Getting older is less about losing time, and more about feeling it pass through you.

There is a moment that comes discreetly, without announcement, when you realise that you have become one of the older people in the room. Not old in the dramatic sense, not the kind of old we imagined when we were young, but old enough to notice that time is no longer something abstract. It has weight now. It sits in the body, in the joints, in the way the morning begins a little more slowly than it used to.

I don’t remember deciding to become this age. I was busy working, studying, raising children, starting over, learning new things, learning the same lessons again, and suddenly I look at my hands and think: when did this happen. The skin is thinner, the veins more visible, the strength still there but not as automatic as before. Nothing is wrong, exactly. It is just different, and the difference keeps increasing in small, almost polite steps.