But what really struck me about the person who wrote Eat Pray Love was that she apparently felt so freaking old. This was the biggest surprise for me—how many times I use the word old in these pages, in referring to myself.
To put things in perspective, folks, I was only thirty-four years old at the time of this adventure. Thirty-four feels like infancy to me now, but apparently I felt ancient back then. This is a real point of cognitive dissonance, because now I am nearly forty-six, and I do not feel old in the least. I ran five miles this morning and nothing hurts. I slept like a baby last night. I take no medications, unless you count melted cheese. (And I do.) I cannot wait to unfold this day, this week, this year. That sort of enthusiasm and vitality, I think, might be the operative definition of “youthfulness”—that sense of endlessly unspooling possibility.