When my close friend Mark asked me if I wanted to join his company softball team this summer in Prospect Park, the answer was immediate. While I hadn’t thrown a ball or swung a bat in twelve years, baseball was basically my life from ages four to fourteen, until I ended my high school career with a broken collarbone. Basketball then took over, and I only ran the diamond intermittently, nostalgically. Turning thirty-four in two weeks, I figured it was the time to return.

Now I’m not somebody trying to relive their glory days by pushing his body past its limits. I am employed in fitness and work out daily, mostly yoga, a bit of Pilates, as well as light weight training, cardio, and cycling, indoor and out. Yet each form of movement has different rules, and by the end of the inaugural softball catch, my shoulder was telling me some things. After the third day, my lower back seized up and dug into my sciatic nerve, an old nemesis from a femur break. Only a massage released that rather unfortunate nerve — anyone who has ever suffered sciatica knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Yet it wasn’t until we hit the batting cage last weekend, in preparation for the season, that I was faced with the true vengeance of mortality. By the sixth round I thought my right shoulder was going to fall off, or at the very least, snap. I’ve had a long-standing deltoid issue from my yoga practice; the plank-chaturanga transition has caused many a rotator cuff injury, myself not excluded. This was the exact area seizing up on me, and I spent Sunday evening with a jar of Tiger Balm, a bag of ice, and plenty of wide-eyed late night hours.

Sunday evening, I watched yet another “anti-aging” product ad fall into my inbox. I’ve seen that catch phrase used as marketing fodder for skin creams and medical procedures (Google “anti-aging” and the first result is a paid ad for Botox), as well as in massage sessions. Recently I noticed a “new” therapeutic massage that actually claims it “targets the fat-producing areas of your body” and helps trim you down. I’m not kidding.

I wonder why our culture is scared of aging, something that was once treated as a sign of reverence and respect. I wonder how it is we started taking one of the most deadly poisons known to our bodies — something the neurogastroenterologist Michael D. Gershon says makes the toxicity of cyanide look “trivial” — and inject it into our faces to keep wrinkles at bay: botulinum toxin, aka Botox. I wonder how it’s come to pass that, according to journalist Guy Garcia in his latest book, The Decline of Men, “The American Society of Plastic Surgeons reports that 70 percent of all patients who underwent breast reduction surgery in 2006 were boys between the ages of thirteen and nineteen.”

That teenage boys even consider this form of “surgery” is frightening. (As is doctors that perform it.) That people my age, and older, and younger inject poison into their bodies, and permanently install plastic under their skin like decorative fixtures, could only happen in a culture that does not celebrate the self inside the self we inhabit. And it’s sad, because no matter what, we are all aging, we are all walking down the same path. The more people spread their personal neuroses by way of injections and modifications, the more they invite others to do so, without ever questioning the motives or consequences.

I can only think of those who stand firm in their convictions, like Samuel Beckett’s character Krapp, from his play Krapp’s Last Tape: “Perhaps my best years are gone. But I wouldn’t want them back, not with the fire that’s in me now.” What we need to embody is the perseverance of integrity, not the vanity of appearance. Not the appearance of vanity, but the integrity of perseverance. This is the “self-knowledge” that the yoga philosophy teaches, but one must take the first step, and then keep on stepping. This path does not end.

Most importantly is humility. As Mark and I walked away from our catch, both of us clutching our shoulders, me with my sciatic limp, his wife and my fiancée could only snicker at these grown men pretending to be boys (as if we’ve really grown up). Mark’s eight-month-old son, James, stuck his feet in his mouth while we applied ice and balm. And still, knowingly, consciously, I prepare for summer softball, aware of the havoc it will wreak on my aging body, letting the blazing sun wrinkle my face all it wants. I wouldn’t have it any other way.