One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave. — Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.

Author: Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Insight: There's something almost comical about how our minds protect us from the full weight of time. We know, intellectually, that we're aging—we see the calendar tick forward, notice new lines in the mirror—yet somehow we keep operating as if we have unlimited runway ahead. The guy who hasn't been to a doctor in a decade, the woman who keeps saying she'll travel "when things settle down," the persistent feeling that major life changes can wait another year or two. We're not in denial exactly. It's more like a useful amnesia that lets us plan as though we're permanent. Colette's observation cuts deeper than it first appears, because it reveals something about how we're built to function. If we truly felt the gravity of our finite time every single day, we might become paralyzed or desperate. Instead, we coast forward with this productive half-forgetting, which means most of us never actually reckon with mortality until we have to. The unsettling part? That reckoning often comes too late to change much. It's not exactly a wake-up call so much as a recognition that we've been sleeping all along—and maybe that was the only way to actually live.