I can see the very beginnings of it when I look in the mirror now. I will not be hyperbolic about it, but I can see the first creases that hesitate to go away when I let my face relax fully. I can see the gray hairs interspersed in the brown. And I can feel the first taste of the narrowing of my scope.
The physical components are nothing more to me than a glance and a thought. But the latter, the latter scares me, and the latter I will fight with every part of my being. The responsibilities of being a functioning adult in this complex society and providing for your own needs and hopefully at least a portion of your immediate desires - these things take a toll on the part of the mind that is able to view and remember the vastness of life. I write of the malaise of the monotony of a forced routine too often, but that too takes its toll. This is to say, I do not think it is anything inherent in age, but in the increasing weight of the world that we must carry as move through this life and as time moves past us.
We are rocks landed haphazardly in a river, trying to hold our own against the flow. Sometimes when the rain has been infrequent and the snowfall sparse it is not too hard. But then sometimes the world works the other way and the flood comes and it takes every fiber of our beings to remain. But speaking only of these fluctuations misses the underlying point - either way, the water comes constantly, and it wears us down. It weathers us, sometimes fast and sometimes slow. But it weathers us.
This is the process by which our field of vision narrows.
