A very wise friend of mine commented that our current fear of death has unseated the repression surrounding sex in the nineteenth century. All that was once suppressed and ignored regarding sex has merely been transferred to our denial of death, which means the underlying issues have never been resolved, just shuffled around. Although it’s true that anything carrying numinous energy beyond our understanding is bound to get us caught, stuck, and frightened, unwilling to honestly face it, we always have a choice to look more closely. My father recently passed away and instead of a funeral there was a celebration of life. The people weren’t sober or somber, there were partying. Any kind of reflection or grieving was stuffed down. No one told stories, or laughed or cried about the man who had passed and what his life had meant to them. Instead everyone got drunk and celebrated, not his life, but the relief that they were still alive.
This is just a microcosm of what is going on in the culture at large. The whole of our culture has diverted our attention away from the inevitable outcome for us all and the difficulties life presents. We don’t want to talk about it, we deny deaths existence. I was watching Bill Mahr talking with a panel of people, all of them over 60, and he commented on how rare that is in our culture. That’s because grown-ups are not given a voice. We are youth obsessed because there is so much fear surrounding ageing. We banish older generations to homes and specific communities instead of learning from the wisdom they have to offer. We don’t want to be reminded of the depths life can take us or to the future it holds. Each progressive phase of life requires something different from us and we have a decision to make about how we will respond to the increasing levels of complexity. Age asks us to bring more attention, awareness, and courage to our lives.
Maybe that’s why we obsess about being young, and doing the things that the young do, it’s simpler, it demands so much less from us. It takes guts to really grow up. It’s gritty and destroys long-held illusions, but it also gives greater meaning to how we spend our days. Staying young is the ultimate rip off, because it robs us of growing more deeply into life. Growing older means we get some experience under our belt that brings wisdom and a deeper appreciation for the delicate nature of what it means to be alive. It’s soul crushing to keep repeating an endless loop of cluelessness. When we refuse to learn the lessons life has to offer we stay small and real life is too big for that.
The problem is we miss out on our lives by not coming to terms with the fact that they will end one day. We put off what we really want to do because we feel we have all the time in the world. We carelessly throw away precious hours, days, and years of our lives. Let’s stop waiting for the right time, enough money, or peace and quiet. The only real time we have is now. So how will we use it? Will we stay sleeping, keep up appearances, or will we really live who we are. Let’s embrace the lessons death has to teach us, let’s grab hold of our life and live it in a way that means something to us.
If we face the fact of death, it’ll open us up to life.
kb
