How Gracefully the Moon Ages

I just took a tennis lesson with a pro, Norson, after a year of not seeing him.

When I walked onto the court, he said, “I remember you!"

And, “Here we are, a year later.”

I smiled. I had been at this resort once before, and had liked his style. Norson had helped me with my backhand volley.

I was happy to see him. My volley still needs work.

“Yes!” I said. “Here we are, a year later. All of my body parts are a year older too.”

I was thinking of the torn labrum in my left shoulder, my tennis elbow acting up in my right, the plantar fasciitis that appears now and then.

“Mmm,” Norson murmured.

He didn't stop there, though. “No one says that about the moon. The moon is just the moon. We don’t think of some parts being older than other parts. The moon is just the moon.”

I considered that for a moment.

The moon is 4.53 billion or so years old.

As the moon quietly ages, I’m thinking, “I wish I had my old shoulder back. I wish for all those years doing yoga when I only had issues with my right shoulder and not my left. I wish, I wish, I wish...”

My shoulder woes started with a torn labrum from a hiking fall. But then, my body stepped up to the plate and started protecting itself. The subscapularis, serratus anterior, and other anatomical parts with complicated names started working harder to hold that weaker shoulder together.

It's as if the shoulder was saying, “Lock ‘er down!”

So, it turned into frozen shoulder, which made it all worse.

All that time, though, the moon was hanging out in the sky. Just glowing, doing its thing. It was there long before me, and it will be there long after me.

According to Norson, the moon is not lamenting the age of its highlands of igneous rocks. Or the birthdays of its maria, the dark lava flows we can see from Earth.

The moon is just the moon.

I suppose this is a helpful perspective—that as large as we think our life is, as important as everything in our calendar today is, we are still but a speck on the planet. A speck in the universe.

There’s that Aboriginal saying: “I thought I was planning. And all the while I was being blown across the sky by a great wind.”

What might I be doing if I weren’t worrying about my tiny little life? About what I once had, or what I once was? What if I didn't notice the hyperpigmentation on my face, or the arthritis in my right knee?

And what if I stopped muscling through it all?

What if I instead go with the flow? And instead, ask myself, how do I want to live this very brief dash that I have?

Even today’s dash. I can think about how to live this day. The short little hyphen that it is.