It happened in the middle of something painfully ordinary—folding laundry. I was standing there, pairing socks, half-distracted like usual, when I suddenly just stopped. My eyes landed on my hands, hands I’ve seen a million times before and out of nowhere, this thought bloomed: these hands won’t always be mine.
It shook me a little. Not in a dramatic, existential crisis kind of way. More like a wave lapping at the edges of my awareness. It was the kind of truth that doesn't shout. It hums. And it stayed with me.
The older I get, the more moments like that seem to happen. Little flashes that remind me that our bodies aren’t really ours forever. We act like they are, like we can shape them, preserve them, make them last. But they’re not permanent. They're on loan. We’re visitors in our own skin, passing through.
I’m reminded of this beautiful passage in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, when Baby Suggs, holy, stands before her community, not to preach doctrine, but to urge something far more radical: feel your body. She tells them:
Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just a soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them.
That line gets me every time. Love your hands. Love the body you live in, because it won’t always be yours. And what a wild, sacred thing it is to live in it now. To feel it weep, to laugh with it, to make it dance. That kind of love isn’t about appearance or performance. It’s about being.
I think about my grandmother, how she fold laundry with reverence, like it was more than a chore. Her hands, soft and worn, moved with a rhythm that felt almost sacred. She never talked much about aging, but I remember the way she’d smooth out a shirt, press a towel into a perfect square, then pause, just for a second. Sometimes she’d take my hands in hers, run her thumb across my knuckles, and smile like she was committing them to memory. As if to say: “You won’t have these hands forever. Use them. Love them.”
That kind of wisdom, quiet, lived-in, stays with you. It teaches you to stop idolizing the permanent and start honoring the fleeting.
Because we’re not meant to last. But maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe it’s the ephemeralness of it all that sharpens the color, deepens the taste, makes the laugh ring louder. When you realize the bones you walk around in won’t always carry you, when you really feel that, you stop chasing perfection and start chasing presence. You live deeper. Love harder. Forgive faster. You stop waiting for life to begin and just... begin.
The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi: finding beauty in impermanence, captures this perfectly. Things don’t need to last forever to matter. In fact, they matter because they don’t. Like sunsets. You don’t rage against the sky when the light fades. You just stand there and watch it go, breath held, heart cracked open. You know it won’t last. That’s why it moves you.
You start to realize it in the ordinary things. A bite of something warm when you didn’t know you were hungry. The way a breeze catches your hair just right. Someone reaching for your hand without saying a word. Small moments that don’t last, but they live.
And sometimes, it’s not even joy that makes them stay. Sometimes it’s the ache—missing someone in a room they used to fill, hearing a song you didn’t know was still stitched to a memory. Grief has a way of sharpening what was once soft. But even that pain is proof: we were here. We loved. It meant something.
So maybe that’s it. Maybe life is a borrowed body and a pocketful of fleeting moments. And our job isn’t to keep ourselves pristine or safe or perfectly aligned with expectation. Our job is to use these borrowed bones well. To feel everything we can. To dance, to ache, to love, to fall, to rise, to matter.
Because yes, eventually the bones go back. The body dissolves. But what we did with it... that stays.
And maybe the hardest part is this: we spend so much of our lives trying to feel at home in these bodies. We dress them up. We shrink them down. We push them to fit into boxes that were never meant for us. Sometimes the skin never fits right. It itches with questions. It aches with the longing of becoming. Still, we keep moving forward in it. Not because it fits, but because it’s all we have.
And somehow, despite everything, we love it. Hard.
Maybe that’s the truest kind of love there is.
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