I wake up every morning in the certitude that I’m in my own bed, in my own bedroom, and that the only other life around is my husband lying beside me. It’s when we’re traveling that I get disoriented, although quickly enough the changed reality dawns on me. Invariably, our red suitcases sitting at our feet alert me to it.

But, then, when I get up in the middle of the night and just have to go, I don’t find my bearings so easily. With warnings scarcely visible to eyes half-awake and unaided by glasses and in the semi-dark, I feel a little silly having to grope for the unfamiliar bathroom.

The writer John Updike, coming to me with some sort of kindred affirmation, had similar moments, although in the reverse. Back home after a three-week China sojourn, he wrote: “The bedroom seemed perilously weird—alien… All the habits and illusions that protect me from the fact that I am sixty-six and nearing death had fallen from me… The room, once so familiar, felt immense, and, containing no other than my sleeping wife, devastatingly lonely…”

In my own case, it’s precisely when I’m sleepy or not fully awake, in my bedroom at home or elsewhere, that I become vulnerable—to myself. It’s not unlike, though in no way as serious, as the case of a motorist falling into a false sense of security when he’s almost home and just right than meets his accident.

Only last night, during bedtime rituals, I realized I had been massaging my feet with an analgesic gel, instead of my intended Peppermint Intensive Foot Rescue cream for dry skin. Not a few times have I also dropped on my eyes liquid meant to be squirted up my nose, giving me a sharp pain of recognition; or put on sunblock instead of my bedtime moisturizer. The most serious case yet has been a cotton ball soaked in harsh clarifying lotion to remove my eye make-up.

I sometimes fall asleep with my glasses on—for more vivid dreams, I say when caught—and have deformed a few pairs irreparably. Ah, but I have my own times of incredible clarity of memory. I wake up remembering I went to sleep wearing my glasses and end up sticking a finger into a bare eye as I try to remove what my husband has already put safely away.

Years of overloading my system have doubtless taken their toll, and I’m learning to be more selective, to let some things go. I am easier on myself and have learned to laugh at my senior frailties. After all, life, like everything else, is energy, which in our case is on the wane and better reserved for truly worthy exertions.

I now choose my battles as well as my fun. So, when I get a phone call from my sweet-toothed friend Rita to meet at the lobby of the Peninsula for its 35th anniversary offer of its famous halo-halo for P35, I drop everything.

Luckily, before either of us gets there, a little sanity prompts Rita to call the Pen to check the situation: 85 people are in line ahead of us! Not being seniors for nothing, we know we’ve been licked. At Rita’s suggestion, we go to Milky Way for the next best thing—guinomis. The absence of hustle and the conversation more than make up for the lost bargain.

My husband and I have learned to reserve our own residual energies for the truly meaningful things. We not only have taken the TV out of our bedroom, but have given it away. We have realized we could no longer afford any further violation of our intimacy.

We meditate longer and sleep earlier and better and thus fight off common threats to senior health like high blood pressure and diabetes. We also find more time to read and talk and be intimate, and have a greater predisposition to laugh when we come short. In any case, all this has brought such wonders to our relationship as we otherwise may be content to have missed.

Indeed, I feel even better than Walt Whitman the self-described “slow arriver”: I haven’t stopped—and don’t intend to stop—arriving.