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.
Senescence – The Touch of Decline: Aging, and the sense of loss it invites, informs us that impermanence is an unavoidable reality of everyday life. Nothing about us, or the world around us, is permanent. Uninterrupted by disease or catastrophic event, senescence presents a very gradual and unavoidable intensification of physical loss. We feel time aging our awareness, or more specifically, we embrace the loss of our time here in this world. Our past begins to take on increasingly larger proportion of our experience, while what we imagine our time remaining to be becomes increasingly smaller. Fear is a carnal and natural response to anything that poses a threat to our survival.
If we are to learn from the unavoidable reality of senescence and the aging of our presence in life, then a response inspired by wisdom and creative expression must inform the inevitable fear we feel within. We know with absolute certainty that we will eventually die even though we cannot know exactly how or when that will occur. Wisdom asks us to fully embrace the unavoidable realities of living, and though these realities may inspire fear and angst within we can choose how we orient ourselves to them. rather than fearing and avoiding the inevitable, a wise person will embrace, allow, move directly into and through the heart of our fear, learn from, and ultimately reorient ourselves in the realm of acceptance and gratitude.
It is wise to embrace fear when appropriate to do so; it is unwise to allow fear to overwhelm our capacity to learn from it. The fear of death, that companion in life that has until now largely remained silent, reminds us that our own survival will eventually become impossible.
The senses begin a natural decline and we continue to age. Our sight becomes compromised; we begin to experience difficulty seeing things near or far. We can’t quite focus our visual field with the clarity we once had and parts of life seem blurry. Perhaps we ears gradually begin to perceive a narrower acoustic range and our sense of hearing is less responsive to the sounds around us. Physical exercise and nutrition become increasingly critical as we age in order to slow down the effects of muscle loss, as well as the subtle loss of coordination, flexibility, and balance that conspire to change how we are able to interact with the world around us. A healthy response to aging is to embrace a lifestyle that serves to slow down the inevitable decline that aging brings in order to preserve our quality of experience.
Our acquaintance with absence and loss begins to become more prominent in our psyche. At some point in life we begin to intuitively sense that there is more time behind us than ahead of us. Aging is an unavoidable trajectory toward death, and the body’s subtle decline invites the eventual realization that we have in some way crossed an important threshold in life. Death often inspires both fear and avoidance, yet allowing ourselves to move into that fear is essential to the full embrace of being alive. The discomfort caused by the increasing influence of loss in our lives is an important message; that which we fear is the very thing we must allow ourselves to move into in order to know it. Fear thrives on ignorance and avoidance; the embrace of aging inspires wisdom and humility. Death is absence made permanent.
The Immediacy of Absence: When we lose a loved one we naturally experience feelings of grief, sadness, and regret. The person we cared about is gone forever and we are left in this world to continue on until it is our turn to pass on. We might feel as though we have lost part of ourselves in these distressing emotions. We regret the things we left unsaid and undone. We wonder what our lives will become since the loss of a loved one thrusts us into the unknown and the unimaginable. The loss of a loved one is the most powerful form of absence in the human experience. It forces us to redefine our present and future, and to proceed with our lives with pieces missing. This kind of absence is never fully resolved, but it is eventually accepted and merged into our identity.
Absence is the harbinger of the mystery of the soul.
One of the most important lessons of absence is humility. We live in an unfortunate age that is plagued by a rampant sense of entitlement. We believe that we can own things that cannot be owned. We believe that having more and more things adds value to our lives. We believe that we are in some manner a superior life form. We seek to conquer and in doing so make ourselves inferior. In embracing entitlement, humanity has placed itself on a hurdling trajectory toward our own collective demise called “progress.” It is healthier to understand our presence as a visit or temporary stay, since in the end it is impossible for us to actually “own” anything beyond our own experience. Even our own experience is taken away from us.
Northing cures a rampant sense of entitlement like mortality. Religious doctrine would have us believe in imaginary forms of entitlement after-life based on our behaviour in the present life. Doctrine and dogma invented by humans lead to the imposition rules and procedures that, if successfully followed, cure us from being born into sin and invite the promise of life after death. If we have faith (belief that has no real foundation) in these assumptions then we grant ourselves some relief from the presence of death. Spirituality is not, however, confined in this manner; a spiritual person is fully engaged in the processes and mysteries of life, while not limiting their experience to the assimilation of externally imposed rules. From a spiritual perspective, death is a mystery and a journey to embrace and learn from in order to promote a greater sense of vitality and vibrancy in life.
As we age we accumulate experiences that become the content of our own personal narrative and identity. Senescence is an invaluable source of inspiration, if we allow ourselves to fully attend to it. A spiritual approach to aging helps us to avoid living a life of avoidance confined by fear. Rather than making ourselves comfortably numb through distractions of all kinds often coupled with intense yet aimless busy-ness, we open ourselves to the underlying reality of life – beyond the boundaries of our social assumptions and cultural boundaries.
Absence and loss invite us into the universal experience of humankind, of those things that serve to connect us and inspire a collective sense of belonging. In this space a very valuable conversation can take place that transcends the pettiness of our economic prowess and our free-fall into consumption. Absence and loss are gifted teachers and inspired mentors that assist us in navigating the essential questions of what it means to be alive.