What am I looking for

Three years ago, I made a drastic change: I left Washington and moved to Charleston, South Carolina.

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I moved from a bustling capital city to a quieter US town in the deep south. I had tried to scale down earlier; it hadn't worked. Possibly I was too attached to my things. I decided on radical surgery.

I didn't sell my things; I called friends and neighbors and asked them to take whatever they liked. The rest went to charity. I put a few clothes and books in my car, gave the house key to a realtor friend and said, "Sell it." I drove 500 miles to a retirement community and took a new apartment. I came out on the porch, peered at a small lake nearby and breathed a sigh of relief.

I swim in a heated pool every morning, eat modestly, walk twenty miles every week, do yoga and tai-chi, and read and work in my study. It is peaceful. But transition is the order of the day around me.

I go out and meet younger people. But many who live here are in their seventies and eighties. A few are in the nineties; a doctor is a centenarian. Predictably, the turnover is considerable. Since I have come here, a dozen people I knew have died and another dozen have moved to what is euphemistically called Assisted Living. An optometrist friend called the place God's waiting room. I felt tempted to ask if the whole world wasn't that.