Journalist Krista Tippett describes an embodied form of grace—the surprising grace of aging. As our minds and bodies slow down, we make space for simple contentment:
To inhabit my body in all its grace and its flaws appears as a gift for the new/mundane bodily territory I’m on in midlife. Aging is the ultimate slow motion loss, inevitable for us all, and yet somehow for me and everyone I know, it’s come as a surprise. You hit a point where it’s no longer so incremental, and no longer amenable to cover up. The original dance between order and chaos takes over our bodies inside and out—even with lots of yoga. As I watched my children move through the primal metamorphosis of adolescence, I made a decision to be fascinated rather than terrified. I’m trying to impose the same discipline on my reaction to myself on this end of aging’s metamorphosis.
There is grief to be had, to be sure, and fear, and lots of simple dismay. But settling into this as best I am able, I experience a wholly unexpected gift of contentment. Contentment is not something I’ve known much in my life and not something I ever really knew I wanted. This, too, is the body’s grace—a gift of physiology, right there alongside my fading hair and skin. At younger ages, our brains are tuned to learn by novelty. At this stage in life, they incline to greater satisfaction in what is routine. Slowing down is accompanied by space for noticing. I am embodied with an awareness that eluded me when my skin was so much more glowy. I become attentive to beauty in ordinary, everyday aspects of my life. There is nothing more delicious than my first cup of tea in the morning; no experience more pleasurable than when my son, now much taller than me, wraps me in a hug; no view I find more breathtaking, over and over again, than the white pine that stands day in and day out behind my backyard.
Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living (Penguin, 2016), 72–73.o
She's still a kid. One of the pleasures of memory loss is to read a book all over again, having forgotten until maybe the middle of it that you have indeed read it before--same with some movies and tv shows. Of course, the more memorable ones still stick in my mind.