Inner Life

 

      Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination

                                                            Mary Oliver from The Wild Geese

 

There is one grace-filled aspect of aging, that I don’t think has been adequately acknowledged. I want to give it special attention. It is hard to do so, in this world that glorifies surfaces. What I want to focus on usually becomes most evident later on in life. Getting old means a growing awareness of an inner dimension. A shocking, often times slippery, movement in, sometimes adds to the confusion that sets in, when one ages. I believe this movement represents the penultimate development of later life, and is the thrust of ripening, that differentiates our species.

 

Inner life doesn’t manifest in the same way for everybody. It doesn’t manifest at all for some folks. Only the Mystery knows why. But, for others, it can be a revelation, a set of synchronistic events, a strange discomfort, a profoundly troublesome symptom, or an awkward knowing. There is a stirring that can happen at any moment, anywhere, inside or out, that one cannot hide from, and cannot easily appease. Something stirs and awakens, unbidden, and unlike what one might have been led to expect. Some seed of who one really is, germinates.

 

This is a birth that has taken a life-time to happen. This is the part of humanness that has been largely left to religion, because science can’t measure it. Something undefinable happens, a life-time takes on new meaning, and one is freshly revitalized. Old age becomes newly alive.

 

There is a lot of loneliness in later life. One of the hallmarks of this era is isolation. Old folks are left on the trail, to fend for themselves, to pass quietly. This neglect is horrific, but it does serve in one way. There is time to reflect — memory may be gone — but the stamp of existence remains. Reduced stimulation, and demand, enable the fruiting of the seed of inner life. Wrinkled, overwhelmed, and strangely happy, an old person stumbles toward the grave, having fulfilled some inexorable natural demand.

 

Inner life contains a kind of productivity that has been ignored by our materialistic culture. Assuming only that we are what we say we are, is a yoke we have placed on ourselves, thinking we are only valuable in economic terms. Our lives stretch out, beyond reproduction, beyond work viability, beyond even our assumptions about ourselves, to manifest the one capability that is our species alone. We are capable of becoming so much more! Alive in a more fulsome way!

  

Inner life reveals the real pregnancy we are. Partly formed, we are becoming! Becoming what, we don’t know, but the stirring within, the fact it happens later on in a human’s life, shows that something is coming. Something we cannot predict, but with appropriate attention, we can feel and experience. Life, as we know it, is a way-station, a means of moving on. 

 

Inner life can be fickle. Sometimes it is dark, cruel even — revealing what seems worst in us. What stirs is a Mystery. Sometimes unfeelable, something invisible changes everything. As seed carriers we don’t always know what we are carrying 

(or that we are carrying) for the world, but we are bringing forward something essential to the whole. It is an unacknowledged part of being human— a spiritual pregnancy— through which the future is unfolding.