This body is undeniably growing older, gradually disintegrating, moving toward its eventual disappearance, like a wave merging back into the ocean, which it never actually left. This growing up and growing old—like the ocean rising, cresting, and falling—is a movement in time, and time turns out to be a kind of imagination, a way of conceptualizing or thinking about what is happening. The only actual reality is the eternity of Here-Now, this one bottomless moment, from which we never depart, except in imagination, and that imagining only happens now…

As the body ages, I become in some ways more limited. I know, for example, that it’s too late to go to medical school, and I know that there are many people and places dear to my heart that I will never see again. That vast realm of future possibility is closing down and shrinking. And as I wrote about in my last book, Death: The End of Self-Improvement, that limitation is actually a blessing. It forces us to find freedom and fulfillment right here in this very moment.

And indeed, I feel increasingly unlimited in a deeper sense. I’ve been freed from the seductive allure of future possibilities. I’ve been brought home. I find myself ever more deeply appreciating the simple moments of love and joy in everyday life—a few words exchanged with someone I pass on my morning walk… the gorgeous song of a bird and my own heart leaping with joy on hearing it and another bird responding, the three of us somehow dancing together in a field of love… sitting later in my armchair, seeing the shadows of a flock of birds passing quickly again and again over the walls of the buildings across the way, shadows flashing out of emptiness and vanishing, and each time, the heart again leaping with joy, while the green leaves on the red bud tree outside my window shimmer in the light and the breeze. How simple it all is.

Joan Tollifson

Increasingly I feel that Tollifson is right, here. Growing old, I have been brought home in some strange way. Without entirely withdrawing, in the eremitic sense, from life and community, I seem to have found a peace in the midst of things that I had not expected to find.

How much of this rest and quietness of heart is down to aging, or to good company; how much is due to practice, and how much to sheer grace I have no idea. I don’t really know if those distinctions make any sense, even in their own context. I do know that I would not exchange these days for any, or all, of the days of my youth.

The last light of evening between the trees is a soft lilac grey, a colour beyond imagining, that will last only minutes now. The fringe of ragged cloud above is darkening moment by moment, and the birds have gone quiet, even our neighbours the seagulls who breed and roost on the buildings across the road. After what seems like weeks, the air is cool and damp. There is more rain on the way.