time, our resource

It's already the end of the second month of 2018, and what I'm going to write in this entry today I wrote several years ago. It's old hat, I know, but it's still something I want to say before I forget.

A friend and I were talking about writing a will, getting long term care health insurance, living in old age near a good medical center, living in old age near family that cares: in other words, we were discussing all the sensible strategies that people take, if they can, as they are confronted by their old age.  --This is us.--

As we went on and on about what to do, it came to me that we do these things so that we may cheat our inevitable end.  Well, cheat it, for a while. If we do such and such, we'll be better prepared, we say. I truly believe that in some very basic, secret, part of our hearts we think we might get out of this intact. We know this isn't so. We have evidence everywhere that as Brendan Gill said, "it ends badly for us all." But we also know that responsible people should look to their old age and make sensible decisions for themselves, hiding away from the fact that the sensible preparations are easier than thinking about what will really happen to us afterward, after we can't live.

We fill up our time with activities that will distract us from the coming calamity. And that's good. We're allowed, as they say.  But, what we are really seeking is endless youth, the exuberance of youth when we had no future beyond a month or a year or two, when who knew what might happen. We long for our youth when we had time enough. We thought. Time. And, now we see how finite time is and we fill up our time. We fill  up our time and we lose time. We forget the gift that time is--time our only resource. We overlook the beauty that is everywhere. How gorgeous a smile is. How incomparable a kind gesture. The completeness of an iris that does not need us, only the sun and dirt and water. And, paradoxically, or maybe comically, we only manage now and then to think of the gift and are brought round again to our mortality and the realization that we must leave all this beauty behind!

Still, the ancients tell us that wisdom comes with age and that we are meant to grow wiser as we grow in age. Wisdom as a compensation?  I'm not sure I think I know how we attain this wisdom. Does it come on its own, naturally? Do we not do anything and it comes to us? Or does it come to us and we must be seeking its arrival and be ready to greet it, ready to recognize its presence? And what would this wisdom be like? Is it acceptance of our fate? Is it good humor? Is it living more and more in the minute and less and less and less for things and false gods? Is it grace that we seek when we reach for wisdom? the grace to be like the trees and the birds and animals who have not been gifted, we believe, with speech and an intelligence like ours, but who instead live completely and unalterably in the minute? Whose joy appears to be unalloyed?

What to make of all of this? Every bit of us, and every thing in the universe, are bits of stars, living and dying, and dead stars. Is this what we must accept and luxuriate in, this underlying oneness? Is this wisdom? (And, how to cope with our stupidity when we cannot see this oneness in ourselves or in others?) It comes to me that perhaps we are unable to accept completely because of a failure of imagination: Being cannot comprehend non-being. We can't imagine it. If everything around you is, how can you imagine the interstitial space, the blank space, the nothingness that non-being is.  I think this is the fear that paralyzes us and makes us petty and foolish, fearful and less than ourselves. This is the fear that overwhelms us and can make us sick.

Rabindranath Tagore says in one of his poems that we must "embrace death as we embrace life." Is this the wisdom that we seek? How does that work?