A small personal encounter in my 75th year has brought into sharp relief the fact that we all, young and old, are silently changing, growing older physically and being transformed internally. Even in an anxious time when the world is preparing for war, and people feel unsettled by catastrophe, incidents like this one call for attention and reflection.

On a recent evening I arrived at the home of dear friends and was greeted at the door by their 11-year-old daughter, whom I will here call Alison. She is a delightful young girl, sprightly in body and lively in mind, whom I have known from almost the beginning of her life.

Arriving at her house for dinner, I was warmly greeted at the door by my young friend. On this occasion, Alison made conversation with me more easily than usual, among other things telling me about her dog Euterpe who was running around the area near the front door, excited by the approach of us visitors.

I did not notice anything else unusual in my contact with Alison on this occasion. While we conversed, she maintained eye contact and was attentive as I took off my coat. Assuming the role of hostess while her parents were busy in the kitchen, she made me feel comfortable in her home.

Later in the evening, however, when Alison was out of earshot, her mother, whom I will here call Wendy, told me of questions Alison had asked her about me. “What has happened to Richard’s arm? Did he injure it?” Alison wanted to know.

Wendy was astonished to hear her daughter’s questions and replied: “Why nothing has happened to Richard. His arm was always like that, since it was damaged during his birth.”

Like Wendy, I also was surprised at Alison asking about my arm since, throughout her life, she had seen me dozens of times previously and had had many opportunities to notice the signs of this injury. Never before had she given any indication of recognizing my impairment.

In reflecting later on the girl’s discovery, I attributed it to Alison’s arrival at a new stage of development. Previously, I surmised, she was not able to notice my disability, despite numerous opportunities to do so. She had not matured enough to take note of this kind of defect in an adult. It required more internal growth for her to see me as I really am.

Some adults, it is true, have occasionally failed to notice that my left arm is shorter and smaller than my right. Looking at me from certain angles, they could have missed this fact. But they would not have taken years to discover the bodily defect caused by birth injury.

Incidentally, I do not claim this disability counts as major, comparable to what many other people face. But, like all bodily differences, it has loomed large in my psyche, especially when I was young, and has had an important role in my own personal development.

Thus, aside from the growth in consciousness that I assume this discovery on Alison’s part may reveal, I paid attention to my own response to Wendy’s telling me about the incident. Though she related it to me in the presence of several other friends, I did not recoil in shame and embarrassment as I would have done earlier in my life. Instead, I listened to her anecdote with intense interest, but with most of my attention focused on what was going on in Alison’s adolescent psyche.

I confess, however, to some lurking feelings of defensiveness, but they were lodged in the far background of my psyche rather than in the front of my mind. Not yet am I entirely free of emotional response to remarks about my body image.

Reflecting further on this event, I take this apparently minor incident as an important sign of change in myself. It serves as evidence of my progress in self- acceptance, to my mind the most fundamental of later life’s tasks.

I had come far from the time when I used to stand before three-way mirrors in department stores, trying on new sports coats, and cringing at my own image. Now, after the passage of decades, I can at last accept myself with some equanimity as I actually am rather than as I wish myself to have been.

However, God has not finished with me yet, my life is still not at an end and I still have a distance to travel before that self-acceptance becomes more definitive.

This apparently trivial incident has signaled for me the way younger and older are all in the daily activity of growing interiorly as well as visibly. What we are able to see and how we come to feel about ourselves and our body image form part of the human adventure.

Richard Griffin