When you’re older, you get more comfortable in your skin. You’re not so reliant upon the opinions and approval of other people. You’re not so willing to please just so you’ll not offend them. Neither do you go out of your way to give them the finger. It’s just that you’ve realized that some things are much more important to you like your inner peace and your health. By now, you’ve learned that it’s best to deal peacefully with your demons – your anger, your guilt, your unworthiness. All these have been troubling you for years, doing everything they could to get your attention while you did everything you could to chase them away, deny them, pretend they weren’t there or justify them with more anger and righteous indignation or hide them behind lofty ideals and arrogance.
It’s not that you’ve lost your enthusiasm for life, that fire in your belly that drove you blindly insane with ambition to conquer the world, make your unique difference to it, leave your unique mark on it or simply grab your share of its attention. That teen spirit, that adolescent fury, that youthful angst, that feverish anxiety has had to reckon with the recurring tides of life whose waves have crashed you senseless against jagged cliffs, tossed you about like a lifeless loofah and given you the finger. Outraged and indignant, you’d rush back in just to prove a miserable, meaningless point. What proof? What point?
When you’re older, you pause long enough to ask those questions and you’re secure enough to accept the answers – nothing to prove, no point to make. Life is inherently meaningless but as a thinking, feeling embodiment of life, you can choose to give it meaning and you can choose what that meaning is.
When you’re older, and if you’ve been paying attention, that meaning becomes less and less about the separated, abandoned, unworthy, individual you and more and more about the undifferentiated, wholesome, love-being YOU. The YOU that you catch a glimpse of when you sit in Presence. Oneness actually feels real now. You realize that while you exist in the form of a wave in the ocean, you’re really the water for it’s the water that pervades both wave and ocean. It is life. It is love. And you are it.
So the enthusiasm doesn’t leave you when you’re older. It just takes a different form and feel. It’s quieter and stronger, finer and more focused, surer and more flexible, disciplined and more intuitive, graceful and more easily humoured.
But not all of us become like this when we get older. For some of us, the enthusiasm hardens into brittleness in mind and body. Hard and easily broken. And so we seek to protect it and in the process, we get more broken and more brittle.
MENTORING
Let Life express itself intoxicatingly, uniquely, powerfully and limitlessly in, as and through you. Don’t settle, whatever your age. Know your true Self. Follow your Bliss. Live the Life that you know you want to! Contact me here.
MINDFULNESS ONLINE
Join me every week to sit in the presence of your true Self and experience the greatness of Life flowing naturally, effortlessly and powerfully in, as and through you!