[Exploring Life] A goal that many of us hold secretly within is to live a long and healthy life, as free from pain and suffering as possible. It would be ideal if each of us were guaranteed to live a long, vibrant and healthy life, until we experience a sudden and painless decline far into the final stages of old age. And wouldn’t it be remarkable if we knew with absolute certainty what happens to us after death. However, we are all faced with the possibility of an interrupted life and uncertainty in terms of what lies beyond this reality. As we continue to age, we begin to realize that we are now farther away from our beginnings, and closer to the conclusion of life. As we move deeper into the experience of aging, we feel the movement of time differently.

Even if we have the good fortune not to experience a debilitating disease, we will all inexorably experience senescence – the natural and normal deterioration of the body as we get older. We begin to feel changes in our body quite gradually, while our minds quietly begin to devote more attention to these changes, and our spirits to ponder the sacred with a more inspired and authentic intensity. In using the word sacred I do not mean to imply a religious agenda; the presence of the sacred in not dependent upon religion. The sacred refers to the essence of being alive that animates us with awe, reverence, and wonder. In the absence of a meaningful spiritual practice for aging to help us navigate through the turbulent waters of growing older, we can feel immobilized by a lack meaning and purpose in life. The sacred is a sanctuary in which we discover our own sense meaning and purpose. As we age, the quest for meaning and purpose to anchor our experience becomes increasingly important to us, and this quest lies at the heart of a spirituality of aging.

The Sacred, Spirituality, and Religion: As we age our quest for the sacred intensifies and begins to permeate our presence. I use the word sacred to point toward the source and origin of meaning and purpose. In other words, the sacred is the very essence of life and the very reason for living. It is experienced as a sanctuary of gratitude, beauty, love, resilience, and belonging. When we are in the presence of the sacred we are imbued with a deep pervasive sense of reverence, wonder, and appreciation. The sacred can appear at any moment; while walking in nature we may be momentarily awe struck in the way the artistry of sunlight reveals fragile ice crystals ever so gently floating down from a perfectly clear blue sky. Though I prefer to avoid saying what something is not, it is worth noting that I do not use the word sacred to refer to a supernatural. The scared, in its most inspiring sense, is not a religious concept.

Spirituality may be thought of as an elemental quest to live a vibrant and enchanted life that is rich in meaning and purpose. This is true wealth, progress, and true achievement. Spirituality embraces and provides sanctuary for our deepest creative impulses and our most authentic expression. It is deeply personal and intimate. Through spirituality we seek to discover our own unique sense of purpose, meaning, and wisdom. The spiritual quest may be informed by the thoughts and ideas of others, but we are ultimately alone in our spiritual pursuit. Spirituality is not merely an inward quest characterized by quiet moments of contemplation and ritual habituation. It allures us directly into the midst of enchantment and the subtle embrace of the natural world. As we mature in our spirituality we become more dynamic, responsive, aware, and interactive. Our personalities evolve and begin to transform as our inner and outer worlds of experience begin to coalesce. We experience the felt-meaning, not merely head-meaning, of true belonging to each moment.

The word religion originates in the Latin ligare, which means to bind or tie. Religion is organized, formal, prescriptive, and can be used to create social conformity and assimilation. When we follow a particular religion have no choice other than to align our thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors to an externally imposed system of beliefs, rules, traditions and tenets. The evidence needed to validate religious dogma originates in the human imagination and are marketed as The Truth. All religion is authoritarian and impersonal. Many religions originate in a veiled threat, that is to say, if we do not conform to the stated dogma we will suffer either in the present life and/or in the supposed afterlife. On the other hand, if we do conform, we are granted entrance into the group and a reward after we die. Religion may be seen as a form of fictional story-telling that is designed to bind people to an imposed set of beliefs.

A crucial difference between spirituality and religion is that spirituality originates in a deeply and individualistic quest for meaning and purpose, while religion is designed to impose a predetermined set of beliefs and seeks to assimilate our behaviour so that it conforms to the group. As we age, we come into more frequent and closer contact with the interplay between life and death as well as the underlying mystery of being alive. External systems of belief, though they may have offered some degree of contentment in the past, begin to lose credibility. The reason for this is that we are now more inspired by the pursuit of authentic meaning and purpose, and become less willing to contract out our beliefs to an external agency. And to pursue meaning is to reach inward into the depths of our soul while simultaneously reaching out into the expansive embrace of the natural world that surrounds us. Through spirituality, our outer and the inner worlds of experience begin to coalesce and unify.

The Soul of Aging: There comes a time in life when we begin to notice and feel subtle changes in our body. Aging is a patient and immutable presence. We all know that our bodies are irrevocably designed to perish, yet the felt-meaning of senescence has a poignant quality about it. As we get older we begin to feel our experience of life differently. The bodymind alerts our soul to something relentless and remarkable. There is a deeper more resonant calling touching us now, a calling that is easily powerful enough to shake us out of our spiritual slumber, material pursuits, and superficial appearances. Our soul begins to embrace an ultimate truth, and that is the truth of impermanence. It is here, in the midst of this emotional tempest, that spirituality offers sanctuary.

The soul is that part of us that is intimately merged with the essence of being alive; it is in a perpetual conversation with the source life. In this respect our body and mind are embraced and completely enveloped by our soul. We are in our soul; our souls are not within us. There is something energetic and electric about the soul. In the manner of Jung, we are all human beings in search of a soul. Our soul is the space of reflection, and is therefore the space in which we create meaning and express our purpose. Somewhere in the midst of our irrevocable trajectory toward death, our soul is touched, awakened, and energized by impermanence. And it is here, in this wondrous yet rugged and wild landscape, that a conversation begins – perhaps for the first time. It is the conversation of our life, the narrative of our own identity, and our own unique and authentic story of a being alive in this world. Touched by our own mortality in the midst of life awakens the eternal in us, and as we move toward it the eternal begins to illuminate the horizon.

Death and the soul are intimate companions. Our bodies are predestined to deteriorate and die. This subtle feeling of physical decline in the body resonates in the underlying currents of our mind. We slowly begin to realize that our body is losing its resilience. The rhythm of our awareness becomes more attuned to the felt-meaning of impermanence. Of course, this is not something that should defeat us, make us feel bleak, or cause us to lose our creative imagination for living. A spiritual response to impermanence is to embrace the unavoidable realities of living with inspiration, animation and creative expression. In other words, the soul of aging invites us to move directly into the source of our fears and anxieties about dying so that we may be inspired to live with authentic artistry. Our fears and anxieties remain, but they do not dominate. Instead, our souls work to transform the underlying sense of suffering we feel into creative expression.

Spiritual Aging and the Quest for Meaning: Lars Tornstam is exploring the idea that seniors are predisposed to consider the spiritual dimension, which includes interconnection among generations, the relationship between life and death, and well as the deeper mysteries of life itself. He calls this idea gerotranscendence. Gero means old age, and transcendence means to climb, rise and go beyond. The idea here is that many seniors aspire to transcend old age through a spiritual quest. In this sense, gerotranscendence is a kind of spiritual practice. In his book Gerotranscendence: A Developmental Theory of Positive Aging, Tornstam identifies four key elements of gerotranscendence:

• The individual becomes less self-occupied and at the same time more selective in the choice of social and other activities.
• There is an increased feeling of affinity with past generations and a decreased interest in superfluous social interaction.
• The individual might also experience a decrease in interest in material things and a greater need for solitary “meditation.” Positive solitude becomes more important.
• There is also often a feeling of cosmic communion with the spirit of the universe, and a redefinition of time, space, life and death.

These ideas animate aging with a sense of wonder and vibrant creative expression. Our ability to bring a positive (yet resolutely realistic) perspective to our own impermanence is a critical learning capacity that has the potential to exponentially increase our understanding and enjoyment of life as we get older. We all secretly seek communion with something greater than ourselves. We all secretly desire to be part of a greater unity in which we find ultimate sanctuary. The artistry of living is intimately connected with the quest for belonging. As we get older, however, the glitter and shine of our cultural belonging begins to fade and the blatant superficiality of our attachments, the expertly-crafted banality of our organizations, as well as the immense ignorance of our material pursuits begins to wear on our soul. This invigorates the call to a greater sense of meaning, and ultimately this call, regardless of our age, is a uniquely individual and magnificently creative pursuit.