Old age can also be a time of clearance. All perception requires clearance. If things are too close to you, you cannot see them. Frequently that is why we value so little the people who are really close to us. We are unable to step back and behold them with the sense of wonder, critique, and appreciation they deserve. Nor do we behold ourselves either, because we are too close to the rush of our lives. In old age, as your life calms, you will be able to make many clearances in order to see who you are, what life has done to you, and what you have made of your life. Old age can be a time of releasing the many false burdens that you have dragged behind you through stony fields of years. Sometimes the greatest burdens humans carry are the burdens they make for themselves. People who put years into constructing a heavy burden for themselves often say, Sure it is my cross in life, God help me, I hope God will reward me for carrying it. This is nonsense. Looking down and seeing a people carrying burdens they have invented and created themselves, God must think, How foolish they are to think that it has anything to do with my destiny for them. It has more to do with their own negative use of the freedom and possibility that I give them. False burdens can fall away in old age. One possible way to begin would be to ask yourself, What are the lonely burdens that you have carried? Some of them would definitely belong to you, but more of them you have just picked up and made for yourself. To begin to let them go is to lighten the pressure and weight on your life. You will then experience a lightness and a great inner freedom. Freedom can be one of the wonderful fruits of old age. You can undo the damage that you did to yourself early on in your life. This whole complex of possibility is summed up magnificently by the wonderful Mexican poet Octavio Paz:
With great difficulty advancing by millimetres each year, I carve a road out of the rock. For millenniums my teeth have wasted and my nails broken to get there, to the other side, to the light and the open air. And now that my hands bleed and my teeth tremble, unsure in a cavity cracked by thirst and dust, I pause and contemplate my work. I have spent the second part of my life breaking the stones, drilling the walls, smashing the doors, removing the obstacles I placed between the light and myself in the first part of my life.
SIXDEATH: THE HORIZON IS IN THE WELL
THE UNKNOWN COMPANION
There is a presence who walks the road of life with you. This presence accompanies your every moment. It shadows your every thought and feeling. On your own, or with others, it is always there with you. When you were born, it came out of the womb with you, but with the excitement at your arrival, nobody noticed it. Though this presence surrounds you, you may still be blind to its companionship. The name of this presence is death.
