My Life in Pants: The Balance Due - A poem of Aging and of Life

The Balance Due

When our days are young, youthfully new,
The flowers bloom quickly, and the trees are always verdant.
The grass is long, untouched—Wildly pristine.
The birds sing above, flying free and flagrant.

The brook bubbles quietly,
The water laughing as it flows.
And the clouds drift serene,
Timelessly slow and comfortably.

Those are endless days—

or so to us they seem.

The air is warm, but not too humid.
The wind is gentle, never pressing.
The ground is soft, a welcoming cradle,
The padding of nature, it beguiles us so.

It cushions us against most realities.

The breathless moments—
We never notice the restriction.
The heart pumping fast—
We do not consider the constriction.
Our muscles tighten, straining forward—

The world shifts beneath us—
We do not feel the weight.

We stubbornly sustain—
and thus, we prolong the illusion.

The rock does scrape, and the skin does bruise,
Yet we ignore those raw moments.
We are lulled by other things:

Soft grass.
Green leaves.
Birds that sing.
The joys of life and living.

We notice the scars, not.
We notice the pains, not.
We ignore completely all the stains.

The price, we are yet due to pay,
Though we owe it, unwittingly.

And we live in those new days for years,
Over a decade of such privilege,
An entitlement for our lifetime it did seem,
Those allowances.

But it is not.

Our days are never fully calculated.
Only the years are counted,
And celebrated.

Later in the day, our step becomes heavier.
Later in the day, nature’s padding becomes less.
Later in the day, bruises and scars become evident.
Later in the day, stains, we have to address.

Later in the day—
We feel each moment,
Each and every impact.

Endless, our days no longer seem—
Yet they still feel longer than they do short.

The ground is harder, and the grass not as soft.
The leaves begin to brown and fall.
The wind is less gentle than before.
And the clouds hurry overhead.

The sun is hot.
The air stifles.
Each breath takes more effort than before.

The sum of the bruises and the scars,
The accumulation of the persistent stains,
The totality of those many pains,
Those tallies come eventually to a count—

And they count against us.

Eyes that are new—
They see everything,
but miss everything too.

Our youth was a loan we never realized must be repaid.

Bittersweet, it seems.
Bittersweet it feels.
The taste is ever that,
But the bitterness never outweighs the sweetness.

We know the debt we owe,
and the payments are not all bitter.

The sweetness of life—the truth of it is,
We receive more than we are owed.
We earned less than we have spent.

We redeem more than we ever will repay.