You stopped dreading the stairs

There is a staircase you know too well. Maybe it is the one at the station, or the two flights to the office, or the walk up from the garage with the bags. You had a system for it: start slow, keep the conversation short, and at the top there was a pause. You called it catching your breath. You never called it what it was. And you built the day around it quietly, taking the elevator when nobody was looking.

Go back there this week and pay attention at the top. Something has changed and it did not ask your permission. The ceiling on ordinary effort lifts on its own once you stop smoking, and it keeps lifting for months without any training at all. Your lungs have been repairing on a schedule of their own, on shifts you slept through. You are not fitter. You are simply less obstructed. That is a strange and generous thing to be handed for free, and it arrived while you were busy with your week.

Notice how much of your self image was built on that pause. You had started saying you were getting older, and you meant it kindly, as a way of closing a subject. But the ceiling was never age. It was one specific thing, and that thing is leaving. Some of what you filed under getting old was just the bill arriving daily. Now the bill has stopped and the body is returning what it can. God built it to heal without being asked, which is worth sitting with for a second.

So test it, on purpose, this week. One flight without the pace you used to keep. The hill you have been routing around. The long way to the car. Go at a normal speed, get to the top, and stand there long enough to notice what your chest is doing. You are looking for the pause that does not come. That is the whole errand. Come back and tell somebody, because this one deserves to be said out loud.