everything is illuminated
Enjoy yourself. It's later than you think.
(Chinese Proverb)Sunday, 20 November 2011
My Father has been gone for approximately 17 years now. Believe it or not, I still grieve. And obviously it has taken almost half of my life to process this. I doubt it will ever reach a full stop. It defined my 30s as I came out of my 20s with the struggles to cope with it. Reflecting on life and death took a back seat for a bit as I embraced the life of an internationally mobile 30 something with the world at my feet, dreams yet to be fulfilled carried in a bundle, and an array of different possible futures to choose from before me. As I end that part of my adventure, slightly dented and bruised, and slightly less optimistic but more hopeful than ever, I entered my 40s. And as time began to show itself again, the topic returned to my consciousness. Another time for the next step of the evolution of the self I suppose. And there it was again. The body. This time, mine.
For as long as the end of the physical body is certain, one other thing is certain too, the deterioration of it. That alone is often hard enough to remember. But before the end arrives at the bottom of that downward slope, something happens. Somewhere along the mind-body interaction, the mind takes off in a different direction. And for a wee while, things get a little confusing.
They say on a cellular level our cells stop building and developing in the way they had before the age of 25 . In other words, we peak at 25, and this peak is also our point of decline. From then on, we - technically - start dying. But our physical bodies remain strong and collected, and they remain for the most part an extension or an expression of who we are on the inside, well into our 30s, sometimes also 40s, so this fact is not always apparent to us. And when time finally decides to make its appearance as we look in the mirror, or as we experienced yet another health scare, it can be a little shocking.
The mind, on the other hand, seems to go on a different path after this point. It became more sophisticated, confident, and certain. As we get older, our mind seems to transcend the fire of its younger days, while retaining the passion that truly matters. It becomes a more abstract lens that gives clarity to how we see life and all its complexities. It knows itself more than ever before, it recognizes itself with more certainty. Some call this wisdom. Some call it depth, or well-roundedness. Whatever it is, it strives towards perfection. And with this, we propel ourselves towards a certain kind of becoming. As such, with aging comes a more refined being and the blossoming of something.
After I recovered from the shock of being reminded that I have been slowly dying since the age of 25, the apparent disjoint between the trajectory of the mind and the body startled me.
For most of us, the last memory of a similar mind-body disjoint is of times when we first started to learn how to shave, or when parts of our body felt strange and unusual, or of times spent sneaking around the house doing the laundry before dawn. Modern psychology conceptualized this transition period between childhood and adulthood as adolescence. It can be a time of flux, conflicts, and confusion. But if we look back in history, this was not always the case. It was said that in those days, by the time one is 13 or so one was considered an adult, old enough to go to wars, marry and procreate. Many ancient traditions which can still be found today bear the mark of this old understanding with coming of age rituals done when the age is reached. The changing life expectancies and a lot of how the world works since the time of the ancients necessitate a different understanding of the human life span embodied by the relatively new social construct that is the adolescent years.
While adolescents are generally given much sympathy for their struggles, those experiencing similar crisis later in life are often seen with a bit of irritation by the general population. It is as if older people should know better than to have a crisis like that, or at least, should know how to handle such a thing by the time they are that age. At times, we also question the reason behind such internal upheavals. Comments about it fall along the theme line of recapturing the past, desperately clinging to what is no more, lack of mental capacity to accept reality, and embarrassing oblivion to the realities of the aging body. It never seems to occur to anyone that the mind-body disjoint later in life is as complex as, if not more so, than that of the adolescent years. If we have acknowledged that adolescence can be a very difficult transitional period in most people's lives because young minds find themselves struggling to cope with new adult bodies, it seems to escape most people that later life changes can be especially mind-blowing, because they force us to deal with our mortality for the very first time in our lives.
While during puberty our body felt as if it was changing into something, as we age past our prime, the changes which occur feel very much like everything is moving *away* from something.
The rather sloppy construct of "the midlife crisis" results only in jokes, stereotyping and ridicules at worst, and at best the non specific and misleading understanding of "midlife" and the less than empowering word "crisis".
As we wait for our trusted social scientists to come up with a more productive framework, perhaps we should take the responsibility to give this later life transitional phase a more deserving place in our social narrative.
Perhaps it is time for yet another review of our understanding of the various transitions that occur within the human life span. Perhaps it is time to move our discussion about later mind-body disjoint away from the idea of grieving over lost youth, or over what was and no more, as it oversimplifies the matter terribly. Perhaps it is also time to take a firm stand against confusing the issue of mortality with that of vanity.
But for now, let us simply acknowledge, that this later life mind-body transition can be as hard as our first one. And be kind to ourselves, and to those who might be in the midst of it, because one day, if you are not already there, you will be. And we will all ride this wave in any way we can, and come out the other end less disjointed, as we realize that the body was made to have a very different journey from that of the very thing that truly make us who we are. Whether this is our mind, or our soul, will be a topic for another sit down.