Author, Anne Lamott, on Aging

But if the fortune of the girl is in the newness, in being the bud, and the fortune of the crone is in the freedom, the lack of attachment or clinging, where does that leave a youngish middle-aged American woman like me?  Maybe it leaves me needing to consider how wealthy I am in the knowledge that the girl of my past is still in me while a marvelous dreadlocked crone is in the future–and that I hold both of these females inside.  Coming out of the movie that night, I realize that I want what the crones have:  time for all those long deep breaths, time to watch more closely, time to learn to enjoy what I’ve always been afraid of–the sag and the invisibility, the ease of understanding the life is not about doing.  The crones understand this, and it gives them all kinds of time–time to get much less done, time for all these holy moments.  So I’ve been thinking about how, realistically, I am probably not going to lose five pounds before I see the guy I like again, or have a little canopy above my eyes snipped off.  And how what I am going to do instead is to begin practicing cronehood as soon as possible:  to watch, smile, dance. 

–Anne Lamott from Traveling Mercies:  Some Thoughts on Faith, p 233, large print edition (not because I’m that hard of seeing yet, but because it’s all the library had, not that I care one way or another what you think, or maybe I do), c 1999.