I am slowing down. We all are at my age. Every faculty – except perhaps reflection – is functioning less efficiently. We can’t move as fast or steadily, ingest or digest as reliably, see or hear as precisely as we were wont. These are facts, neither tragic nor comic, sad nor happy. It is thus for all creatures always and thank goodness, for who could enjoy a show that never ends?

I mention this not to elicit sympathy or admiration, but to explore. Beneath the obvious collects the unconsidered, like an aquifer. Every place is new to a traveler with eyes. The verdict “same old” suggests an eye condition.

Slowing down has advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages are too obvious to cite. The advantages include senior discounts, a seat on a crowded subway – in Rome, not Manhattan – amazement in a grandchild’s gaze (to think, their parent had a parent!). Also, if pride has troubled you as a sort of lust, its abatement. Wherever you’ve arrived is as far as you’re going, so relax, take a load off your feet.

Slowing down one goes slower. This is not the tautology it seems. Slowing down one notices more. I never paid much attention to my body, for example. It didn’t shame or advantage me, it worked fine. Only when it started malfunctioning did its intricacy astound. Oh how those sinews, bones, blood vessels, corpuscles, nerves, organs collaborated to do their work (unlike the U.S. Congress), supporting and deferring to one another for the benefit of the whole. God is a matter of opinion, but whoever contrived creation was one hell of a tinkerer! That humans even figured out how we function – in a mere few centuries – is a miracle of another sort.

Slowing down I ponder more. You can’t think sprinting. Walking (and pausing to catch your breath) you must think or sicken with tedium (unless you’re listening through earbuds). The more you see, the more there is to. As slow cooking makes food tastier, slow motion makes existence more wondrous. Pondering, if that’s your bent, one works through many of the worries that for millennia have plagued mankind. Epistemology, eschatology, ethics, logic, metaphysics, aesthetics no longer keep me up at night. I don’t know all the answers, God knows, but I’m sure humans have, for our own reasons, needlessly complicated the quandary of being. Puppy Henry thinks this too.

Slowing down – counterintuitively – existence grows jollier, more of a lark, as when a city’s gritty details resolve into gleaming patterns as a plane rises. The littler we are, the less we matter, the freer to enjoy our mereness. Humility is no saintly surrender but acceptance of the evident. Sooner or later it’s dust to dust, so let’s party, bro.

Some old people get grouchy as their capacities slacken. Maybe I will too, but I haven’t yet. Something like the opposite seems to be occurring. Aging melts me into a mensch, passionately devoted to beauty, truth, grace, peace, goodness and above all, love, for only such conclusions make sense. How often, Henry reminds me, humans mangle the beauty of being, harming instead of healing, striving for what’s not worth having. Daily our great hymn with its sweet tune plays in my brain:

Or as brother Henry (Thoreau) urged me half a century ago: “Simplify, simplify!”

This the greatest gift of slowing down.