SURPRISE
Aging arrived quietly, but it never felt quiet. It felt like a crisis warming in the distance, a low-grade tremor beneath the floorboards. No alarms, no sirens—just a subtle shift in the air, as if something was preparing to announce itself. I awakened one morning and realized my body had begun keeping secrets. My memory, too. Even my confidence. Everything I once trusted started to wobble, just slightly, like a table with one uneven leg.
No one explained to me that aging was less about decline and more about surprise. The unexpected became a daily companion. A knee that clicked. A name that slipped. A sudden awareness of how quickly decades had folded themselves into a single afternoon. I began to understand that time isn’t a straight line but a tide—pulling, returning, and reshaping the shoreline of my life.
Yet the crisis I anticipated never fully arrived. Instead, aging revealed itself in small, startling moments: finding my mother’s hands at the ends of my arms, hearing my father’s voice in my own, and realizing I’d become the person younger people look toward for steadiness. I didn’t plan for that. I didn’t expect it. But there it was—a quiet authority I didn’t know I was growing.
The real shock was how tender aging felt. How soft. How strangely luminous. I started paying attention to things I once rushed past: the way morning light pools on the kitchen counter, the way a friend’s laugh can lift the whole day, the way my own heart still startles at beauty. I soon realized the crisis I feared was never a collapse, just a turning—a reorientation, a deeper listening.
Aging was and still is unexpected, for it continuously reveals me to myself, not all at once but in small, shimmering increments. And maybe that’s the unexpected truth: I am still becoming, even now. Not in spite of aging, but because of it.
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