The only thing wrong with getting old is that your friends keep dying. Your body starts falling apart. Your joints are creakier. The eyes aren’t as sharp as they used to be; the street signs look fuzzier. The coastline is just as inviting but the rocks are rockier to walk on; your legs are shakier, your balance not as agile as you remember. Almost worse are all those senior citizens you see everywhere whose frailty you feel sorry for — until you realize they’re probably younger than you.

No need to feel sorry for yourself, though; you’ve made it this far and are still in the game and healthy enough to lament your decline, which is only time doing its thing. In what’s left of the mind you’re as alive as ever as you marvel at what you remember of how you got this far on the path of bliss and disappointment, of existential revelations, losses and gratifications, the long friendships and the ones wrecked by events you couldn’t help, the loves that didn’t last, the marriages that turned out different than you expected, the families fractured by conflicting affinities.

If you were a novelist you could toss all the stories and characters into a blender and make something out of the mixture that might make sense, or at least entertain for a few hundred pages, as if that would make any difference — but if you can’t top Dostoyevsky, why waste your time? Better to take a walk by the ocean or ride your bike as far as the trail will take you or watch some birds or sit in a café and have a conversation or just eavesdrop on others’ drama.

If you’re old enough to have nothing better to do, you can volunteer your skills where you can be useful, or start to paint like you always imagined, or pick up that instrument you’ve longed to hold in your arms, or invent that memoir. As the Buddhists say, it is all illusion anyway, so why not make up a story that suits your self-made myth. In retrospect it all seems to add up to something, even if you’re not sure what as you scroll down your screen in search of anything that lasts longer than a click.

Crows are drinking from your birdbath. A cashier is ringing up your groceries with the senior discount. A receptionist is politely scheduling your medical appointment. A tech support person is patiently resolving some conundrum. A postal clerk is sending off your package. Even such mundane transactions may subtly contain a glimpse of grace, if only for a flash, a trace of the everyday whose mundane amazements have often escaped your notice.

A perfectly restored red 1930s roadster goes by, then an electric-blue Tesla, a contractor’s pickup full of tools, an old Subaru with an ambiguous assortment of bumper stickers — is this a parade whose occasion you forgot to celebrate? No, it is just the ongoing show you can see when you pay attention. When you are emeritus, you’re finished, invisible, beside the point, so you can do as you please and nobody else cares. If you have a bed, a roof, maybe a grandchild or two, a retirement account, comfortable shoes, an ear for music and a chance to hear it live from time to time, what else do you need?

The doctors you were counting on to save your life are almost as clueless as you, so you must save your own before the lights go out. You have nothing but time, and it has you, so make of it what you will. There are things you wish you could do that you can’t do anymore, but as Heraclitus said — or was it Ecclesiastes? — life comes in seasons. So dig this weather, cool and sunny between atmospheric rivers, as if we should live forever under these mostly mild Mediterranean skies while the globe is toast, cooked beyond redemption or recognition, submerged by storm surge. And if you don’t quite recognize yourself, it’s only because you’ve changed in the course of becoming more completely who you are.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.