Olympic medals.

I don’t know if this makes me feel better. You’d think folks with Stanley Cups, Porsches and Olympic medals would have it all going on. And I don’t have any of those things.

I did have a father who wanted to end his life, whoa, starting at the age of 50! I don’t worry about a genetic inheritance. I can put that in a box. He was a modern progressive farmer. His brain had been polluted by agricultural chemicals (gee thanks, Big Ag!) and also dented by a rock to the head. When I was researching an eight-part series for The Toronto Star, “Crisis on the Farm,” I spoke to Carlton University researcher Shawn Hayley, who studies the links between Parkinson’s and pesticides. He thought the bang on the head (causing inflammation) was like “throwing a match” into the chemicals that had pooled in my father’s brain tissue, starting “a forest fire” in his head. The researcher actually used that poetic language (thanks, literature!).

My dad saw the black clouds of confusion closing in. I came home from high school to hear the tearful ultimatums he gave to my mom: either take him to hospital to fix his confusion or take him to the cemetery. The doctors tried and could not fix his Parkinson’s dementia. We hid the hunting rifle, the keys to vehicles, kept an eye on him. He once managed to go for a walk across Highway 400, though the police apprehended him and returned him home, “safe,” ironic quotation marks fully intended.

I was 15 when dad started going off the rails. Being the kind of kid who wrote poetry, I perhaps sympathized too intensely with his drama. I went through high school asking myself this question each and every day: What makes life worth living? And every day, I would have to come up with an answer, for both dad and myself.

I really struggled with answers for dad. His autopsy report, which I bizarrely keep on my writing desk, says he lived to 70, though it was in a thick mental fog for the last 15. Still, he lived to meet all six of his grandchildren, and he delighted in them and I think they felt that he, confused and unhappy as he was, gave them a lot of positive love.

As for me, I always came up with the same answer. Growing up gay and denying it to myself for many years (cause it was considered vile and despicable, like it’s changed all that much for kids) didn’t make high school or university life particularly peachy. So my answer was always rooted in future. Things would get better in the future. I believed in the future. And for too much of my life, I have lived not so much in the now, as for the future.

But at 50, the future’s not such a great place to live. If there’s ever a time for an occupy-the-present movement, it’s now.

Last night, I was at my alma mater, University of Toronto, doing speed work around King’s College Circle, pounding out 10 kilometres of laps, passing undergraduates spilling out of evening classes, thrilling in being in the best shape of my life (and likely better shape that 95 percent of those 20-somethings).

I was not thinking about Boston or the blessed end of the workout or even the next lap, but exhilarating in the speed and gruesome effort, living in the wondrous moment of each stride. And I was strong. And I was happy.

I have been turning 50 for more than two years now.

At age 48, I decided to train for my first marathon. Actually, I hadn’t even turned 48, but that January, when I started my usual three-month preparation period to deal with the psychological trauma of my birthday in April (the cruelest month), I realized with some horror that my mom was 48 when I first took note of her age and by then she was already old.

Though I’m a writer, I can do some basic math. At 47, you’re closer to 45. At 48, there is no turning back. It’s a flashing, fret-lined, fat-fuelled, free fall to the big ‘ffing fifty. Might as well skip the denial and accept that you’re already 50.

The number has a way of concentrating the mind — even mine, which given my sign, a goat, is prone to scrambling up this mountain pass, only to reach an impasse; then scrambling up that dead-end path because the view is just spectacular over there; and then trying another whole new route because I’m curious like that; and on and on.

As I stared down 48, 49, 50, I realized there was no more time for scrambling. I had just two years to grow up!

Bizarrely, that’s when I decided to train for my first marathon. Never in my previous five or six lives did I ever dream of running one. I have flat-feet for gadsakes.

But in the middle of some hot flash of genius, this idea came to me: The marathon had something to teach me.

I figured that by chasing that terrifying goal, I might develop superior commitment, discipline, focus, even fearlessness, and perhaps other things (maybe a tight runner’s butt?), which I could apply to my career.

Because there are a few really big things I want to accomplish and time, as they say, is running.

So far, my strategy has worked, for running anyway. This April, a week after I turn 50, I will toe the line of my third marathon, at the big kahuna of all marathons, Boston. Yes, I qualified in the 50 to 54 age group. Yep, moving into THAT age category (another set of numbers to prepare for.)

But I’m okay with it. Really, I am. I mean, I’ve been preparing for 50 for more than two years now. How bad can it be when it really happens?

Oh that sounds crotchety. I apologize on behalf of the 10,000 species (or more) that went extinct last year  (and, oh, why not the 22 percent of all species that may be extinct by 2022 if no action is taken).

Is there an angst gene that suddenly turns on as we approach 50? I haven’t felt this way since I was a kid, worrying every time I turned on the TV (everything in black & white back then), that this might be the moment, regular programming of The Partridge Family interrupted by a newsflash of the big flash: Nuclear war has broken out. 

Now the world around me in this wet whimper of a winter seems not just ill, but carooming toward some bad end. So-called free markets enslaving the poor. People starving when there is more than enough food to feed everyone. A handful of corporations controlling food, drugs & education and therefore our very minds and bodies. Democracies throwing citizens under the corporate bus. And the economy just keeps unravelling at its plastic seams.

But there is one word that keeps me from despairing.

It captures one of those ideas that seems so obvious and and true and right when you hear it explained.

Permaculture — as in permanent human culture. It’s about designing human systems that work in harmony with nature rather than against nature because, obviously, we are a part of it. Screw nature and we screw ourselves, eventually.

Permaculture has been catching on with food growers since Aussies Bill Mollison and David Holmgren developed the idea in the mid 1970s. They said, before designing a food system, study the master, as in the most productive innovative, self-renewing designer of all time, nature. Then mimic nature, which is complex, rather than design in our own image, which tends to the self serving and simplistic.

So what do we get with permaculture?

*Good healthy organic crops, obviously, because nature offers her bounty without the crutch of chemical pesticides or genetically modified seeds (and 99 studies say organic agriculture can feed the world versus 0 studies that say industrial chemical agriculture can).

*Crops that mimic what would grow naturally in a region (for example, a complex mix of perennial grains in the prairies versus monocultures of annuals).

*Local sustainable food systems and new care and respect for every inch of land we stand on and the human stewards who care for it.

*A waste-free system that sustains itself, by recycling waste and using available energy.

*A go-slow approach that values creativity, diversity, human and natural traditions and careful scientific observation.

And that’s just poking at the fecund edges of what permaculture means.

Permaculture is catching on in urban design and architecture (LEED-certified buildings being an example). It’s central in transition-times thinking, as in how to survive peak oil, peak food, peak economic meltdown.

But how do we “permaculture” the areas we work in — energy, natural resources, business, banking, online, retail, heath-care, education, travel, entertainment?

How do we think in permaculture?

Who do we create and live permaculture lives?

For more, check out this video.

Sorry dear readers for the dreadful pun, but welcome to my new “Webb” site. I will be blogging regularly here in the new year, on my obsession to make 2012 stupendously super awesome.

I have already logged 80 kilometres towards that goal, leaving only 1,180 training kilometres to run until I cross the finish line at the Boston Marathon, April 16. My goal? To be in the best shape of my life, ever.

I’m also thrilled to say that I’m heading into the homestretch of my future-of-food novel, set in a green valley in the future & I will be chatting about that at the Guelph Organic Conference, January 27.

In the meantime, check out “Eating Canada“ to take an eating tour of Canada via my book, Apples to Oysters: A Food Lover’s Tour of Canada ( sample the first chapter for free!). There are also articles about local eating tours of Ontario and my Toronto Star series, “Crisis on the Farm,” in which your scribe cracked open a dastardly plot to make it nearly impossible to raise organic turkeys in Ontario. I believe my line —  it may be easier to buy crack cocaine in Ontario than a drug-free bird — may have roused the ag minister to take action to save organic turkeys.

This January, I’m back at Ryerson University teaching Writing for Magazines and the Web in the Magazine Publishing program in Continuing Education. Please check it out if you want to polish your talents for blogging, writing short articles and features or bringing a reader-friendly glow to corporate, policy, grant or PR writing.

And I can’t help serving up some food for thought for the holidays: If every Canadian ate the recommended 5 to 10 servings of fruit and veggies a day, we could save the Canadian health care system more than $6 billion dollars. So eat your fruit and veggies, preferably grown sustainably and close to home.

And on that note, go for a walk or be in a big hurry to get healthy and run! It’s really good for you. After eating my way across Canada researching and promoting my book, I bumped up my old-lady, flat-footed shuffling and trained to run a marathon, fell in love with it, ran a second marathon, and qualified for the big kahuna of races, the Boston Marathon. Oh, and I lost 20 pounds in the process. Check out the picture up there. That’s me, scampering up Mt. Kilimanjaro this past June (more on that TK).

If you want to get in touch with me, it’s easy. Just point and click the “contact” button in the top right-hand side of the navigation bar. I’d love to hear from you.

Happy holidays.

mw