It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
- Aristotle
Contemplative Thoughts
Aging: Senescence as Creative Inspiration
[Exploring Life] It is strange to contemplate aging. The process of getting older often seems so gradual as to be imperceptible. The idea of getting older can create a sense of discomfort since the very mention of it requires us to come into closer proximity with the reality of our own impermanence. We have an understandable but unfortunate tendency to avoid sources of discomfort, even when we secretly know that moving through the nucleus of that discomfort would invigorate our very experience of life. It is sad to be held captive by fear and dread in the face of an unavoidable reality that we all must experience. We cannot change the presence of aging in our lives, nor can we determine exactly how it will reveal itself, but we can decide how to orient ourselves to it. Aging and the inevitable physical deterioration that it reveals offers an essential of creative inspiration for living a vibrant life.
Senescence is a term used to describe the physiological changes that naturally occur in the body as we age. More specifically, senescence is the science of the range of physiological changes that lead to functional decline with age. As the biological resilience of our body begins to wane, we become more susceptible to disease. In this sense, aging means that we become more vulnerable and fragile over time. There is a deeply primal sense of poignancy in senescence. It is only natural that we would feel distress in realizing that we will all unavoidably experience physical deterioration. Turning away from an emotion in avoidance is a sure way to harbour pain and suffering within. Our task is to move directly into the physical, mental and spiritual distress inherent in senescence so we may experience what it has to offer.
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Aging: An Acquaintance With Absence
[Exploring Life] Absence is an emotional state of awareness in which we feel a deep sense of loss; the death of a loved one or friend invokes the deepest sense of loss. The feeling of absence originates in the poignant contrast between the presence of someone or something and the impossibility of ever being able to experience that presence again. Absence is a primal echo of a previous existence, of something that once was but now can never be. When we enter into the landscape of absence we have passed through a threshold, a point of no return, in which what was can never be retrieved. Absence is the child of impermanence, that subtle yet pervasive reminder that our life here on this planet is as much about endings as it is beginnings.
What does absence conspires to teach us? Aging is a relentless trajectory toward our inevitable demise. As aging progresses our physiology increasingly expresses a subtle yet relentless deterioration; we physically begin to lose our viability and become more susceptible to disease. Senescence ushers in the pressure of our own mortality. Perhaps one of the most influential moments of aging occurs somewhere the realm of middle age, when we first begin to realize that our body is becoming more fragile and less resilient. This is an intimate and deeply personal expression of loss, the accomplice of absence. In our early years, the body continued to develop and we experienced the physical growth and expansion. Later in life the gradual decline of our bodies begins to create a subtle yet penetrating awareness of physical decline and contraction. Regardless of our internal angst, this realization inspires one of the most vibrant and powerful learning experiences in our entire lifetime.
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Aging: The End of Retirement
[Exploring Life] To retire means to withdraw, retreat, or remove oneself from a particular circumstance in order to engage in something different. The traditional view of retirement is that it brings one period of life to a close while simultaneously ushering in a new beginning in some other mode of life. The origins of retirement from the work force at age 65 can be traced to the latter half of the 19th century. The average life expectancy of a male in that period of time was approximately 54, making retirement an entirely ridiculous notion. In the early days, retirement was a phase of life that few were expected to reach; for the most part, people died while engaged in some form of work. If we applied the same criteria today, we would set retirement age at age 89, and once again most people would never leave the workplace. In the past, retirement has been defined by a person’s age, an underlying sense that at a certain age we can no longer contribute to the workplace, and an overly idealized and often exaggerated view of life as a kind of reward in the “golden” years. This view of retirement is, thankfully, losing its grip on our lives.
There is no meaningful line of reasoning that would allow us to determine a specific age at which all people should retire. This is an exercise in futility. The psychological impact of retirement, that is to say, the feelings of anxiety and uncertainty that naturally result from any significant shift in the course of our lives, is both profound and life altering. Do we retire merely because we are now viewed as “old?” Do we retire because we can no longer contribute to the workforce? Do we retire because we have done our time and now expect some kind of entitlement? Ageism has, unfortunately, tainted our understanding of retirement; retirement is all too often equated with being “old” and therefore in some way less valuable or able in the workplace. This is complete nonsense. It is far more beneficial to think about retirement as a kind of threshold in life, a moving away from something and, more importantly, a moving toward something else. In other words, it is far more important to envision what we are retiring to, and how we can embrace life in a new and perhaps more vibrant way.
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Memory: The Cult of Remembrance
[Exploring Life] How many misleading or false beliefs and assumptions do we preserve in our memories? And how many of these false beliefs and assumptions have been assimilated as a result of cultural conditioning? It would be immensely difficult to conduct a statistical inventory of our memories in order to quantify the exact number of beliefs and assumptions we hold on to that are confining and perhaps even virulent. We cannot describe or locate the precise nature of a memory. Memory is an elusive phenomenon that remains hidden and mysterious to us. The contents of memory, the specific thoughts and beliefs that give rise to remembrance cannot be itemized and put on display. Our awareness of the memories that animate our actions is incomplete; we are not always aware of what we remember and how those remembrances influence the choices and behaviours.
In Against the Memory Industry, Christopher Szabia asks, “Is the cult of remembrance holding us back?” The idea of a cult of remembrance is compelling and immediately places us on a trajectory to explore the shadowy confluence of psychological assimilation, personal identity, and lifestyle. The idea of a cult often retrieves the negative imagery associated with abhorrent forms of devotion to a set of beliefs that are all too often unfounded if not deranged. The task of any cult is to infiltrate, capture, and confine memory within a prison of imposed belief. A cult infects memory with subservience, making us pliable, feeble and numb. Our memory is hijacked, and the deception is often so complete that we view those that hijack us as our benefactors who are caring for our best interests.
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Spiritual Endeavour: Dark Night of the Soul – 5
[Exploring Life] A dark night of the soul is an invitation to our own renaissance. The curse of seemingly inescapable psychological and spiritual burdens is a threshold that immerses us in a dark unrelenting entanglement with our own spiritual-renewal. It is deep within the midst of our most intense struggles in life that we are provided with the opportunity to cultivate resilience, self-reliance, and the recovery of our intimate and inexorable bond with nature. Escaping the shackles of habitual and conditioned responses in life leads to the recovery of our innate creativity, which allows us to offer ourselves more imaginatively to the world. When the source of our creativity is natural, the expression of our presence flows effortlessly into the world around us. It is not, unfortunately, possible to insulate ourselves from pain and suffering and attempting to do so will only serve to intensify our quiet agony, but we can choose to meet that which threatens us the most with imagination.
The intense psychological and spiritual burden imposed on our sensibilities in a dark night of the soul is immense and threatening. Life can take on the appearance of seemingly endless anxieties and dilemmas exacerbated by a painful unrelenting absence of simplicity, comprehension, and clarity. Perhaps the most profound and painful aspect of a dark night is the realization that we are completely and irrevocably alone in our journey. No one can travel with us downward into the roots of our own identity. We can read about the journey of others into the dark night, but ultimately we must escape from our entrenched habits, addictions, patterns and routines that have silently reduced any remaining creativity we might within our soul have to mere cultural fodder. Our primary resource in the midst of a dark night is a vibrant and expansive form of learning that lies in wait within each of us. It is now time to author our own unique narrative. This is the essence of the invitation and the essential creative endeavour shrouded within the mercurial depths of a dark night of the soul.
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Aging: An Unexpected Life
[Exploring Life] Life expectancy embraces a statistical assumption about how long, on average, we will live. We might also think about is a projection of when, on average, we can expect to die. For example, newborn Canadians will on average live to approximately age eighty-one. A sixty-five year-old Canadian can expect to live into their mid-eighties. For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume each of us will live, on average, to age eighty-five. By subtracting our current age from the expected age we arrive at the number of years left, on average that we have in life. When we are forty-two and a half years-old we pass the chronological half-way point in life, that is to say, as we continue to age we become closer death. A fifty year-old Canadian can expect to live another thirty-five years on average. Our date of birth has always been known fact; our date of death is a statistical probability, that is, until it happens.
Surrounding these statistical assumptions about life expectancy are myriad influences that can effortlessly render our assumptions irrelevant. Most of these influences are the kind that lower or life expectancy, and cause our projected date of death to be quite a bit closer than we had wished. Or perhaps our date of death suddenly appears without warning. Statistical assumptions about life expectancy are fragile. Though we seek comfort in mentally projecting our date of death as far into the future as possible we are in no way entitled to live a statistically probable length of time. We simply do not know with any degree of certainty whether or not we will die this evening, tomorrow, next week, in a few months, or several years into the future. Death is an inevitable in life that can stimulate fear and angst deep within our being. However, embracing senescence creatively and imaginatively can inspire and animate our lives in the here and now. To live a life of fulfilment is to live an unexpected life.
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Aging: Creating A Foundation for Fulfilment
[Exploring Life] November mornings somehow inspire reflection. It’s strange to wake-up while it is still dark and this seems to be something that I never quite adjust to. Our natural internal rhythms somehow feel more forced as the amount of available light during the day decreases during the fall and winter months. On this November morning I found myself reflecting on the rhythms of aging; each morning I am one day older in biological terms. In my youth, however, the rhythms of aging were quite soft and often peripheral to my experiences. Today, somewhere in what we sometimes refer to as mid-life, I find that the rhythms of aging are becoming more immediate. There is no sense of sadness or regret in these words, no sense of time lost; to equate sadness and regret with the organic and natural process of growing old is self-destructive.
Aging, the gradual process of growing old, is the fundamental pulse of our creativity and imagination. Our bodies travel through this life by slowing and almost imperceptibly growing old. To fully embrace senescence (the natural organic process of growing older and the effects of increasing age) is to reach into the essence of living a life imbued with meaning, intention, and purpose. There is a deep mystery in aging; we do not know how long we will live. How many more Novembers are in my future? As I sit here on this dark November morning, I realize that this new internal rhythm I sense is an invitation to approach time in a more imaginative way, and to move differently in mind, body and spirit. It is important to approach aging with care, and to openly embrace the process of growing old with creativity and imagination. This is not always an easy or desirable path to explore since growing older serves as a constant reminder of the quiet approach of our own mortality. Perhaps it is precisely when the waters of life become troubled by the fears, doubts, and anxiety inspired by the relentless progression of aging that creativity and imagination become our most precious resource.
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