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.

Add to the Love Pool in you by Loving your Journey

 

Arthur Ashe: “Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome.”

There is a real journey beyond the mirage. We simply need to have the eyes for it. The mirage leaves you struggling. Its blinding sands chuck out the rays emanating from your real compassionate self. As a struggler you cling to your fears, limited gets the vision and you constrict. The real journey, on the other hand, lends you a simple task, leaving you with enough scope to retain your loving rays as you smile and move on, appreciating the efforts of fellow travelers.

Matsuo Basho: “Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”

So buddies keep your eyes on the journey itself instead of the destination. Real happiness and joy lie in doing rather than completing the task. In the latter’s stronghold, we miss the fun, looking as we are all the time at the finish line.

As Raheem DeVaughn says, we are on a journey to mastering our inner peace.

You are not here to discover new miracles for the world. You are here to recover your own self, your own truth, your own loving nature. This mainly is the basic journey. Try to stay perpetually in this journey; never mind the destination. Let your joy and happiness be your journey itself, instead of some far away goalpost. You can simply be the map-maker of a short-sweet fable. Chart your waters.

The journey is priceless in that you row your boat with your skills, talents and abilities. It is empowering. Your fears change into definite steps to freedom. And freedom cannot help but make you an embodiment of loving kindness.

Life isn’t just sailing in calm, composed waters. Mostly, the waters are stormy. That is the law of nature. It simply cannot leave things static. Things will turn static only at the moment of the cosmic crunch, the opposite of the Big Bang when the universe will implode to start exploding again in the next spell of activity. So till then enjoy the activity.

Overall, our character is defined by the manner we captain our little boats to enter the peaceful waters, the doldrums, for a short period of time. Sailing in calm waters is not the reality though. The storm lurking over the horizon defines the reality about life. Keep an eye on it as you are cooling your heels after the last battle.

Sadness may strike you while you drop your knapsack, like a battle weary soldier easing her of the metal armor and weapons, and look at the dreamy destination you have toiled to reach, which unfortunately doesn't look the way you expected it. Don't forget this destination, which you find short of expectations, at least gave you a journey and made you richer by adding positives to the man and woman in you. Irrespective of the destinations, love your journey, for there are no destinations, only journeys.

Destinations are the shifting mirages. Reach one, and its latest variant teases you from a distance again, pulling you into an endless pursuit. With biggest uncertainty about its ending, life is naturally supposed to be a journey and its carrier simply a journey-woman. Had it been meant for destinations, the timing of its ending, death, won’t have been the most uncertain thing for each and every being alive out there. There never was a happy person who didn’t enjoy the journey to have his bumper reward of happiness in one lot after reaching the so called ‘destination’.

Braving the stormy patch and keeping an eye on the next one is the formula to become a successful caption of your life. So simply be a journeyman or journeywoman. Quite ironically, the destination is just being there on the path, simply journeying.

Look into the past and try to remember all those who died and try to recall how many reached the so called destination. The only fixed destination is death, which is the most uncertain event (in term of its time of occurrence) for all of us.

There is no such thing as ‘life’, the hard-fixed noun. All we have is a sweet-sour poultice ‘living’, the verb, the activity, the process, the journey.

So do your deeds, make your run, have your shots at your so called goals, but never forget that the process of doing itself is your reward. Beyond that any idea of rewards and destinations is just like mirage in the deserts. And thousand miles after mirages don’t give you as much as a few steps to the nearest stunted tree and a tiny water puddle may give.

Practice to be a Happy-go-Lucky Person

 

Tom T. Hall: “I'm a very comfortable and happy-go-lucky old man. I never wanted to be great, because I'd just get worried.”

A certain level of smiling level-headedness makes you a relaxed, anxiety-free and fun-loving guy. Well, for that you have to contrive your happy-go-lucky image in your own ways. Please don't get carried away by people's birth-time entitlements. Happy-go-lucky attitudes are raised up instead of the inheritance, entitlements and attitudes we are born with.

Don't go by the meaning in letter as somebody cheerfully unconcerned about future. The mere fact of unconcerned cheerfulness makes you easy-going. This is not to make you overtly carefree and casual, nor is it to instill devil-may-care attitude. It's a benevolent light-heartedness. We only know of one type of concernedness, and that is chronic. But there is an untroubled mild concernedness that allows you a smile on your face instead of a painful frown as you slog it out in life.

Enjoy your healthy nonchalance. It's basically about the right proportions. They say, even nectar in larger amount is more dangerous than poison. And poison in right amount can be more beneficial than nectar. So look at these adjectives carefully. In due amount they hold the key to a great contended self and hence a loving persona. So enjoy being lazy and laid back in little amounts. They save your engine from getting burnt out prematurely. Believe me, they ward off whole lot of distress and confusion.

The adventure and fun of life decrease in proportion to the distance between the point of your craziest, wildest urge of your heart and instincts on the one hand and the low point where you chose to be, driven, rather checked, by your fears, overvaluation, inhibition and assumptions, all of which stopped you from saying 'yes' to the moment and the choice that had all the possibilities to change your life miraculously.

Never underestimate the consequences of your endeavors. A butterfly flapping its wings in Africa is linked to the causes that drive a furious hurricane in America. So no action is small, only our fears and insecurities turn it puny, belittled piece of failure.

Coming back to the choice that could have seen you soaring up on a sunny journey at the highest height, but which you missed through over-analysis and chose to crawl on earth, cursing yourself at every step over the so called missed opportunities. Long after that choice is gone, and you cast a helpless look at the sweeping miles between where you could have reached if you had the guts to say 'yes' to your heart and the poor point where you chose to be, you just can't help but find life almost meaningless.

Destiny isn't a cheater altogether. There are moments passing through our lives when, with only a little bit of daring 'yes' we can change the entire course of our lives. Say ‘yes’ to the liveliest, loudest, craziest and wildest cooing of your heart. If not the destination (and there is no destination by the way), you will love the journey for sure.

A little stroll impregnated with your heart's consent is far more substantial than hundreds of miles of sweating run if you have forced yourself into it. Those miles after miles are not the rewards to your self-punished self. It becomes a punishment for not being true to yourself.

Listen to your heart, shut off all over-haggling by your mind that is tricking you by forcing you to compare and belittle your worth through the scales of others’ journeys. You need to have your own scale to measure the worthiness of your journey, how many miles you have to go, to what pace, availing how many stopovers and many more.

Use others' scales and all you do is just self-fuck at the cost of lot of pain to your ass. So we always have the option of being a happy-go-lucky person instead of a self-fucking moron. And unlimited love is always lurking around such a self-made happy-go-lucky person.

Cynicism: A Check-dam in the Stream of Love

 

Allow the boons of nature and manmade conveniences to bathe you. Let them fall spontaneously on you. Like a mountain allows the rains to kiss its slopes, bathe its forest and drench its top. It just enjoys it without trying to retain the showers. It is not looking for fullness with the help of external agents. It just loves the way it is.

A lake, on the other hand, is looking for completion through the outside phenomenon. It tries to retain water. It wants to hold onto it. In the process, it forgets the bliss of just being; all this while it is trying to capture the fleeting transformations of the free-flowing boons of life. No wonder it loses a lot.

I am afraid, we also unnecessarily cling to so many things that are simply meant to fall our way, giving us a skin deep sensation and a bit of learning, only to be left behind with a sweetly cute detachment. Don’t you think there is a mystical detachment in nature as things move on from this moment to the next? But we prefer to carry the unnecessary load that becomes unbearable after a time. It turns us cynical. There is hardly any chance for the flower of loving kindness to blossom in a cynical being. Love is a feather bed. Hardly apt to carry the iron weight of cynicism born of failed attempts at retaining the things that are just supposed to flow along. Let us try to understand it through a tiny fable. 

There is an old ascetic staying very happily under a banyan tree. No material possessions, almost naked and no worldly desires. The spiritual force of his wisdom is spreading far and wide. The King gets so impressed that he touches the saint’s feet and overcome by huge pangs of reverence for the sage asks the old mendicant to come and stay in his palace.

He is sure that the ascetic is going to say a loud “no” thus verifying the big mismatch between asceticism and worldly possessions. But then very surprisingly, the old sage says “yes”. So it becomes mammoth news and the King is even feeling duped. The old friar comes to stay in the palace. In irritation the King is pouring more and more worldly comforts around the mendicant who never shows any unwillingness to roll over more and more in comfort.

The sage is accepting all the worldly facilities on offer. The King’s agitation is turning into burning jealousy and then anger day by day. He starts condemning the sage as an imposter who has now forgotten all his wisdom after staying in the palace. The King’s anger reaches a breaking point and he condemns him as a disgrace in the name of monkhood and banishes him from the luxurious palace.

Nothing changes in the old monk. He smiles and says, “Ok King, as you wish! I was just fulfilling your wish to offer me luxury.” Smilingly the old sage prepares to leave the King with a blessing and a little sermon:

“I stayed in your palace but your palace didn’t stay in me. I am not a lake, I’m a mountain. I enjoy the water falling all over me, cutting my sides, kissing the trees on my slopes. But I am not possessive to hold the waters back. I simply allow it to flow down. I don’t hold. I don’t pull back. I just let it be as it is supposed to be. The lake is hollow. It craves for fullness. It wants more and more water. It has to hold. It has to collect. It is attached to collection. But the water will in any way flow away. So there is pain at the exit. Hence it’s forever looking upland for more and more water. I allow the flow, so enjoy the process, the mix of past, present and future. The lake holds. It suffers. It hardly enjoys its present, its being. It just turns it cynical, the cornerstone of suffering.”

So let’s try to extract the seeds of cynicism from our being. If not so, it lets loose a parasitic growth of bitterness involving scorn, doubt, distrust, sarcasm, skepticism, suspicion and pessimism. It just sours life’s taste to a point of revulsion.

Without cynicism one is healthily restful, holds a practical perspective, and possesses a balanced confidence, sense of security, patience and simplicity. All these are the manure nurturing the flower of a loving persona. Cynicism simply turns you skeptical to the inherent loving nature in the people around. Optimism for the possibility of selflessness in fellow human beings is the stepping stone to allow sunshine in one's dark corners. It enables one to see above one's personal miseries and problems of life. If you shed your insecurities, these appear like simple problems of life that everybody is facing.

A cynical attitude is the breeding ground of negativity. Once it sets in, it eats positivity like termites eat wood. You impose a blindness over yourself thinking all the people around are there to hurt your interests. Surely, the journey starting with such a big ‘no’ to life's prospects takes one to disappointing ends only.

Undue distrust is the rust that eats the iron fabric of one's being. With distrust we can simply justify any miscalculation of ours because it masquerades as wisdom and practicality. And mind you, one's empathy plummets down in proportion to the rising cynicism.

Most of the time, we camouflage our cynical nature as over-sensitivities, which in turn we self-justify as the natural results of our hurts and disappointments. But at the roots of our cynicism are our fears. And fears are nothing but bugs that plague a heart and stop it from actualizing the potential it got at birth time.

We are basically self-fucking species. Sorry to say it this way! I am looking for a better word to define us.

Very easily we allow our disappointments to turn us cynical. But if we go a bit deeper into the roots of our dejections, heartbreaks and losses, we find a simple truth. It’s basically we ourselves we have been stopping the winner in us? Just re-align the meaning of victory here. If you cannot win a gold medal at the Olympics, who has stopped you from enjoying the game in your local park? Nobody! Only we ourselves deprive us of the moments that could have fetched unqualified happiness and joy to us.

We don’t enjoy because we look at the end, the gold medal, and totally ignore the process—the present—of playing.

So what if you can’t be the handsomest man and the prettiest woman on earth! But who stops you from getting decked up to be the best for your resources and looks? There is no scale of beauty; we create one on the basis of our complexes. Nature made all of us different in appearance. Nobody holds the copyright on beauty. It’s a freebie lying there dirt cheap to be claimed by one and all.

Accepted that you can’t own a Jaguar. But who stops you from enjoying the pleasant drive in your old car while nature is at its kindest and the weather is applauding at its best?  

Long before destiny, society and governments arrive to rob us of our claims to happiness, it’s we ourselves who shut the door in our own face. We are basically self-fuckers, always pulling down our own pants to shame our own selves.

So guys, sulking self-fucking moron or a happy-go-lucky filly? The choice is always ours!

Tame the Superbugs of Evil

 

Mahatma Gandhi: “Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.”

Plato says ignorance is the root and stem of all evil. So my dear seekers of truth, the first step lies in recognizing it. Even the most hateful of individuals have some good in them. The shiniest of personas around have some bad in them. All of us have our entitlements and copyrights to both good and bad. So it's better to start rectifying our own house, putting things in order in our own yard.

Our strengths stand out too shiny and hence most often we remain blind to the shadowy gray areas in our persona. Shade your eyes with the palm of your hand and look for these murky areas. It's here the parasites lie waiting to stall the full luxuriant blossoming of your personality.

John Bradshaw: “Evil is a source of moral intelligence in the sense that we need to learn from our shadow, from our dark side, in order to be good.”

You have got to believe that there is a methodology of driving the evil, first, out of your body, second, your mind, and consequently out of your soul. This is the process of wiping the floor clean with disinfectants so that your loving nature has a scope to bloom in perfect splendor.

At the level of the body, in the domain of the visible world around you, put up a conscious effort to avoid doing anything bad that may hurt someone in its multiple meanings including the physical, economical, emotional and social. Avoidance of bad at this level will help you become a law-abiding citizen. It will give you a clean social image. These are required to keep you motivated and bound to the path leading to the next level of goodness, or the path to taming the evil.

Taming the evil at the level of mind is a bit tougher. Thoughts come more rampantly than actions. It’s basically a free float. In fact, these are even more suitable outlets for the bad. We can think bad to any extent in the hidden corners of our mind. We can plan any sinister scheme in the safe secrecy of our brain. We can hate anybody to any extent inside us. We can burn in jealousy about anybody on earth.

This mode of letting out badness is even more tempting because, unlike badness in action that might get us punishment at the hands of law or fall in our public image, this channel of hate does not carry the risks of such immediate, visible punishments. It but harms us in more ways than we can ever think of. The punishment crawls slowly, silently. And it is poisonous.

All these negative emotions of hate, jealousy, frustration, fears, apprehensions, illusions and unrealistic assumptions let out toxics on the impulse of our brain. By engaging in such thinking you are bombarding your own body with chemical weapons. You are your own enemy before anyone else. You are putting your gun at your own poor head.

Slowly over a period of time these poisons, the unseen punishments of uncontrolled evil thoughts, eat away the body. Our brain, the seat of unrestricted potential to be good to the self and others, becomes the ticking bomb, letting out toxins in our blood stream, eating our vitality, our strength and drawing us to a frustrated death. That is the cruel-most punishment, your own brain letting out poison in your body. Mind you, your thoughts are the trigger for this.

So driving out the evil at the level of ideas and thoughts is of utmost importance. Right from our birth, life is all about bypassing the snares of mortality. But the inherent meaning of life is to find happiness while we avoid the snares of death. You cannot find happiness in any corner of this world, under any material comfort if your thoughts are plagued with the virus of evil, the bugs of hate, jealousy, selfishness and anger.

We cannot avoid death. It will come. But we can turn it meaningless. The success of death lies in giving us a painful feeling that life was meaningless at the last breath. If we die with a feeling that life has been worth it, we deny death its final laugh. Life prevails over death in this regard. (Because there is journey after the interruption, don’t worry.) We can do justice to life by being happy, and making others happy as well along the way, and be loving. There can be no other meaning of life.

So train your mind for better thoughts and better emotions. It will help your brain in becoming a launch pad of creativity instead of a toxic tool of death. Meditation is the first step in taming the restlessness that is basically the foundation of the evil in the mind. Dislodge it from its seat. Sit down and practice restfulness. Calm your mind. Give it a space as you contemplate peace.

Be a neutral observer and witness to what goes in the mind. Try to be aware of your trail of thoughts instead of just allowing them to float freely in the dark rooms of negligence. The real you, the best judge, keeps a watch over the trail of thoughts either positive or negative. Believe me, just by being aware of the negative flow of thoughts leads to check-dam these after some time. Under the stern watchful eyes of your consciousness the shadows will vanish. Positivity and good thoughts start becoming your instinctive nature because with each good thought you feel rewarded by your soul, and with each negative one you find yourself reprimanded. And who doesn’t need rewards?

As much as bugs of death are ever eager to finish their task of chucking out organisms and lives, the angels of healing are even more eager to sustain life. And the seat of healing is in love, in caring, in positive emotions. Allow yourself some time of stillness, repose and rest. The angels of healing, the agents of life, the couriers of love will cure you.

The practice of love and rest in thoughts leads to a healthier soul. It nourishes the soul as much as it heals the body. As a loving person you become a flower spreading fragrance and beauty. As a hateful individual you become a thorn drawing blood from the feet that are leading to their destination. Both die anyway. But look at the roles they play while in their journey.