The concept of aging is universal and often contentious, and we all approach it differently. In her latest book, The Privilege of Aging: Savoring the Fullness of Life, which received a Kirkus star, Indian American playwright and poet Kamla Kapur embraces the subject wholeheartedly, including all the attendant physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects. At age 71, she began jotting down her thoughts on getting older, and the result is what Kirkus Reviews calls “a moving celebration of life before death, balanced between plangent reflection and exuberant affirmation.”

The author is forthright about her motivations regarding her late-in-life decision to pull together her ideas and research on aging and death into a cohesive book. “It wasn’t a conscious decision so much as a call—I had no choice but to write about a subject I was living in the thick of,” she says via email from her home in Del Mar, California. “That has always been my way: Whenever something absorbs me completely, becomes my life, I jump into it with both feet. Writing about my aging gave me a perspective on it, a way of standing both inside the experience and outside it simultaneously.”

Throughout the deeply felt, philosophically enriched narrative, which proceeds with the pace of gracefully interconnected essays, Kapur explores themes of love, loss, physical hardship, spiritual devotion, and the vitality of travel and the natural environment. She is adept at balancing the past and present, emphasizing the importance of forward momentum while also paying proper respect to both the gravity and the elasticity of memory.

“The two are not in contradiction,” says the author. “In fact, they feed each other. To savor a memory is not to live in the past; it is to bring the past fully into the present, to extract its nourishment, its meaning, its beauty. A memory savored becomes fuel for forward motion. I think of it as the difference between being haunted by the past and being enriched by it. When we cling to the past out of fear or regret, we are stuck. But when we return to it with open, grateful hands…we are doing something essentially creative.” She adds, “Memoir is the art of going back to see what you missed. And what you find there—the moments of grace, of loss, of love, of transformation—these are not anchors. They are wings.”

Though Kapur is grounded in often difficult real-world situations—two of the most poignant, powerful chapters focus on her deceased parents and the suicide of her first husband—she also meanders freely and appealingly, incorporating the work of a panoply of literary, cultural, and philosophical figures: Gandhi, T.S. Eliot, Lao Tzu, Socrates, Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, and John McPhee, to name just a few of dozens. She also examines aging through the lens of Greek mythology, Sufism, and Hinduism, as well as the joys to be found in thoughtful, intentional cannabis use.

Highly focused thought and gratitude are significant motifs across these pages, where Kapur demonstrates an impressive ability to balance intellectualism with romantic notions of joy, compassion, and empathy:

To some extent the perspective of old age as privilege is a natural evolution. We enter a different dimension and experience of life with the passage of time. Our views mature, keeping pace with our circumstances. Many studies have shown that people in their dusking years are happier than ever; that nothing is taken away, only given. We know and accept who we are, grow wiser, give gratitude for our lives as they have unfolded, become content with our lot in life.

…

The privileges of aging are so numerous that I must take detours to unfurl them all. Meandering, in life and in writing, is the prerogative of age. I am so entranced with my experiences of aging that I want to tell all. Being oneself in life and in writing is one of the most delicious offerings of age. As is time, that mysterious force that no one can explain or comprehend in any but its practical, empirical applications.

“Kapur’s writing is clear-eyed, evocative, and wryly humorous in its kvetching portrait of advanced age,” notes the Kirkus review, and while that’s a spot-on assessment, the author is also unafraid of tackling that most insidious foe of the writing life: self-doubt.

“The internal editor is a necessary part of the writing process, but it has its time and place, and that time and place is not the first draft.” She adds, “As for the fear of mediocrity, I have sat with that fear honestly, gone all the way to the end of it, and here is what I’ve found: Even if my writing is not great literature, it is mine. It came from my life, my suffering, my joy, my searching. No one else could have written it. And that—that absolute uniqueness of your own experience and voice—is not mediocrity. That is the gift you bring. Write because you must. Write because it clarifies your life to you. Write because silence is the only alternative, and silence, for a writer, is a kind of slow death. The page is not your judge. It is your most faithful companion.”

Whether discussing her parents’ physical and mental decline, her occasionally turbulent relationships, her current husband’s battle with cancer, or the environmental wonder of California and the Indian Himalayas (she was born in India and now divides her time), Kapur never wavers in her philosophical rigor or focus on the vagaries of time and chronology. In addition to writing nonfiction and drama, the author is a celebrated poet, and lyricism is a welcome, constant companion throughout the text:

The mind is weary of reason, chronology, linearity, of any structure imposed upon its natural flow. There is a different structure here, beyond geometry, as of a river, as of a tree. Movement is the only imperative. As I age, I become pregnant with that swell of abstraction that is my matrix, the vast astronomical, interstellar spaces to which my boundaries extend. So tempting, so scary, this unraveling of the brain.

…

What do I do when I don’t want to do anything but am not comfortable doing nothing? Do I take that extra step, that push against entropy, or give in? Pushing feels like work; surrendering feels delicious, languid, lazy, easy, in the flow, like a senescent river at its delta, directionless, winding, wandering aimlessly, idly, before merging with the sea. And scary.

Kapur is a lovely guide through the aging process, informing and enriching readers who may have struggled with similar life circumstances. Ultimately, The Privilege of Aging is a paragon of wisdom, a term the author has pondered extensively. “I think we nourish [wisdom] through honest self-reflection, through sitting with difficulty rather than fleeing it, through community and through solitude in equal measure,” she says. “Perhaps most of all, through the willingness to keep asking the hard questions, even when—especially when—we are not sure of the answers. Wisdom is not a destination. It is a practice. A daily, humble, sometimes painful practice. But there is no richer one.”

As she approaches her 78th birthday, Kapur shows no signs of slowing down—a boon for readers, who will urge her to keep publishing. “There are several projects already screaming for my attention, and if the universe grants me more life,” she says. “I expect I will die mid-sentence, mid-stanza, mid-story.”