It started Wednesday afternoon. No, it actually started over five years ago. I was packing up to go to Switzerland, and after fetching an empty valise from the basement to bring up to the bedroom, I felt something niggling at my lower left back. Just a murmur, nothing more, so I packed. By the time I started driving to the Boston airport I knew I was in trouble, and this became even more palpable on board the flight, when I squirmed all night in my narrow seat.

Sensei Franziska Jinen Schneider picked me up to go for lunch with Fr. Niklaus Brantschen at Lassalle-Haus, and as happy as I was to see him, I still remember how I squirmed even then, sneaking my hand to massage that spot in the lower back even as we talked about the many things we’d shared in that beautiful Jesuit center, and memories of Bernie. The pain continued for two days even after we drove up to Franziska’s home in St. Gallen, and then disappeared, probably due to her diligent care, which was a blessing since we were beginning a retreat together.

It came back a month later, hung around for a few days, disappeared. The same thing the next month, an unwelcome guest, and by the month after that, Jeff Bridges referred me to Dr. Eric Goodman’s Foundation Training, which focuses on the back with attendant implications for neck, hips, feet, and shoulders. I did that training assiduously, first in classes and then via Zoom.

But on Wednesday, after a visit to the weights room in the Greenfield YMCA, the pain returned, this time with a vengeance. It got worse on Thursday, worser on Friday, and super-worser on Saturday, leaving me in agony. Ibuprofens didn’t help. This being a weekend, I turned to a dear friend and doctor who sent in prescriptions for muscle relaxants and steroids, hoping that steroids would more powerfully counter the inflammation that was there.

And it seems to have done so, since Monday was the first day I could move around. I still try to put weight on my right leg rather than the left and pivot the chair I sit on to give my left side the best cushioning possible. I can go up and down stairs and I can even (carefully) twist at my waist rather than taking steps to make a small turn. Aussie has given me dirty looks for two days of canceled dog walks, but it’s also rained most of the time.

Soon I will start the aging person’s pilgrimage, from family doctor to physical therapy to probably (by now) an orthopedist. Many of us know those routes, or variations thereof. So why am I sharing this now?

Maybe because the Zen Peacemakers has a bimonthly circle on aging, one of which I facilitate and address. I have sometimes felt that I have less dis-ease, dis-ability, and chronic pain than many other participants, so what gives me the right to talk to such issues? The past 5 days provided some solid homework; I share a little more in what so many others experience on a more chronic and severer basis. My own family provides similar “inspiration”: a younger brother with a heart condition, a niece who just found out that she’ll need a second kidney transplant, and the wife of a cousin who died in her early 60s several days ago.

As I write this, the rain gushes down to a parched ground that opens grateful and wide. Is one rain just like every other rain? Once you’ve heard one rain, have you heard them all? The path is wet on my way to the car, feet sloshing through puddles that haven’t yet flowed down the culverts, green apples lining the yard, too sour and grainy for eating but splendid for worms, deer, squirrels, chipmunks, and rabbits.

Sometimes you must resist the feeling that one day is just like another. The skies are gray as I open my eyes, husband-less, the house is cold because it’s in that midpoint between early autumn and heating season (with skyrocketing fuel prices). The body that for years lay naked in bed is now encased in pajamas under two blankets, protecting me from elements I never needed protection from before, and a kind of habitual melancholy can set in, unless—

Unless I open to life outside myself.  I don’t mean transcending pain; I’m not good at that at all, a big crybaby at heart. I don’t mean ignoring or denying, I don’t mean smiling in the face of back spasms. Give me a break!

I mean keeping everything open. Continuing to broaden consciousness, which is so much at the heart of my Buddhist practice, in the poet Ikkyu’s words, “to read the love letters sent by the wind and rain, the snow and moon.” And muse on the—coincidence, is it?—that I received these words by email from a dear friend just as I’m writing this.

I went to a reading of a new novel published by Dustin Spear, artist and writer, and she reminded the audience of Simone De Beauvoir’s words relating to women creators. De Beauvoir said that the reason we don’t have women Shakespeares and Einsteins has nothing to do with ability and everything to do with how difficult it is for even the most independent woman, subject to socially, culturally, and religiously mandated expectations and constraints, to work through all that and find her own unique voice.

The more layers you have of those expectations, the harder it is and the longer it will take you to emerge from under that load and realize your own distinct persona, and what you—and you alone—are there to give the world. Or, as Parker Palmer wrote: “A calling is not simply something we do. It is the way the life within us seeks its particular form—and the way we offer that life back to the world.”

But we can’t explore that till we’ve worked through the constraints and conditioning. And it’s hard for us to then address the wider world and its issues—be it through social/environmental work, art, political activism, etc.—because so much of our energy is consumed in working out who we really are.

Now, at the age of 76, I have good news. I’ve done a lot of that personal work, so I feel freer than ever to let some creative spark run through me and then, in some way, present it to the world. I think that this is what some of us mean when we talk about feeling more comfortable with ourselves and less concerned with others’ opinions about us as we get older.

The bad news is that I continue to face constraints. My body, even without the spasms I experienced over 5 days, is not as strong as before; I don’t have the same energy. And then, there are once again cultural and social constraints, only now they’re less about me as a woman and more about me as an aging woman. I can’t count the frequent remarks I get about how, at my age, I should learn how to take things easier, sleep later, watch more TV, take it easier: You’ve earned it!

You know what I earned? The time and space to get out of myself, out of the eternal questions of who I am really, beyond family and social expectations, do less inner psychological work and instead go out and take some risks. Not conquer the world in whatever way I might have wanted as a girl (write the Great American novel!), but look deeply at what has been given to me and what to create out of it.

The emphasis on whether it’s my vocation or calling is less important because the my is not as important. I have nothing to prove here because nothing is really mine, it’s about what lives through me.

I am grateful for the steroid I was prescribed and the dear old physician who’s been taking care of me since 1985 (in addition to the Buddha, the greatest of all physicians). I have an appointment to start the doctor-PT-orthopedist trek for my back, along with continuing my Foundation Training exercises. But those are not the only new paths in this life.

The real new path is giving flesh and bones to what has always been there, always ran through me, only I was too involved with the eternal me (which turns out to be not so eternal, finally) to do the work I could have done.