A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.
- Robert Frost
***
Ageing – the only inevitable in life apart from death – is an experience that can be daunting to the mind. It is not so in the least due to vanity, but because each stage brings awareness of how ageing imparts a new way of perceiving the world internally and externally - an experience in every moment of
“What is, isn’t; and what isn’t, is!”
“What matters, doesn’t matter; and what seems to not matter, does matter!”
Still decades away from senility, but close enough to sniff it in the distance, there come two new things in life. Firstly there’s a newfound ability to see childhood and youth with fascination, which creates in one a compassion that has never been experienced before. Along with it comes an academic curiosity about old age, and a resolve to fight it, if not at the physical level but at least at the intellectual level, at least as far along in time as possible.
The desperate will to keep the mind accommodating enough till the very end finds an internal opponent – a concretised portion of the brain with set habits and patterns that possibly could have been changed while it was still malleable. The “I” that is; wishes for an “I” that isn’t, and ironically fights an existential fight with it. The “this is who/how/what I am” coexists with “this is the same who/how/what I wish I weren’t”.
Change comes over with an internal fight that is won this way or that. When the change persists starts an external struggle of telling the world – “this is who/how/what I am today” – and the ensuing yearning for acceptance for the new me. Strangely this leads to an acceptance of the world and the other for what it is, in the now, and in every moment of change, with varying degrees of coexisting feelings of pleasure and despair.
As much as one may choose to believe that contradiction cannot be a path leading to anything, paradoxes do rule life. It is just the lazy mind that shuns the all-encompassing complex greys and labels them black or white!
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