The Anesthesia of Old Age: Loving Kindness

 

Victor Hugo: “When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.”

With a slight change in perspective, a journey down the slope, once you have reached the pinnacle after coming up the slope from the other side, can be equally fun-filled and loveable. It has its slow-paced rewards. You are looking into the valley on the way down, just like you looked at the summit while climbing up. Then it was excitement. Now it’s the ripe wisdom. Then it was laughter. Now it’s smile.

Victor Hugo: “Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.”

Feel free to have your pass to the blunders of youth. But if you avoid your manhood from being a mere struggle by honing the art of joy, your old age won't be a regret. That much is guaranteed.

Francis Bacon: “I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am.”

In fact, old age may very well turn out to be the crowning glory of life. So play the last act gloriously. With honor and grace, you get into the folds of immortality. You can take your love fruit to ripe to the core. It then drops of its own accord. Painless. Uneventfully. Thus seeped in the naturality of things. Like a dry autumn leave swirling to the breeze and tumbling with childish hilarity. But for that ripening has to go to the core. It gives you anesthesia against pain and regrets. And there is no better anesthesia for old age than loving kindness.

I can recall such vintage peace ripened in those dull old eyes on the wrinkled face. His image strikes me. He is steeped in the Regalia of Old Age. Well that sums it up. Each stage of life has its own type of freeways to joy and happiness. So all those caught in the middle-age doldrums, smile please. The moment you look up to old age with a cool anticipation, your younger version at the moment gets a huge loving lift. You shed the skin of insecurities, fears and tensions. So let me narrate the real regalia of ripe age.

He, the regal old man, embracing his age with fragile but enthusiastic grip, lives happily as the tail-end of a great life lived. He has weathered the tempests of youth: the force of beginning, starting and acceleration! And now the path of letting it go; losing the pace slowly, gracefully and receptively. The deceleration.  Slowing down with effortless muse. To stop finally. It gives him as much excitement as the force of starting. And then the final rest.

Now, during the slowing down phase, his time has become slow, the world is a small puddle around his feet. He lives like in a dream. A slow-paced one, minutes stretched like hours, days like weeks, weeks like months and months like years. In slowing down gracefully and effortlessly, he lives equal to a dozen lives lived in the beginning mode.

He enjoyed the choices that fate sieved for him. Just grabbed his share. Now he picks up and plays among the coarse, discarded chaff that remains unwanted above as the fine particles, much in demand, trickle below. But it’s great fun, he tells with mischievous gusto:

“In youth, we just think that life means rolling in the sieve’s fine brew. But life can be equally enjoyable among the discarded heap, little malformed grains, sand-grains, specks and chaff. Now I roll like a child in the rubble of the past, which was once waylaid by the youth’s blast. It’s now the precious wealth of my old age. Mellows down the rage in this haze. There aren’t any takers for it now. So I enjoy it alone, without that competitive drone.”

The old reveller, away from the fire, cosily lying at the margin, where the faintest traces of warmth touch his old bones before moving into the cold darkness.

The majestic slow down, as important and enjoyable as the headlong thrust of the beginning, the youth. The source, the beginning, and the slowdown, and the end. A cycle. Enjoy it!

With such acceptance, you embrace your own self primarily. Your love for your own self turns a classy vintage wine. Take sips and see the slow-paced, eternal majesty sprawled around. The love booze spreads the self to include everything around, and you are willing, and welcoming even, to get merged into everything.

Fears melt. Pain loses its meaning. The shaky graph stabilizes to turn a single, straight line of harmony and peace. And you say bye to everything with love. The soul with the last panoramic zoom-shot of love takes a huge flight to go leaps and bounds into the cosmos. Well, this life, defined by this body, is nothing but a launch pad for your loving self’s meteoric rise. So let it be that way.