One of the great joys of aging.
Is coming to know ourselves.
Annoying ourselves in a way we never could have as youths.
With a gentleness and a compassion we used to only reserve for others,
While too often being harsh with ourselves.
This self-knowledge comes to us as the doubts and the strivings and the anxieties that mar our early adulthoods are burned away in the cauldron of experience.
We know now what we are worth.
It seems so easy at times to take for granted the subtleness that comes with self-knowledge.
We might say or feel.
I'm not a person who.
.
.
And now feel no regret or desire for change.
I ran into an old friend I hadn't seen in well over a decade.
A dinner with him and his new partner.
He had recently returned from a four-month trek in Europe.
The toll of long hikes through the Dolomites,
Staying in huts in the rainy Pyrenees,
And waiting out a hailstorm in the Lake District.
My partner and I marveled at these wonderful experiences that felt no compunction to try them ourselves.
We are not trekkers of mountain trails,
Nor have any desire to sleep in a hut.
We'll take trains and an Airbnb and walk along Cobblestone streets.
In the past,
I might have felt some sense of deficiency compared to my friend for choosing a more comfortable road.
But now,
With age,
I find it easy to celebrate the choices of others and rest gently in the comfort of my own.
Knowing who we are and who we are not,
And being safe within that.
It's one of the great joys of aging.
If any of this sounds familiar,
If you find that now you know and love yourself for who you've become as you've aged,
I hope it'll take this awareness with you into the day.
To enrich your life even more than the lives of all you meet.
