I Used To Be The One Who Could

You noticed it on the stairs.

Not because anything happened. You went up them the way you always go up them, at the speed you have always gone up them, and at the top there was a difference, and it was small, and you registered it and carried on and did not say anything to anybody.

And that is not the first time. It has been happening for a while, in small increments, in the ordinary places. Getting up off a low chair. Carrying something up from the car in one trip because you always have. Kneeling down for something and the particular way you now get back up.

None of it is dramatic. That is what makes it hard to talk about. There is no event. There is just an accumulating list of small differences that nobody else has noticed and that you notice every single day.

And you used to be the one who could.

You want to be careful how you say that, because said out loud it sounds like vanity, and it is not vanity. It is that being able was part of how you understood yourself. You were the one who carried the thing. You were the one who went up the ladder. When something needed doing that required a body, it was you, and that was not a boast, it was just a fact about the household, and you were quietly glad of it.

So here is what I am not going to say to you.

I am not going to tell you that you can get it back.

You might get some of it back. Bodies respond to being used and that is genuinely true at any age. But the twenty five year old body is gone and it is not coming back, and if this site promises you otherwise then everything else it says is worthless.

What I want to do is something more useful, which is to notice that you are grieving, and that nobody has told you that is what it is.

Forsake me not when my strength faileth

There is a line in the Psalms that says this out loud, and the fact that it is in there at all is most of the help.

Cast me not off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength faileth. (Psalm 71:9, King James Version)

Forsake me not when my strength faileth.

Notice first that this is a prayer, which means somebody was permitted to pray it. Somebody brought this exact thing to God, in these words, and it was written down and kept and is still in the book.

That matters more than it sounds. Because you have not said this out loud. You have decided, without deciding, that it is not the kind of thing a man complains about, that other people have real problems, and that mentioning it would be self indulgent.

And here it is in scripture, prayed plainly, with no apology and no qualification attached to it.

And notice the second thing, which is what he is actually afraid of.

He is not asking for his strength back. Read it again. He does not ask for the strength. He asks not to be cast off, not to be forsaken, and the fear underneath the prayer is not that his body is failing but that failing makes him disposable.

That is the real fear and it is probably yours.

Not that you cannot carry the thing. That not being able to carry the thing takes something from what you are worth, in your house, to the people who used to see you as the one who could.

You are grieving something real and you are permitted to say so, and it has never once been self indulgent to pray this exact thing. Psalm 71:9 asks not to be forsaken rather than asking for the strength back, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hears the fear that sits underneath the body.

The comparison is with a man who does not exist

Here is the practical part.

You are not comparing yourself to other men your age. That is worth noticing, because it would be the normal thing to do and you are not doing it.

You are comparing yourself to yourself at twenty five.

And that comparison has a particular quality: you always lose it, every day, permanently, and it gets worse on a fixed schedule for the rest of your life. There is no version of the future in which you win it.

That is not a standard. A standard is something you can meet. That is a countdown, and you have had it running in the background for about six years.

And the man you are measuring against is partly invented. That twenty five year old could do things you cannot, absolutely. He also could not do most of what you did last week. He did not know how to fix anything. He would have handled the difficult conversation you had on Tuesday extremely badly. He had no idea what he was for.

You are running a comparison on one axis, the physical one, and calling it a comparison between two men.

So it is not that the comparison is unkind. It is that it is not a real comparison, and you have been losing to a person who does not exist except in one narrow respect.

You are measuring against a man who exists on one axis only, and it has never once been a comparison between two whole people. The written word puts the prayer about failing strength beside a whole life of usefulness, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a countdown out of the back of a man's mind.

One thing, and stop while it is easy

So here is the assignment, and the second half is the discipline.

Do one thing today that the body you have can do, and stop while it is still easy.

One thing. Walk somewhere. Carry something. Go up the ladder for the small job rather than asking somebody else to, if it is genuinely safe. Something physical, chosen because you can do it rather than to find out whether you still can.

And then stop while it is still easy.

This is the part you will fight, and it matters more than the doing. Every instinct in you says to find the limit. To go until it is hard, so you know where you stand now. That is how you have used your body your whole life and it served you well for thirty years.

It is exactly wrong now, and not because you are fragile. It is because finding the limit means ending every session at the point of failure, and a man who ends at failure every time is being handed a fresh piece of evidence for the countdown, on purpose, by himself.

Stop while it is easy and you finish with something left. Do that four times and something changes about how you approach the fifth, and it is not the muscle.

You are able to stop while there is something left, and finding the limit has never once been what your body actually needed from you. Psalm 71:9 prays about failing strength without asking for a demonstration of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a man who puts something down early.