The Wonder Years: An Unexpected Blessing
I’m not exactly sure how this happened, but life has blessed me with an extraordinary gift as I have gotten older. At almost 77 years old, when things are supposed to be getting dimmer as I age, the light and life inside me has gotten stronger and brighter. I feel this as an intense connection to life—an almost overwhelming appreciation of just being alive that has gotten more acute with time, ironically as my time on this planet (however long that will be) grows shorter.
I attribute this “wonder years’ light inside me” partly to the health journey I’ve been on for the past 20 years, which includes the exercise, yoga, healthy-eating, and other practices I’ve developed to maintain my physical, mental, and spiritual health. I also know that my awareness of mortality itself, something that sharpened dramatically at around age 60 and has grown ever since, plays a role. Yet I can’t take any personal credit for this new gift because it seems to have visited me from a place beyond merely “putting in the work.” I like to think that my efforts prepared me for its visit, but it has a quality of otherworldliness.
The power of life, the prana as the yogis call it, that flows through our bodies is immense and multifaceted, like a jewel. For most of my life, I’ve stayed largely unaware of just how much I’ve relied on this energy of health and life to live. Like most people, I was occupied with the immediate and “important” affairs of life—careers, relationships with others, and various pursuits, such as travel and entertainment—and all the experiences that came with them. My awakening regarding my own mortality and the life I was living taught me a great lesson: My health is the foundation for everything else that matters to me in life. Without good health, my abilities would diminish, relationships could suffer, and many joys in life would be curtailed or simply would not be possible. Without good health, my time on this Earth would be cut short, which would certainly impact my young daughters.
About three-quarters of the energy my body uses every day is focused on just staying alive and keeping me healthy. (Most of this happens without my awareness.) What I’ve considered to be “my life” for much of the time I’ve been alive, that is, what I’ve done, achieved, acted upon, and paid attention to, is the smaller part of the life force that exists within me. The phrase “your body has a mind of its own” comes to mind. In these later years, I have come to realize that being alive is not about the circumstances of my life and who I am in a biographical sense; it is about the miracle of mortal existence.
The Wonder of a Sunrise
Where I spend summers, my view on many mornings is some variation of the photo above. And as wondrous and multifaceted as the many sunrises I have observed are, the true wonder of this experience is the observer, me—a living creature on a small planet 93 million miles away from the Sun. A living creature who not only has a highly developed sensory system to observe the sunrise, feel it’s warmth, hear the sounds that come with the Sun’s arrival, and smell the air but also knows that he has these powers. This body and brain of mine took billions of years for the cosmos and nature to evolve and create. The universe has been hard at work on a long, long journey that led to me existing on this planet and appreciating the wonder of a sunrise.
So, much of the wonder I’m experiencing and celebrating in these later years is the wonder of me and the very fact that I am here to experience and appreciate my life. It infuses me with a depth of visceral feeling that constantly reminds me what a privilege it is to be living, to have the faculties and capabilities I do, to pay attention to the world around me, and simply to be me.
This sense of wonder comes to me as a feeling of inner space, room to be who and what I am in the very simplest way. My conscious mind plays a subordinate role, well in the background. When I feel this sense of wonder clearly, without all the many barriers that can block it, it puts all the affairs of life in perspective. Unlike how I used to live, these various pursuits are not matters of life and death, although it can sometimes feel that way. Only real life and death—and health—occupy that elevated plateau.
The Wonder of the Inner Journey—Touching Grace
In an article on the topic of later-life bucket lists, I wrote that my bucket list was not focused on traveling to distant lands, going skydiving, or rocketing to outer space. Instead, it was mainly to live one healthy day at a time. For me, exploring the wonder of inner space, starting with my body and working into the core of who I am, how I stay alive, and how I got to be here, is all I really want from life at this point. I believe the only thing the universe expects from me is to live as genuinely and completely as I can. It wants me to use the particular talents and inclinations it has given me to pursue what matters to me, to solve problems in my life, and to seek clarity and overcome obstacles.
But the inner journey is about more than just problem-solving. Along the way, I have found prompts, hunches, and what I would consider visceral “proof” that the energy that flows through me is the same as what powers not only all of life but all of everything. I believe this is the one, true thing we all have in common: a common creative energy that made all of us and keeps us alive.
Paying attention to my health over the past 20 years has brought me much closer to the grace of what it means to be alive. As far as we know, we humans are the only self-aware, sapient beings on the planet who can know we are alive rather than simply be alive biologically. We can also alter what life has to offer us, either willingly or unwillingly and sometimes for the better and often for the worse. I have found that paying attention to my body—not only the flesh and blood biology that brought me to life, but also its prompts, inspiration, and intuition and the pull of an ever-deeper journey—has yielded a magical sense of the grace of existence, of being fully alive, and being aware of it. This is what fuels my wonder years.
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