The day long after you’ve accepted your changing appearance, you look in the mirror and catch yourself wincing.
The day you believe you love unconditionally and then your loved ones don’t do what you want.
The day you’ve made peace with mortality and the doctor calls you to his office to discuss your blood work.
The day you believe you’ve come to a place of forgiveness and find yourself ripping up faded photos and setting them on fire.
The day you celebrate that your heart has grown large enough to embrace your losses graciously, except that one.
The day you finally speak your truth, willing to take the consequences, and there are consequences.
The day you really think you are over jealousy, self-pity, judging others who judge others and arrogance.
The day you commit to adding yoga to your exercise routine and you can’t get down to the floor.
The day everything finally makes sense, you’ve healed your original wound and fulfilled your life’s purpose and you are bored to tears.
So what, then, is the funnest part of conscious aging?
The day you are convinced that you’re the only one who isn’t doing conscious aging right, write a blog about it and that makes you smile.
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The following is an excerpt from The Making of an Old Soul, Stage 10 “The Land of Old Souls”
So what are we left with in this romp toward a final reckoning? In an understanding that disavows fixing, what you think of as unwanted traits do not magically transform into serenity. When you embrace your anger, you are still angry. Embrace your naivety, you are still naive. But as I noted earlier, we are not only our least desirable traits. One assumes that there are things we like—even love—about ourselves and the world, as well. But better yet, in Stage 10 it is time to stop making the fool-hearted attempt to define yourself as good or bad, right or wrong, or according to your likes and dislikes. The encounter with your authenticity in the world of old souls jettisons the old masks to reveal a unique eccentricity that has less to do with striving for moral perfection and more to do with appreciating yourself as a force of nature.
Reality includes allowing yourself to have authentic feelings, even those that you had thought you’d long ago outgrown. In fact, rather than the placidity some gerontologists prefer for their sedated patients, the depth of emotion that is unleashed in the making of an old soul is likely to take you by surprise. Parker J. Palmer writes in On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity and Getting Old: “Reality may be hard, but it’s a safer place to live than in our illusions, which will always fail us, and at no point is that more true than in old age. …Coming to terms with the soul-truth of who I am—with my complex and confusing mix of darkness and light—has required my ego to shrivel up. Nothing shrivels a person better than age. That’s what all those wrinkles are about,”
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and a link to CarolOrsborn.com.
