There is a two panel cartoon I keep coming back to this week. 

In the first panel, two people, a dog, and a chicken are falling through a black void. The caption reads: “Three seconds after falling into a bottomless abyss.”

The people are freaking out. The dog is not doing well. The chicken is not doing well either.

The second panel is identical — same abyss, same gravity, but this caption reads: “Six months after falling into a bottomless abyss.”

Now one person is reading a book. The other is leaning back into nothing in particular. The dog is asleep. And the chicken? Just chillin’.

I notice I am still fighting gravity.

Lately, it is the gravity of aging. Each month it seems I am removing someone from this list—  not because they unsubscribed, but because life unsubscribed them.

Life is not especially interested in my plans.

The Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck once said that our practice is the struggle between what we want and what life wants. The older I get, the less metaphorical that sounds.

Life keeps showing up as illness, limitation, the slow wearing down of the body. I can keep asking why me, but gravity keeps doing what gravity does.

And I am beginning to feel the gravity of the situation.

Shantideva, in the chapter on patience in his 8th century classic A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, writes that there is nothing that does not become easier through familiarity.

What changes for me is not the fact of aging, or uncertainty, or loss. What changes is that I am getting used to them. What once seemed totally out of place begins to feel more like furniture in the room

This is not quite acceptance, at least not in the modern psychological sense. For me, it is more ordinary than that — simply becoming more familiar with where I already am.

Joko Beck once posed a question that has stayed with me: 

Is life becoming more and more OK with you?

I hear asking whether our arguments with gravity are losing steam.

Aging is still aging. My friends continue getting sick and dying. Uncertainty is just as uncertain as ever. And yet there are moments when something loosens.

The body softens its complaint. The mind stops insisting quite so loudly that things be otherwise. And we find we are still here, still falling, but perhaps a little more OK with it.