I am now in my eighth decade. When I was in my second and third decade, I wondered - and consumed myself with anxiety - as I was confronted with the mysteries that lay ahead of me. Now those mysteries are solved - some of them anyway. So what does the landscape look like now?
Swivelling around and looking back over my mottled shoulder, what strikes me most is that at some level, I haven’t changed at all. I am still chaotic, , puzzled, curious, thin skinned, somewhat naive and - ridiculously at my age. - acutely aware of my appearance. All those years of effort, to become a better person, or at least a different person, have utterly failed. The essential aspects of my body/mind are the same. I am, it appears, a fixed quantity.
But, paradoxically perhaps, things have changed nonetheless, irrespective of my perceptions. The cells that constitute my body have been replaced entirely, five or six times. So in a sense there is nothing left of the original ‘me’ at all. And since nothing of the physical me is left, I cannot be my body.
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