Possibilities

The shrinking of possibilities is one of the most sobering realities of aging.  What was easy ranges from hard to impossible. 

Squatting comes to mind.  As does getting down and back up in a finite number of muscular moves.  

When Will squats to fix the pump or when I see a younger woman squatting to pick up her baby with ease, I find myself staring longingly at those (formerly, to me) possible moves. 

High heeled shoes, bikini anything, falling in love all over again--well, you get the idea.  Even things you never actually did when you could have--at least once upon a time were possible. 

I looked at my hands yesterday and thought, "Whose old hands are those?"  Truth is they match the other parts, but I rarely actually scrutinize the other parts.   But hands--the crooked index finger on my right hand, the resemblance to sausages in hot weather (okay cold weather too), the splotches--I see them every day.  It always comes as a shock that I have hands this old.  If it happened overnight, it would be grotesque, but it happened slowly while I was busy doing other things, a cell and a second at a time.

There are compensations, however.  The trick is to find them and get so immersed in them that we temporarily forget the possibilities that have slipped away while following the new ones. 

When I'm watching art videos or trying out things I never knew were possible before, age is a big nothing.   I may not look as young as I feel in those moments, but how I look isn't the yardstick anymore.