Disillusionment

 One of the attributes of old age which has had a positive impact upon me has been that I am outgrowing much of the cultural nonsense I have been subject to. Growing more mature has brought with it a more refined and perceptive viewpoint. I am no longer subject to ‘common knowledge,’— the most conventional of assumptions. That development has been really liberating, but full of betrayal and painful disillusionment. The crazy deception prevalent in the normal social world has led me to a lifetime of distortion.

It has been painful, disorienting, de-humanizing, disturbing and debilitating. Once I was small, young, and inexperienced-enough to believe the created world I was born into. That era passed long ago. And with it passed my child-like innocence.

I drank the kool-aid. I lived the big lie — swallowing separation — and reducing my native wit into the pablum of the era. I was the most faithful lemming, heading over the cliff of environmental disaster, with a smile on my face. I may have been more and more depressed, but I was living the good life.

Fortunately, I’m older than that now. Aging has revealed what I always knew, but had no way of saying, integrating or really affirming before. The world is suffering from a lack of human imagination. And, so am I.

Each step of the way. Each turn of my life, as I grew more aware, I found good reasons to no longer feel so sanguine about what had once been so important to me. I went from trying to be what would pass, to an effort to find something to save me outside myself — like a good job, relationship, or house. All along, I was soon disabused of the things that mattered to me. I grew, by leaving behind a trail of shattered illusions. I could have been cynical, but instead my disillusionment just grew.

Now, I have experienced a life of twists and turns. What used to matter — the circumstances that always floated my boat — have all passed over the horizon. I am    left with a lifetime of illusions of fulfillment. AKwakening to all of these false starts has been disheartening.  It is odd how bearing this lifetime of disappointments has somehow prepared me for this part of my life.

I have a new friend who says, “Disillusionment is a precursor to wisdom.” Rightly, I believe, as he is pointing out, that all of these necessary failures, have delivered me to a healthier realization of what really matters. The earlier illusions have been replaced by newer, more gratifying ones. But, now I can see an old pattern of broken promises and hypnotizing beliefs. I’m still prone to believe some of them, but now I’m savvy enough to know I’m fooling myself. I am a sad carrier of yesterday’s beliefs, of hope gone awry, of massive disillusionment, of a humble, if not humiliated, innocence.

Strangely, all of this is so normal. Getting older, has revealed to me just how much I have been wrong. It is a painful kind of liberation. Another twist, is that it is carrying me closer to home. I am old enough now, where I know my freedom depends upon freeing myself from the gravity of all these old assumptions. Disillusionment with the past serves one headed into an unfettered future.

Along the way I have come to distrust certainty. That has put me on a path of unknowing. This experience is harrowing, only slightly more desirable then the one that formerly looked so appealing. I travel more slowly now, weighed down by my accumulated illusions, but sensitized to a humbler way. 

 

 

  

Deep and Slow

 

It is the deep and slow
that survive,
the deep and slow that
hold up the land

It is why we are here,
together for a while:
to help each other slow
enough to hear the deep,
to feel the deep, to find
it in ourselves. 

                                                                  It is why we are here.

                                                                                from To Be An Elder by Mark Nepo

It is why we old people are here. To notice depth and to embody it. That means, in some way, to become it. The experience, sensitivity, and nearness to death, alter awareness, and promote a more layered perspective, that can give expression to what lies underneath us all. Depth is an antidote to the crisis of shallowness that debilitates our society. There is inherent in the elder experience of some folks, access to a penetrating awareness. The ecosystem of beliefs that defines the surface of our daily societal interactions suffers from lack of nuance — the many-layered depth — that some elders know.

This awareness is slow. It is composed of multiple layers, connections and potencies. The moment is an opening to all that can happen. It takes a while to become palpable, and even then, it is laden with probability. Slowness honors unknown enormity. Slowness salutes uncertainty and thusly pays homage. Beneath it all is the unknown, the face of providence, to which slowness is reverence.

Getting old is more than just aging. Old souls quicken awareness, and paradoxically slow it down. The deep is slow because essence unfolds according to laws of its own — the truth is always a multi-faceted thing. The humility that befalls the many humiliations of a long-life, prepares one for being partially alive to arising wholeness. What the deep delivers is always greater than what we expect, always more than we are prepared for.

Mystery and aging are tied together. The deep has a pact with slowness, and this pact governs the ripening process. One cannot get riper without deepening and slowing. It is this natural inclination that makes an elder such a timely host for the honoring of depth.  Perhaps some of the most poignant suffering the world knows comes because elder depth is not adequately recognized. The world is mired in the superfluous.

There isn’t a solution to this imbalance. The self-correcting elements of the larger system will eventually prevail. But, in the meantime, find the way to slow. Think of doing that as taking a retreat from the normal hub-bub of your life. Depth is after you — slowing down makes you a more inviting target. You want to be this kind of bulls-eye. If you are a slow hot mess, then Life is on its way.

Being depth is inherently slow. Feeling it inside takes a while, decades according to the author. This is one of the things we need each other for. The complexity we are to each other, supports the emergence of this kind of being. Slowly, we can be turned into a kind of human kaleidoscope, a multi-faceted sponge, aware of the many nuances, that make up the depths. Falling all over each other has a humanizing and deepening effect, that is good for releasing depth into the world.