oursin | If that's so, I think she should consider herself fortunate (Reply)

My attention has been drawn to this article about OMG getting to 50 and growing old, which I'm actually finding quite annoying.

How many people can say, following a fall which (honestly) could surely have happened to anybody at anytime, like the moped/pedestrian crossing thing that happened to me in my 50s:

I’ve never regained an absolute trust that my body will automatically fall into line with my will: from now on it will falter and fail. I can no longer depend on it to function properly. This, it seems to me, is solid indication that my youth has ended and middle age begun.

To which I was thinking, no, this is a revelation that you have not been subject to a lot of the nigglesome and tiresome things about bodies to which the flesh is heir, even among those of us who would probably count as able-bodied.

Never, throughout my life, young or old, have I felt that my body will 'automatically fall into line with my will'. Migraines, menstruation, colds, fevers, food-poisoning, accidents, tripping on things, being unable to reach things on high shelves, being unable to lift more than a crtain weight, limitations on how fast I could run - all these were things which, will it as strongly as I might, I could not affect.

Surely very few people do feel that absolute surety? There must be some sense of limitation falling between the will and the capacity to embody it.