I have been slowly and
surely trying to integrate what I have been learning, since I started paying
attention to this process of aging. It has been enormously gratifying to have
discovered, via the literature, and through direct experience with other older
people, that there is a lot of benefits that come with aging. It looks like the
key words that seem to best describe the pleasures of aging are; integration
and actualization.
Integration refers to the organic process that
stimulates recollection, life review and a deepening sense of self. This seems
to incorporate a movement toward inner life, and being instead of doing.
Actualization has more to do with fulfillment. Elder happiness seems to emanate
from fully becoming oneself, feeling connected with the larger movement of the
Universe, and basically aligning self, expression, gifts to others, and
spiritual pursuits to one’s highest values. All of this, I’ve found, is really
good. I think it represents good news, but what I want to write about is the
pattern underneath, the greater news of our existence.
I have been harboring these
thoughts for some time. Maybe you have been holding your own thoughts just as
long. For me, the time is up. What wants to unfold now, has got me in its
grips. Aging has brought me here, and now insists that I honor what is
unfolding right along with my wrinkling, greying body. I have written, about
this era of life, that magnificence creeps in. To my mind, every bit of Life
has that attribute, and so does death.
Death is a favor to us. It
is fearsome and nerve-wracking, but not because of what we’ve learned from this
culture, but because being included in such an all-encompassing liberation is
itself awesome. I’ve come to see, through my own life, and through the lives
and deaths of others, that death is nothing more than a return to one’s deepest,
most divine self. Some may call it a return to the Ground of Being, the
Universe, The Great Mystery, Nothingness, or God, but the words don’t really
matter, the pattern seems to indicate that one experiences a recall, a
transition back/forward into a larger whole.
This is the greater news for
which aging is just a prelude. My partner, Alexandra Hart, first started
talking to me about something she was feeling rising in her as she got older.
She referred to what she called “essentializing.” This, for her, was the
process of giving up the superfluous in favor of the more essential. Simplicity
was beginning to replace no longer necessary complexity. Her life was becoming
more focused. In my sense, she was participating consciously in her own death;
in other words, she was ripening, becoming her juicier self.
As time went on, and as we
observed and talked about it more, it became apparent to us that some kind of
paradox was unfolding within us, and within others we were seeing. We were
declining, like many old folks, and we were becoming more. We soon came to
refer to this paradoxical movement as “reduction.’’ Xan likes to cook, so we
took a metaphor from cooking that captured the complicated advance that occurred,
as people, as we, became less. We were being reduced like the ingredients of a
good sauce and in the process our essential nature was being drawn out of us,
and we were becoming richer, more complex, and flavorful.
Even later as I was
reflecting upon death for a piece of writing I was doing, I suddenly realized I
had been reduced before. I also realized that in those same moments I had grown
closer to my full stature. Parts of me had passed away, died, so that I could
become more fully myself. Death began to look like something else to me,
something more mysterious and benign than I had been lead to believe. I began
to consider old age as a time of honing, of becoming, and death as a time of
actualization.
By and large, when I look
around, I see a culture that is pretty death-phobic. It makes sense to me, that
if people have no way to see the underlying beauty of death, the way it draws
out of us what is most essential and idiosyncratic about our nature’s, then
this natural part of Life would be fearful. Therefore, I consider it great
news, the realization that death may not be more than reduction par excellence!
I am not naïve enough to
believe that even shouting this news from the rooftops will convince anyone.
That is part of why I wouldn’t utter these words before this. I, probably
wasn’t mature enough, to handle a world that went right on fearing death. Today
however, I know that change will only follow personal realization. So, I simply
invite you to consider your own life, and view the times you have experienced
reduction (through broken plans, relationships, careers, deaths, illnesses),
and been re-made as more than you were. I would say that through those
experiences you died, you went beyond yourself, and became more yourself.
This realization contributes
a lot to the happiness of my life. I have died in that way several times
already. And, in some mysterious, unplanned way, I have become so much more
essentially me. Life re-made me. I’ve done a lot of therapy, become a
therapist, done a lot of spiritual practices, joined spiritual communities, and
sought out the latest greatest practices to insure that I was living fully,
only to find that Life had my back, and was growing me even better than I was
growing myself. Death is an installment of grace that I probably would not
choose (at least in cultural terms), but Life in its compassion and wisdom has
chosen for me. In the end, death is a favor.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
For more pieces like this, go to www.elderssalon.blogspot.com
(2010 thru 2013) and http://www.elderssalon2.blogspot.com (2014 on)
To hear archived versions of our radio program Growing An Elder Culture go to www.elderculture.com
To read excerpts, or otherwise learn, about Embracing Life: Toward A Psychology of
Interdependence go to http://www.davidgoff.net
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