On Stiffness

II have been thinking about stiffness this year because I am stiff. I wake up stiff. I get up from a chair stiff. My right shoulder, in the morning, makes a small adjustment that takes about forty seconds before it does what I want it to do. I am sixty-three years old, and these are the new conditions of my body, and they are not tragic but they require some thinking.

There are two kinds of writing about getting older. The first kind tells you that you can fix it. There are pills, exercises, regimens, a man on a podcast who has done all of this and is sixty and looks forty. The second kind tells you that you can't fix it and you should accept it. There is wisdom, there is letting go, there is the dignity of the body's decline.

Both of these are wrong, or at least incomplete. The first is selling you something. The second is also selling you something. Acceptance is just as marketable as resistance, depending on the audience.

I want to write about stiffness as it actually feels. Which is: not a problem.

It is a fact.

A problem implies a fix, or at least a desired direction. A fact does not. I am stiff in the morning the way it is cold in the morning. I do not experience the cold as a problem. I put on a sweater. I move toward the kitchen. By the time the kettle boils I have stopped registering the temperature. The cold has not been solved. It has been integrated.

Stiffness is the same. There are some movements that take longer than they used to. There are some positions I no longer enter without a long preliminary. None of this is failure. None of it is decline. It is just what my body is. The body adjusts to itself, the way a house adjusts to its frame as it settles. The settled house is not a worse house. It is the same house, more itself.

I want to be careful here. I am not making the wisdom argument. I am not telling you that aging is beautiful, or that suffering is meaning, or that the body knows best. I do not know if the body knows best. The body does not know things. The body does what it does. I am just suggesting that the framing of stiffness as a problem to fix or a loss to mourn is a framing imposed from outside. From inside the body, it is simply what is happening today.

There is a moment in the morning that I have started to like. It is the forty seconds where my shoulder is becoming useful. The shoulder is not yet ready, then it is becoming ready, then it is ready. The transition takes its time. I sit and I let it. Younger, I would not have noticed there was a transition. The shoulder would have just been ready. Now there is a small window where I can see a system working. I can hear, faintly, the body doing its negotiations. I can sit with the negotiations. They feel honest.

This is not enlightenment. It is observation. There is a difference.

Stiffness does, however, have actual physical effects, and I should be specific about them. There are stretches I do most mornings — borrowed, with some embarrassment, from a younger animal who runs a yoga class for animals. The cat arch. The chest opener. There is a series of them. They take eleven minutes. They make the day measurably easier. I do not pretend they are not effective. I think they are. I do not, however, think they are the answer to anything. They are something I do, like brushing teeth, that helps. They do not reverse anything. They are not a fight. They are just a few minutes that put me in better contact with my body before I ask it to do anything.

I am suspicious of the entire framing of stiffness as something to defeat. The language is military. Defeat suggests an enemy. The body is not the enemy. The body is the structure within which I exist. I cannot be at war with the structure within which I exist. I can be at war with the conditions of the structure — too cold, too hot, too noisy, too rushed — but the structure itself is just where I live. Declaring war on your house because the floors creak is silly. Live there. Let it creak.

Some days the stiffness is worse. Some days it is barely there. I have given up trying to predict which is which. I had a system for a while — what I ate, when I went to sleep, whether I had walked the day before — and I built up a model of what would lead to a good morning. The model was correct about thirty percent of the time. Most days, the body did what it wanted regardless of what I had done for it. Good mornings happened after long evenings. Bad mornings happened after early bedtimes and dinner with vegetables.

I now have a different system, which is no system. I get up. I notice what is there. I move toward the kettle. I do the eleven-minute stretching. The day starts. Some days are easier than others. I no longer interpret the difference as feedback on whether I am doing aging correctly.

Aging is not something you do correctly. It is something that happens to you. The most you can do is be roughly attentive while it does. You cannot pass aging the way you can pass an exam. There is no grade. The conversation about aging well has been corrupted by the same impulse that corrupts every other conversation about being a person — it has been turned into a test you can pass or fail, with self-help aisles full of guides on how to pass.

Pass the test of aging by not taking the test. Be in the body. Notice what is there. Move where you can. Don't move where you can't. Don't apologize for the negotiations.

I am writing this in the late afternoon. I have been at the desk for three hours. I should stand up soon. When I do, my hips will take a second to remember they are hips. I will stand half-bent for about two seconds before I straighten. This will not be elegant. There is no audience. I will straighten.

Then I will walk to the kitchen and put the kettle on. The kettle is not a metaphor. It is a kettle.

This is what stiffness is, from inside the body that has it. It is not a problem. It is a fact. The fact has its own dignity. The dignity is mostly that of slowness. Slowness is the only honest pace at which a body in its sixties can move. There are faster animals. They are not me. I am the slowness now.

The slowness is doing fine.

—B.