Although Buffalo Park was a slip and slide mud festival after last week’s snowfall, I walked a mid-day lap on Sunday. People who had driven up the hill to see the snow clustered around the entry to the park, squealing as they made snowballs and snapped photos. I sloshed alone through the melting snow patches on the Nate Avery trail.
About a half hour in, I heard the steady cadence of a runner behind me. He trotted by, buffed and sturdy and splattered with mud. He looked like the human equivalent of a rugged offroad sports utility vehicle in a car commercial. He wore what looked like a heavy backpack, sunglasses, and shorts. His legs were muscular magnificence. He radiated a musky, feral life force.
Just ahead was a chin-up bar. The runner detoured off the trail, glided to the bar and
tucked into a half dozen pull ups. As I passed by, I watched him exert, heard his labored
breath, and marveled at the human body—its beauty, its capabilities—all more acutely
compelling in the face of their eventual decay. I was transfixed, as if I were in the
presence of something too powerful to fully understand.
On my way home I thought about the runner and those feelings. When I told the story
later to a friend, she chided me. She heard it as a lament about my aging body. The
runner is at his apex; I am in decline. Stop whining, she said, your body still works just
fine. But that wasn’t it. Yes, my age was a factor in my swirl of feelings, but it wasn’t the
violin section for a pity party. It is my age that gave me the vantage point to take in all
the marvel the runner unleashed in me.
If my life is a hike, (my analogy of choice) what I know now is that the further along I go,
the better the view, the higher I climb, the better the vista. When I watched that runner I
wasn’t thinking of my body—my creaky knee, my fading eyesight, my inability to do chin
ups any longer–or of his body, really. Instead, I was thinking of all young bodies
everywhere and their offhand beauty, the gravitational pull of their physicality, the
beguiling and beautiful sight of a human being in top physical form. From my vantage
point now as a woman in her sixties, I not only see a bigger picture, I feel a more acute
depth to my response. Beauty is everywhere, calling me to witness it. This, I find, is
easier from my vantage point.
When I was young girl, one of my favorite Olympic sports to watch was high diving. It
was only seconds that they twirled and tucked between board and the water, but it
mesmerized me. The perfection of their bodies and their movements. The contours of
their thigh muscles, the industrial strength of their shoulders. The control and mastery
and command. My feelings were never sexualized; instead, it felt to me like watching
music and being silenced by my good fortune at beholding something close to
perfection.
I read a story recently in Forbes about a 46-year-old California billionaire
obsessed with reversing his aging process. It has become his life’s work. He has a
herd of 30 doctors, a $2 billion annual tab for medical tests, and a rigid regime for
his sleep, diet and exercise. Something tells me he is a drag at parties. Why go
back when you can clamber up to the next peak and see it all as part of something
larger than yourself?
One of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott, said in a recent Washington Post piece
that age has given her two distinct gifts: softness and illumination. I’m adding one
more to that list: perspective. In the illumination she writes of, I’ve come to know that I
can see in ways I was never able to when I was at my physical peak. And I have found
beauty in the most ordinary of places, sometimes covered in mud. This wasn’t possible
to see until I hiked further along the path.
