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My new fitness ritual takes me two or three days a week to a community center in a nearby town. It’s nicer than “community center” suggests–with a large pool, lots of fitness equipment, and on-site day care center, it’s an amazing resource for our rural area. I don’t know what the median age is in the county where the facility is located, but I’m willing to bet it’s over 50, if the patrons of my gym are any guide. I am always, always one of the youngest women (every once in a while a brave man joins) in a very crowded class. The teacher is, I’m guessing, in her 50s, and most of the women busting a move alongside me are in their 60s.

The fourth or fifth time I went, I ran into the mother of a friend of mine. She’s, you know, mom-aged, i.e., in her late 60s or maybe even early 70s, but she’s in awesome shape. She was excited to see me, and quick to add how great it was to see some younger women (I’d dragged two other “young”–i.e., in their 40s–friends along with me) at the center. I asked her if she came to the class frequently, and she replied, somewhat sheepishly, that she didn’t. It was too easy for her.

I was drenched in sweat, and sore from classes I’d taken the previous two days.

OK, this ego-crushing moment aside, exercising with women a generation older than I am has mostly been an inspiring experience. Where I live now, in stark contrast to my former home in Los Angeles, I see little plastic surgery, abuse of injectables or other strategies meant to ward off aging but often, in my opinion, just drawing more attention to the cruelties of time. The women in my class are round and lean, white-haired and hennaed, exhibiting every variety of beauty and vanity and lack of those qualities you can imagine. But without exception, those women are moving, swiveling, dancing. They’re sexy, perhaps, most of all, because they’re clearly having fun.

I’m lucky to have a number of women I count as close friends who are 15 or 20 years older than I am. But our interaction tends to take place over a glass of wine, not a water bottle and a yoga mat. Seeing older women in this light was a game-changer for my view of myself and my own aging, and my view of my companions in cardio.

I started taking this class in a moment of desperation to shift my focus and kickstart my exercise habits, realizing that in this economy (how sick of that phrase are we all?) hiring a personal trainer was just not an option. It felt a little like a spoonful of bitter medicine, but one I’d force myself to choke down. Instead, I can’t wait to go dance and box and kick and sweat every week with a roomful of sisters, senior and otherwise.

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N OTHING LIKE THE dawn of a new year to make a middle-aged person think of, well, aging. Gracefully or otherwise, I always say it’s better than the alternative (no one has ever accused me of sentimentality, in case you’re wondering) but that doesn’t mean that I always enjoy stark reminders of the ever-present physical (and emotional) changes wrought by the passing of time. A couple of days ago, one of those stark reminders arrived, of all places, in my mailbox.

My passport expired in December. It had lain unused in a desk drawer since the spring of 2001, when, heavily pregnant with the River, I traveled first to Berlin, where I produced a movie, and then later to Paris and Normandy, where the H celebrated the premiere of a television project he co-wrote. It was a big  year for me, travelwise, and then: parenthood, and stick-in-the-States-stasis arrived. Our kids didn’t even have passports, and the H’s had also expired, so in the interest of a trip to at the very least Canada (not to malign Canada, I like Canada, don’t get your  maple-leaf knickers in a twist) we decided to march ourselves down to the post office and passport away.

I didn’t think too much more about the whole thing until my new passport, and my canceled passport, arrived in the mail the other day. The old passport had stapled into it a copy of the new picture I had taken that December day, which meant that I had a document that showed, in stunning detail, the passage of ten years, all in my own slightly smirky face. I went to put both old and new into the file where I keep all our documents, and found my even older passport, the one I hurriedly obtained in June of 1989, when I was 23, and living in New York, working my first “real” job. I needed it for an impromptu trip to Kenya with three dear friends. That passport is full of stamps from Germany, Kenya, the Phillippines, France, Thailand…hard evidence that though I’m not the world’s biggest adventurer, I did once go unexpected places and see unforeseen things.

The other hard evidence is in those faces: the 23-year-old is soft and tentative, the 33-year-old (I was at the top point of my television career then, working hard but seeing the fruits of my labors) confident and direct. The 43-year-old? She looks a little tired and exasperated to me–exactly what I would expect of a mother who’s been corralling two kids and a husband through a 45-minute session of paperwork and photographs at the local P.O.

I think a lot about aging these days. Isn’t that inevitable in your 40s, when your joints are starting to creak and you suddenly cannot get by on less than eight hours of sleep, and there’s more gray in your hair than before. (There was no gray at 23; it all started when I went to graduate school at 25, and by the time that 33-year-old pic was taken, I was well into the [hair dye] bottle, where I plan to stay for at least the next 10 years.)

My husband saw this lineup and said (kindly, I thought) that the most amazing thing to him was how little I’ve actually changed. And maybe he’s right. Somehow, along with the lines in my face, what I see in those pictures is that whatever, whoever, I am, the core of me is more or less the same now as it was 20 years ago, and it might even be better. (The knees? The belly? Not so much.)

Do you see evidence of your own changes, or those of your sisters? Chime in, and tell us what you think.

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