The Midlife Moment of Truth

The clock marks the flow of time,

A circle of segmented reminders

Seconds become minutes, minutes merge into hours

Every day the sun rises, and usual routines fill up our calendars

Each innocuous day adds up to months, years into decades,

Instance by instance, layer after layer,

Time moves ever so smoothly, a continuous river

Never stopping, never pausing

The lull of seamless sequencing

An unsuspecting mind holds on to an image

And yet a sudden revelation of age

The grey strands that show up one morning from nowhere

A slight paunch that refuses to go anywhere

Eyes that miss the fine print,  one fine day

That sudden onset of decay

Age, a discontinuous awareness.

A grudging acceptance

The pushing game of peaks and plateaus

An invitation to mature,

To shake off the illusion of repair

To  see through the myth of reversal

To embrace the illusion of renewal.

The youngest cell in my body is but a few seconds old

The oldest may be seven years, I am told

Did any carry over intact from the womb?

Every second a cell dies, a thought dies and an idea is put to a tomb;

A new cell is born, new thoughts bombard and ideas survive

Age, an ambiguous, a non parametric premise

With infinite possibilities and a singular promise

Continuity of each moment alive

Cell by cell, breath by breath,

Continuity of a discontinuous life.