Farther Along

When you are getting older, there isn’t much you can rely on. Aging, despite the body changes, is such a mysterious process. It is hard to believe that some inexorable process, other than the breakdown of what was, is happening. I call it ripening. This piece is about the Mystery that goes on, mostly unnoticed, while we are bemoaning the new difficulties we are experiencing. There is something else happening, something so unknown, and beyond us, that it deserves some attention, some recognition. As I have just learned, it is good that we cannot make it happen.

 

Old age is a kind of special indignity. Besides wrinkles, loss of memory and balance, advancing ear hair and invisibility, there comes, the losses that propel one into a broader orbit. An overview looms. New perspective comes into sight. And suddenly, if you are not too mesmerized by what you’ve lost, escape velocity is near at-hand. For the first time, you can feel the possibility, of being yourself, of no longer being defined by the conventions of the consensus conspiracy theory. Ripening means you get to fall from the tree.

 

Some people are totally terrified at the prospect of that moment. Whereas, some old people are not. What’s going on? Ripening is taking everyone beyond control, beyond imagination, beyond themselves. It’s a free service that the Universe provides.

 

Anyway, getting there is a kind of foreplay, full of surprises, misdirection, and passionate anticipation. No one knows where the fruit goes, or what service it renders, but falling is much like flying, so exhilaration takes hold. The really interesting part occurs when one recognizes that one has always been falling, one  is just farther along.  Then joy settles in.

 

Some people already realize the Universe is diddling with them. They have anticipatory joy, pre-orgasmic elation. Getting older, for them, is non-rational, and highly suspect to the culture. 

 

Farther along is a Mystery, that turns us all in new directions, without our consent, and approval. This is equal parts terror and awe. It is the finest e-ticket ride the Universe has to offer.  Thrills, spills, and beguiling hills to climb. The body’s breakdown heralds the end of this ride, and the perspective that makes sense of the whole strange trip. It is the end and the beginning all at once. Imagine that!

 

Farther along, there waits a being of light. It is what you are becoming. A mystifying sensuous light, that is a product of a lifetime of befuddled learning. One can sense this unfolding presence, this lightness of being, in the way things keep evolving, becoming more complex as they become simpler. Farther along lies breakdown, the breakthrough, that we cannot make, which gratefully insures that we get there.

 

Yes, paradox rules.