Getting Older

"As we grow older…the beauty steals inward." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

This week I have a birthday. I enter the last year of my 40's - the age that in my youth I considered old.

The fresh unlined face that once stared back from the mirror is replaced by the wrinkles and effects of gravity that time bestows on all that travel through this life. The naive enthusiasm of youth now replaced with a quiet knowing, a comfortable acceptance of who I am and what is important to me. Age has come bearing its gifts.

I have come into alignment with myself, walking in
time to my own rhythm, trusting my own beat.

Scattered pieces now magnetized by my core, return
and slot in to places I didn't even know were empty.

A jigsaw coming together, edges done long ago, the
final bits are slipping easily into the missing spaces.

Fragments I suspected long gone, were not lost, just hidden.

The final piece will reveal the whole picture,
I pick it up and gently put it into place.

As we travel this journey of life we need to keep letting go, evolving, adapting to the moment. We need to be sure that we don't have our hands so full of the past that we can't accept the gifts of the future.

How do you feel about getting older? Do you recognise the gifts?

"Coming into alignment" - taken from Out of My Ocean