I went to my country house recently and received, without asking for it, a lesson in aging.
The building was crumbling. My bailiff explained that he was doing everything possible — but the house was old. The plane trees I'd planted myself had grown gnarled and sparse; he assured me he was caring for them — but those trees were old. And then a stooped old man shuffled past the gate, and I asked who he was, and was told it was Felicio, who used to run to greet me when I arrived, whose father managed the estate, who had been my favorite among the household since he was a child. He looked at me with dim eyes and I could see his teeth were going.
Everything I looked at was aging alongside me. The house I'd built, the trees I'd planted, the boy I'd watched grow — all of us on the same slope, just at different points on the descent.
I want to tell you what I've come to think about this, because I spent an embarrassing amount of time resisting it before I understood it: old age, when you know how to use it, is full of its own pleasures. Not the same pleasures as youth — different ones, quieter ones. Fruit is most welcome when nearly at its end. The last drink of an evening is the one that satisfies. Each pleasure keeps its best for last, if you're paying attention.
And here is what I mean by paying attention: the appetite quiets. The wanting that drove so many years of striving gradually stills, and in the stillness there is something that turns out to be quite good. Not absence — presence. The presence of what actually is, uncluttered by the noise of what you're still trying to get.
Each day is a complete life in miniature — it has its dawn and its dusk, its beginning and its close. Heraclitus said that one day is equal to every day, and I think he was right: not because days are identical, but because a single day contains everything that life contains. Light and dark, effort and rest, the small deaths of sleep. A person who has lived one day well has understood something essential.
There's a man I've heard of who used to hold a funeral for himself every evening — had himself carried from the dining room to his chamber while music played and voices chanted he has lived, he has lived. He did it from vanity and excess. But I want to do something like it from a better motive: to end each day by saying, simply and honestly, I have lived. Whatever was given me today, I have used it. If there is no tomorrow, this was enough.
That man is happiest who can await the morrow without apprehension. When a man has said "I have lived," every morning he arises he receives a bonus.
And today's thought, which I borrowed from the enemy camp and claim as common property: it is wrong to live under constraint; but no man is constrained to live under constraint. This is about more than one thing. It's about the daily constraints we accept without examining — the obligations that have calcified into fate, the habits that have hardened into necessity. On all sides lie short paths to freedom, if you're willing to look for them.
No one can be kept in life against their will. And no one need live their life as if they were.
Yours, with what remains of the day,