I told you not long ago that old age was in sight. I was wrong. It's behind me now — I've walked past it without noticing, and some other word applies to what I am these days, at least to this body. Old age is tired. What I have is closer to worn through.
Still, I want to thank myself out loud, with you as the witness. My mind hasn't aged. My constitution has, my old weaknesses have, but something in me stayed sharp, and it's lighter now, having dropped most of what it used to carry. It actually argues with me that this is its best season. I'm inclined to let it have the point and see what it can do with it.
Here's the question I keep sitting with: how much of this calm is wisdom, and how much is just that I've run out of the energy certain vices require. I try to be honest about the difference — what I've truly outgrown, versus what simply stopped being available to me. There's no shame in losing capacities that were never going to last. The complaint is optional.
Everything I've said or done up to now proves nothing. It's a rehearsal, not the performance.
I've started treating each day like a hearing where the verdict's still open — not to torture myself, but because I want to know if I actually believe what I've spent my life saying, or if I've just gotten good at saying it. Talk is cheap; even cowards give brave speeches. What I've done matters. What I do at the very end will be the only evidence that counts, and I've stopped being afraid of that trial. I want it, actually. I'm done performing courage — I want to find out if I have it.
I say all this to myself, but I mean it for you too. You're younger, and it doesn't matter — there's no schedule for this. You don't get to know where or when, so the only sane move is to be ready everywhere, always.
Learning how to die is really just learning how to stop being owned.
Think about it — not morbidly, just steadily, the way you'd rehearse anything that only gets one real take. Someone who's made peace with dying can't be threatened anymore. Bars, deadlines, diagnoses, other people's power over your days — none of it lands the same way. There's only one leash left on any of us, and it's how much we love being alive. You don't have to cut it. Just wear it thin enough that when the moment comes, it doesn't hold you back from doing what you were always going to have to do anyway.
Be well.