Pushing Back the Twilight

It is 8:29 PM on Monday evening. Twilight setting in, the day turning to the darkening sky and eliciting thoughts about this day’s lessons. I am watching, for the second time, the Netflix series, “The Crown”. In Season 3, episode 7, Philip Windsor Mountbatten, His Royal Highness,  The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Marioneth and Baron Greenwich, experienced a crisis brought about by aging, consistency of daily life, relegation to being reactive to his duties and meeting his world with a particularly familiar curmudgeonly demeanor. As the episode progressed, he asked himself, “Is that all there is?”. He had found himself to be lost after watching, over and over, the Apollo 11 lunar landing and the  sequence of films from that adventure. He experienced the very common human condition of asking himself the eternal question that, ultimately, we all ask, “why am I here…for what purpose?”,

Philip’s answer to his question about “the why“ led him to question his faith. His conclusion was that he had lost his faith, and with that loss, he found that his excitement for living and his exuberance for this world had faded.  His quest was to try to regain some part of that feeling. I have, on several occasions, experienced myself descending into a similar state-of-mind. Thoughout my decades on this planet, I have attempted to quell that mental quicksand in different ways. Some worked better than others. I only recently have found that the essence of “the fix” for this foundering feeling is simply resolved by two clicks of the mental mouse. First, click the “ah oh, here is that damn feeling again, fix it”. The second click is the “create something” click.

As we age and our physical capacity changes, we become more entrenched in our mental fortress. We can reside in the past with our accumulated memories and look at the present as a series of run-together days in which we feel every nuance and tick of pain and loss of capacity. Or…we can flip the switch in our brain and create something…anything! I realize that hobbies can provide the mechanism for escape. I love the images for little gray haired ladies in big brim straw hats spending mornings over the potted plants on their patios and their afternoons creating new recipes for the next door neighbors and the visiting family members and playing mahjong with their friends from across the street and from their first grade class. Through these creative endeavors, they are pushing back against “that damn feeling” of being overtaken by the process of aging. But I actually believe that there is something more that resides in all of us.

Faith…an unseen and difficult to describe bell that rings in the depths of our consciousness. No matter how we have come to our beliefs about our inner voice and that from which it emanates, we each can ultimately view ourselves, age and physical capacity notwithstanding, as uniquely created or evolved creatures with opposing thumbs and the ability to conceive of possibilities that can be new and exciting and that can lead us to new adventures, regardless of our aging bodies and minds. If we recognize our inherent humanity and all that it provides for each of us as individuals, aging and physical impairment cease to be obstacles, but rather become new challenges that are presented to us in order to use our faith, innervoice, subconscious and conscious minds to live fulfilling lives through the process of continual creation. I brings light to the twilight and new levels of connection to the world and those around us. Each day, as we swing out of bed, or in my case, creak out of bed…remember that “today, my purpose is to create”.

bill@safeharborpathways.com