I found myself thinking about aging this week while on vacation at the same spot on the coast of Maine where we’ve been coming for the past twenty years or so. Not much changes here. Each year a cottage or two may get a bit of renovation. Just enough. Maybe one wall gets moved to make room for a slightly larger screened porch or the postage-stamp kitchen gets new linoleum.
But this summer is an exception. This year some things are a good bit different. This summer both my husband and Roger, our big old dog, are feeling their age. Robert has a mysteriously sore knee, and rather than walk with Roger, assorted friends, and me around a boggy conservation area where we scout every morning for frogs, beaver, and an occasional bald eagle, he sits on the porch reading a detective novel, with a bag of frozen peas flopped across his elevated knee. And Roger, who seems to be feeling the pain in his arthritic knees more acutely in this moist air, just sniffs his food bowl, walks away, and plops himself down on the floor of the porch where the breeze off the bay comes up through the slatted floorboards.
“He’s not eating today,” Robert announced this morning. “Maybe we’ll have to get him something really tasty at the market later on,” he says. “ I think maybe he’s just getting old and isn’t as hungry as he used to be,” I reply. And so I leave them together on the porch and wander outside on my own.
In this quiet, sweet place where time truly seems to stand still, change is still the one constant. Here, though the changes are subtler and show up as things like occasional Internet access in one or two spots on the farmhouse porch, time marches right along. The brave 5 and 6 year-olds, who jump off the end of the pier at high tide with the teenagers and the grownups, look just like our daughters, who are no longer 5 or even 13, but 22 and 30 and living out their lives far from this quiet cove on the coast of Maine.
I wouldn’t have it any other way. Despite the toll that aging takes on our physical and mental bodies, I trust that we are part of a life force, of God or Spirit, a divine love and mystery that is at the heart of all that is, and that we, too, are ageless and without form. And I trust that, as Spirit, we are intimately connected to each other, to all life forms, and to our past, our present, and our future.
And so as these physical bodies, our cells in all their intricacy, inevitably wear down and we stay on the porch soothing our aging joints with a bag of frozen peas or maybe choosing not to eat just now even though there’s cheddar cheese sprinkled all over our kibble, Spirit, our true nature, remains stunning in its perfection, its beauty and timelessness. Just knowing that is all the reality I need. And it is the only reality I trust.
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