Time is the Least Real of Our Realities

Is Age Slowing Me Down?

I have found myself musing about age in general these days, how it may or may not impact one’s functioning in the vocational field of one’s choice. 

There are many advantages of being a ‘senior,’ and I am all for them. I turn seventy this year. More than a senior.

But by labeling ourselves as seniors we are in many ways limiting ourselves. 

In terms of linear time, by which we tend to categorize the stages of our lives, and by our cultures of youth, we are aging, old, afflicted, feeble.

In one sense, of course, time and the changes it brings are very real and obvious. We see it blaring all around and in us. The images are all too numerous. Examples of plants and people sprouting, blooming, fruiting, decaying, dying, suffice as reminders when we tend to forget or deny the inevitable.

I had a long phase, after I retired at the age of 55 from my career as an educator, when I felt within myself the ravages of time. I could not write for a long and tortuous stretch. 

There is always the danger after ‘retiring’ of falling into a pit of depression and futility. I have known people who have died shortly after retirement. One must recognize the need to be relevant, to matter, and then take steps, often minor ones, to perceive and ensure it. 

Knowing from the examples of acquaintances and friends the psychologically dangerous straits one can fall into, I am grateful to the Universe for bringing me out of it whole and unimpaired. I have not only survived, but know, if I am granted health and longevity, that my best work lies ahead of me.

The processes of creativity, the crooked, unexpected paths it takes, the essential lessons to be learned from our adversities and suffering, and the techniques, tricks, and perceptual shifts that helped me pull through are too numerous to narrate here.  

I do have days in which I strain for words, can barely catch the edges of thought, forget, then remember briefly something almost urgent to do, some idea or insight to jot down, then forget right away and no effort can bring it back. 

But I know on such days to rest my brain. With rest, my brain invariably recovers.  

Though time appears to be linear, bringing us to the diminishment of our power and abilities, in another sense time is the least real of all our realities. 

Simply look within your heart to see all time, all memory existing simultaneously. This narrative is anything but linear. It is a-chronological, outside the bounds of time and change as our minds know it. 

The heart, where memories, hope and desires spring, knows nothing of time. Here, from memories of stories told, our parents and all the ancestors that have preceded us and brought us here, to this now, we are still children, still possibilities in that plasma of life which births and receives everything; here, even in this dimension, old men in decrepit bodies fall in love and shriveled old women still nurture the embers of youthful desire in their hearts; here dreams and hopes never die and time ceases.