I swear it's true - reaching down to pick something up from the ground gets harder and harder every year.
Ironic really, given that I'm probably shrinking a little bit as the seasons pass. You'd think a bit of a stoop and some general lowering of the centre of gravity would help. But nope, definitely more effort required to reach the shoelaces every morning these days.
So why does the earth feel further away than it used to? It clearly isn't, maybe it is just the sense I feel that the earth is calling me downwards. And my old bones are resisting gravity's pull as a last stubborn stand against the inevitable march of time?
Life, it is so very cyclical isn't it? We're born to be low down to the ground, literally. Unable to stand and designed to spend that first year crawling around on our bellies in the dirt.
But instinctively we want to raise ourselves up, to reach for the heavens, aspire to be tall. And we grow like weeds, pushing upwards and onwards. We leave the dirt behind, we want far horizons, blue skies, we want the stars themselves.
After a couple of decades or so we reach our peak. We are naturally the fittest, strongest and most fertile we'll ever be. Of-course we then spend the next couple of dozen years trying to maintain this peak, striving to extend the virility. Working endlessly to push, pull and drag ourselves up to a new plateau where we hope we'll feel safe and secure, beyond the reach of the inevitable decline. Never imagining that we too will succumb to frailty and become diminished versions of ourselves some day.
But slowly, and it is ever so slowly at first, gravity pulls us back down to earth. Gravity and time bow our heads, bear down on our shoulders, slow our steps. We may not want to admit it, but we can certainly feel the earth calling us down. That's right folks, we all know it's true, (although none of us want to think about it) - nobody gets out of here alive.
And so the circle of life, we suddenly realise, isn't like a merry-go-round but actually more like a Ferris wheel, the ground seeming to rush up towards us, our ride nearly over. Too soon, way too soon.
But we are returning to earth - back where we came from, back to where it all started.
