I have recently been studying my body as if it were a stranger I have lived with for years, but never spoken adequately to.
It surprises me: these broad shoulders, these calves that seem to have trained themselves without my consent. I never set out to sculpt them, yet they have grown into a kind of quiet testimony about the life I’ve led.
I wonder if our bodies learn lessons long before we do.
While I worried about purpose, they gathered strength.
While I doubted my path, they prepared for it.
While my mind busied itself with books, ambitions, and distant visions, my body quietly practiced endurance, carrying boxes, standing long hours, rising early, adapting to whatever the day demanded.
In this way, my body has been more honest than my thoughts.
It tells me what I have become: someone capable of more than he first imagined, someone shaped by labor as much as by ideas.
Perhaps this is Montaigne’s old lesson returning to me in a new form:
that self-knowledge does not arrive only through the mind, but through the humble accounting of one’s own lived habits.
I am learning that the body also writes its own essays.
And so I find myself, strangely enough, grateful.
For I may not yet know exactly who I am becoming,
but I can now see that I have already grown into the shape required to begin.