I am just starting to be a part of the crowd who has a litany of complaints against aging.
I am not inclined to join them.
I
acknowledge the stiffness, the injuries, the sleeplessness, and the
digestive indignities. The embarrassment and even humiliation that
often comes with being publicly and inadvertantly marginalized simply
because you no longer vibrate with youthfulness may be surpassed by the
embarrassment of realizing how small a world you've invested in, how
forgettable your contributions are, and how many more times you must
repeat these same forgettable gestures before it's over. I also
acknowledge that aging can legitimately be understood as just: real slow
dying.
The thing is there's an oak tree in my
neighborhood and most winter mornings, its bare branches emerge from the
dark dark sky slowly as I walk the dog. I watch as the clarity of
daylight announces itself.
This is a pleasure that the young cannot see.
Many
of them are sleeping. But more than that, they have not been given the
gift of long life, of repetition, of the mundane becoming so familiar
and so pervasive that it begins to be worth noticing. One of the
pleasures of aging comes when we accept that our banal worlds, in all
their ordinariness, also offer us spectacular nuance as they
(inevitably) change incrementally.
No morning sky is
precisely the same when it dawns behind the oak tree in my
neighborhood. The air quality, the cloud cover, the temperature, a new
birds nest, a flickering streetlight.
The pleasure of
seeing anew can be found everywhere the more carefully we attend to our
tiny and in some ways disappointingly predictable worlds.
Nuance, dynamism and even death become gifts when we choose to look closely at the same thing over and over again.
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