[Exploring Life] At night we sleep and surrender our awareness to the unconscious world of darkness and dreams. During the day we remain attentive to our needs, hopes, and desires in the midst of the circumstances that inhabit our conscious awareness. When we first begin to wake in the morning we are guided into a fragile and mysterious space, a threshold between the mercurial world of dreams and our episodic foray into the world of striving. In the threshold of our morning awakening a primal and mystical conversation occurs. We are not completely awake, nor completely asleep, but our awareness travels deftly and fluidly across both realms. Our conscious thought is intimate with our most imaginative dreaming. An awakening is a primal threshold and a magical moment; when we awaken there is subtle yet pervasive feeling of moving from one mode of reality into another.

Sleep is the carnal medium of dreams. If our sleeping patterns become worn and imbalanced, the equilibrium between our conscious and unconscious worlds is contorted. Insomnia is an inability inhabit sleep, as well as a disruption of the natural interplay between our conscious and subconscious conversation. When sleep is illusive, we lose intimacy with the primal cycle of surrender and awakening. Our minds can become addicted to thought trapping our presence in a whirl of mental activity that inhibits the approach of sleep. Without sleep there is nothing for us to wake from. Morning creatively emerges with the rising sun and the earth begins to vibrate with the rhythms of life, yet we are already awake – we fail to emerge creatively. Somehow the quality of those initial moments in the morning inspire and animate our presence during the day.
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Patricia Pearson defines anxiety as fear in search of a cause. Fear is an immediate emotional response to a perceived threat, which results in potent feelings of apprehension, dread, terror and panic. In the midst of a crisis the brain invokes a pervasive feeling of tension and stress. Once the crisis we are experiencing has resolved itself, our fears begin to dissipate eventually subside. Acute anxiety is the result of a sudden and unexpected emergence of an emergency situation that presents a direct threat to survival. In this sense, the anxiety we experience is helpful in that it puts us on high alert in order to bring our complete attention to resolving the threat at hand.

However, anxiety can be more mercurial, cloaked, and insidious in our lives. We can feel a general sense of anxiety even though the actual source or cause of our concern is veiled or completely imaginary. Chronic anxiety affects us even though there is no immediate or apparent threat, except the threat we imagine in our mind. Our thought patterns, whether they have a basis in reality or not, cultivate emotional habits. Anxiety can become both habit and addiction. It is a grave risk to ignore the quality, character and content of thought that inhabits our minds. Anxiety can become one of the most destructive forces in our lives; under the wares of anxiety we perceive the world and interpret our experience through the bias of fear, worry, tension, stress, dread, and apprehension.
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[Exploring Life] It has been just over one year since my parents passed away. The feeling of their absence remains poignant, yet there is a greater sense of acceptance of the loss. It is clear to me that we do not “get over” the loss of someone important in our lives. Grief is an amazingly agile and powerful emotional creature. Earlier I wrote about how grief changes our orientation to time and place. At that time, I had no idea just how stealth grief can be. That is to say, grief can patiently wait within our inner landscape and suddenly reveal itself as a torrential emotional storm that catches us unaware. The experience is perhaps more acute if, like me, the initial feelings of grief were repressed in order to “take care of things.”

Death creates absence in life. After the loss of a loved one, it is perfectly normal to experience a disruption of body, mind, and spirit. We may even withdraw from social settings for a while so that we can heal. When someone dies we are overwhelmed by the immensity of the mystery we live inside of. As a result, our thinking may become unsettled, we may feel deep levels of sadness and emptiness, and confusion over how to proceed in life. As we move through our grief, we learn to accept its message and we begin to experience a new perspective in life. Even though we may feel as though we have reached a place of acceptance, grief may inform us otherwise. Grief can be mercurial; a sudden (and completely unexpected) upsurge of grief may overwhelm us so completely that we lose our ability to function in the present moment. These experiences are known as STUGs (a rather unpleasant sounding acronym for sudden temporary upsurge of grief) and present themselves after we have presumed a return to a normal state of functioning. To use play on words from a saying about the past, we may be done with our grief, but our grief may not be done with us.
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[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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[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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[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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[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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[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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[Exploring Life] How do our beliefs change when we are faced with our own mortality? Our lives are fragile and inexorably transient. Our presence will transform when we die. The nature of our transformation at death is an unknown and, in spite of our proficiency in creating fanciful stories that propose an explanation and perhaps even comfort, there is no evidence of what actually happens to us. The unknown is something that can inspire breathtaking levels of fear and anxiety within. The mystery of our own death is perhaps one of our most intense sources of fear in life. Yet it is while we are walking through the terrain of this universal mystery, this uncomfortable landscape of fear, that the essence of our beliefs becomes strikingly clear and coherent. The subtle approach of our own mortality brings tremendous clarity and transparency to our lives.

There is a kind of threshold that many of us will enter into, a landscape of experience that is defined by an overwhelming awareness that death is approaching and our time in this life is coming to an end. The amount of time we will remain in this threshold is not apparent to us, it may be hours, days , weeks, perhaps even months. What is apparent, however, is that the nature of our beliefs we have lived by in our lives are exposed in the midst of this, and we are completely immersed into the most practical and authentic philosophical moments in our lives. During this time we realize that all we have, all we have ever really had, in our lives is our beliefs. We innately wish our lives to have been meaningful and purposeful, yet sometimes we find ourselves near the end of days facing a wall of regret.
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[Exploring Life] Closure means to find a resolution to a significant event in a person’s life. With respect to the loss of a loved one, closure ultimately means to find contentment and gratitude as the final and most significant outcome of death. This is the twelfth and final entry I will dedicate to the series On the Loss of My Parents. This is not to say that I have brought full closure to the grieving process, nor is it to say that I will no longer reflect on both the presence and absence of my parents in my life. It is to say, however, that this is the last entry I will dedicate expressly to the loss of my parents and as such it represents a form of partial closure. The meaning of their lives will remain a constant companion within me; death destroys physical presence and replaces it with spiritual presence. Grief does not want us to become lost and mired in a bog of suffering and pain over that which is now gone: it encourages us to emerge from the trembling and begin to inhabit gratitude. Ultimately grief is a direct extension of love, therefore grief is fundamentally an essential source of healing. The feelings and memories that surround the loss of my parents remains an impassioned interplay of absence and presence. They have died and are physically gone, but their presence remains. Through death, grief inspires emergence.

We know without doubt that our departed loved ones would not want us to become entrenched in mourning their death. The loss of a loved one invokes suffering because all grief originates in love. Mourning, the offspring of grief, only wishes to pay us a short visit in order to give us permission to express the intense emotional turmoil invoked by death. The death of my mother and father is an expression of the impermanence we all inexorably belong to. My father lived life according to a simple yet profoundly effective outlook, and that was to influence what he was able to, and not worry about things he had no control over. My mother lived life by actively seeking out enjoyment in life and sharing that enjoyment with others as much as possible. They experienced the unexpected onslaught of life as we all do, but were able to steady themselves through the rough weather with these perspectives.

As I embrace the union of both of those perspectives in the midst of their absence, I literally feel the touch of the spirits within. The inevitable veil of tears continues to fall within the privacy of my heart, yet I also sense the approach of a new landscape that lies beyond the vanishing point. Grief does not wish us to take up residence within it – we are meant to pass through it as if it were a portal to a new land. My parents would encourage this movement through grief, to find contentment in the midst of their absence, to inspire memory with their presence, and to inhabit a landscape of gratitude.
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