There are certainly times when you feel your age creeping up on you and catching you unaware of the passing of time. I am almost at the 65-year mark, and yet absurdly, I feel no older than 55. I see in my practice as an independent facilitator, so many parents who have steadfastly stood by their son or daughter through all of the travails of life and are now looking at their 80’s closing in on them. For many of them, it is inconceivable to turn 80 having had very little respite over the many years they have devoted to their son or daughter and few or no sustainable resources that they can count on to secure the future for their adult child.
Many face the coming of the last couple of decades of their life (if they are lucky) with a waning of their capacity to sustain the hyper-vigilance it has taken to continue taking care of their son or daughter, their other family members and themselves. They feel ageing in their bones and watch their health become more and more unsteady and complex.
Over the years, these parents are fueled by their dedication and love of their children. They have kept the flame alive in their hearts by a faith in the rightness of their action and knowing that love is always enough and is bountiful. This is the belief that sustains them and makes it possible to go forward day by day.
The unfolding of life does more than fray our bodies with entropy — it softens our spirit, blunting the edge of vanity and broadening the aperture of beauty, so that we become both more ourselves and more unselved, awake to the felicitous interdependence of the world. And yet the selves we have been — young and foolish, hungry for the wrong things, hopeful for the right but winged by hope into hubris — are elemental building blocks of who we become, unsheddable like the hydrogen and helium that made the universe.