On the taste of water

As age creeps up from behind one becomes more content with simpler things. Water instead of tea or soda, for instance; except that water tastes stronger and more fortifying and more essential. One's morning cup of coffee tastes all the sweeter for being the harbinger of a new day that one is allowed to live and savor the fruits of the earth. The apprehension of the world; the taming of the senses: we learn to cut out what is no longer necessary. Over the years, we learn. We filter music out of noise, and come to love the most beautiful music of all, that which is found in silence. We learn to cut out the chaos of all that our eyes can see and focus on what is meaningful to us, that which we can paint, or frame in the rectangle of the viewfinder. We eat no longer to devour the world but to delight in the flavors and scents that set our heart beating with the language that it speaks, and the tapestry of memories it invokes. We breathe, we remember, and we teach. We pass on the arguments and the answers, the craft and skill that has become embodied in flesh and muscle and movement. And blind ambition and desperation and seeking give way to allowing things to be, and telescoping outwards from the individuality of selfhood to being part of mankind, and being content in the knowledge that if meaning is not found this this generation, perhaps we will come a little closer to it in the next. With this one must be content.