I love getting older. Getting older has meant discovering a new appetite for life I never knew before. Can I say it has been an exuberant discovery?
How fortunate I feel that this is a realization I have now, and not in the dire moments of my final breath when I might suddenly realize what could have been. I don’t expect a final moment filled with painful regrets and a desperate grasping for roads not taken.
Now is the time I feel free to put off the constraints that have restricted my jumping into life. It is a time of joy and exhilaration. Unlike what is expected for old people, it is not a time of putting aside, of regretful separation from what I can no longer do. I only feel the pained limits of my aging body. But even that is not as bad as I had anticipated in my grim imagination.
I have been nibbling life around the edges and now I can embrace life with open awareness and penetrating abandon. I have been planting flowers with care and watched them grow with pleasure. Now I am part of them, smell them, feel them, grow with them, wallow in their glorious beauty.
I have walked a narrow path in the woods and found delight, never realizing I could wander through the wild flowers and roll in the leaves.