I had a hilarious conversation today with an old friend about red toenails, both of us sporting nails of this color for much of our lives. She described carefully painting her own toes, something neither of us have done ourselves in recent years, getting red varnish on her skin as well as the nail itself. ‘Don’t worry about the polish on your skin’ she said cheerfully ‘it will come off eventually in the shower’. As we discussed the increasing difficulty of reaching one’s toes from a sitting position I stood up and touched my toes from standing. I can still do this even with straight legs, no bending at the knees even, which brought relief. I also experimented with sitting on my computer chair and putting my feet on my desk, also easy to reach the toes with a brush.
These are the kind of conversations I had never thought about, assuming when younger that aging meant getting older with attendant wrinkles and shrinkage, hopefully decent health but one’s ordinary body intact. I never considered slowing down and now I am not even certain what that means. Am I allowed days in a chair by the pool, sitting in the shade staring up at the mountains that surround us doing nothing but daydreaming? I have always been happy not to get dressed all day and have a rack of dressing gowns in every shade to prove it, but to stop or slow down wasn’t part of any conversation I had with myself. Now I find my body telling me to listen to the voice that begs for better sleep and less to do. How ironic that this is what I am hearing as we emerge from the lockdown of a pandemic. More silence, less doing.
