An old friend asks how I’m doing. Ours has been one of those friendships that survives decades of separation. The time we shared still glows like an ember after a long fire. His affection is not faked, so neither can be my response. But what to say?

I don’t know, is the truth. My health seems OK after various scares over the years. Aches and pains, memory loss, but all “age-appropriate,” apparently. No doubt some microbe lurks in a corner of me, readying its attack, but that’s more than I know. We’re all dying all the time, but for now I’m not actively, knock wood.

I am deeply gladly married as my friend knows I wasn’t for most of my span: an everyday bonanza. And we’ve a dog we love and family and friends we love and a place we love and memories we love. And I’ve got my readers, whose affectionate attention keeps me chugging – and improving, I’m convinced, though I’m hardly the one to judge. And I’ve got time, blest empty hours to feel the time. Never have I pondered more, which I love doing, though not where my thoughts take me.

The more I think, the more I think humanity’s messed up. This is not, I’m pretty sure, the grouchiness of senescence harping on the good old days, rather the shock of revelation.

Living my life, I hadn’t time to think much about it, too busy whizzing through my time like a high-speed train, barely noticing the views. Sweet or bitter I hadn’t time to savor, it was on to the next thing and the next. Ambling now, instead of racing, I notice more, and what we notice isn’t guaranteed to please.

I notice, terribly, all I’ve missed along the way, words I haven’t read, thoughts thought, music heard. Though not conspicuously idle or indolent it’s as if I’d bumbled through a museum blindfolded. Seeing takes time and I shortchanged perception with action. This awareness aches.

I notice, too, the bewilderment of my tribe. We are all blinded – by greed, selfishness, ignorance, indifference. We disrespect one another and scoff at truth. We don’t use our heads or listen to our hearts. Our politics for almost a decade have rattled me like dice in a cup. Call me addlepated but I’m persuaded we’re hurtling to our demise – and we know it, deep down. But do we do anything about it? Man’s achievements are awesome, but our defects may prove our undoing. This dread makes these latter years anxious when I’d been counting on ease.

I’m also stalked by the clock, which I did not expect. I don’t fear death, it will come when it will, but oh, the immensity of my non-accomplishment! I groan with Shakespeare’s Richard II, “I wasted time and now doth time waste me!” This leads to feeling hurried, harried.

I tell my friend about the arrival of God in my life. It was a big deal, that unfathomable, illimitable presence – comforting in one way, but agonizing in another. He expects so much more of me than I deliver. While flattered by His encouragement, I keep feeling I’ve let Him down. Why not more, better, kinder? I never used to think such thoughts, too busy; now, for the first time, I feel the need for forgiveness, absolution. The words of my boyhood Confession aren’t just words: “I have left undone those things which I ought to have done and done those things which I ought not to have done and there is no health in me.”

I’d been hoping for a happier homeward jog.