Time

I turned 60 this past January, which affected me a little more mentally than turning 40 or 50 did, although in truth my health is good so I feel fortunate to be able to do anything that I ever did-albeit a bit slower. My hair has become mostly gray at last and my paunch a little more stubborn, but I still climb mountains daily, thus attribute whatever physical decline I notice to the extra few pounds rather than to any particular affect of aging. That is, my body could easily walk the country a second time if my mind chose to do that, so a lifetime of walking and good genes have blessed me, and I never forget my good fortune.
        Long ago I had an intuition that I would live until my early 80's and I have thought about what I wish to be done with my body after I die. My preference would be to be laid out on the ground somewhere so that the animals and insects and bacteria could consume me in the same way that I have consumed them all my life, but that is frowned upon in Western culture; for economic reasons I'll probably accept cremation as the simplest disposal. When I lament burning up in a fire as a somewhat unnatural waste of flesh, I remember that wildfires are common in nature and that ultimately the entire Earth will be incinerated by the expanding sun-so what is 'natural' is quite an expansive definition. At any rate my family will be able to scatter my ashes wherever they choose and so that is dust to dust and atom to atom.
       In his book "When Breath Become Air", neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi describes his stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis at the age of 36, and in the final paragraph of the book he writes a simple message to his eight month old daughter who will never know him:
                "When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you have filled a dying man's days with a sated joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing".
               So life goes on, and we all grow old and die, and nature eventually reclaims even the bulldozers that scar her. All is as it should be.