Every morning I conduct a small audit.
It takes perhaps thirty seconds. I lie in bed — a very good bed; I am 152 years old and I have earned the mattress — and I ask my body how it is getting along. The hips: serviceable. The knees: a minor editorial comment but nothing I would call a complaint. The heart, which has been chemically persuaded to behave itself for years now, is beating with the quiet competence of a civil servant who has made peace with her job. The mind is, as always, the last to check in. It arrives at the meeting slightly rumpled, holding a coffee it doesn’t remember pouring, and announces that it is, on balance, still here.
I have been conducting this audit every morning for as long as I can remember, which is quite a long time. What has changed, in recent years, is what I am listening for. I am no longer checking for problems. I am checking — and I hope you will forgive an old woman a private honesty — for the particular quality of stillness that would tell me the whole enterprise is, at last, winding down.