Conundrum

Do we all reach a point in our lives where the fragility of life, the temporal evanescence of it, the delicate way in which the whole of living becomes a tenuous rather than an ongoing affair....is there a point where all of our searching resembles a quandary?

It wasn’t that long ago that life expectancy was half of what it is today. That we live much longer these days is something I find comforting. We are endlessly worried about the various diseases and environmental poisons that surround us yet somehow most of us manage to make it well beyond the average life span of recent human history.

Getting older is a conundrum.

We relax in the face of the familiar but we know all too well that any day might be our last. We have no more idea of what lies beyond death than we do of the concepts of our religions that tell us that life continues on. It is all a matter of faith. In the scheme of things, we are neither tiny nor enormous. Size seems more and more relative. We are unique. Each and every one of us. This idea comforts me in a way that the silly storybook notion of Heaven never has. Even as a child I found this Heaven concept a bit of a stretch.

Old age brings so many wonderful surprises but also the diminishment of the body, the thing by which we have defined ourselves to the world since birth.
We know that people look at us and see an older person but inside us this doesn’t square with our looking outwards through our eyes. Our looking upon the world remains essentially the same as it has always been. This discrepancy - between the essential continuity of perception and the way in which we are perceived at this point in time - creates a new frontier for us, a new world that we slowly stumble into. It would be easy to be saddened by this, to seek the Fountain of Youth and whatever stuff gives us the appearance of continued youth. So many fall into this trap. But there is something richer, more profound, more rewarding, that seems to be around for those of us who want to be who we are - not who we think we should be.