I think God got it backwards. By the time you have all the tools and start to understand how this wondrous system called life works, your body starts to fall apart. What was She thinking?

When you are young you have so many ideas about how life works and what it all means. And then it changes and you wake up about the time you hit 40 something. In my youth, we disciplined children and set reasonable limits, now we indulge them and set no limits in order to build self-esteem. Of course, since the world does not function in that way, once these kids arrive in the world as adults who expect to be pampered, they fail.

We have pushed out the limits of our sexuality so far that there is no longer anything special, exclusive and sacred about what we can offer our beloved. The same thing gets offered to everyone.

We have abused our power and called it leadership. We have closed our minds and called it discipline. We have lost value for human beings and called it productivity. We have disconnected from nature and called it progress. We have fallen into dogma and doctrine and called it religious freedom. We proclaim a love for humanity and freedom and attempt to achieve it through execution and war – all the while refusing to let those who suffer from terminal illnesses end their pain. We’ve traded soul work for stock portfolios. We create a billon dollar industry abusing children, women and men with pornography and called it freedom of expression. We beat ourselves up unmercifully for where ever we are in life and push and prod ourselves beyond reasonable limits and call it ambition. And then suddenly, it hits you at about age 40. None of this feels very good. None of this really seems to fit the truth of who we are. None of this is very satisfying.

Then, in some unexpected statement out of some innocent’s mouth, in some timbering flash of awareness, in some comic jolt to the psyche – a window to the mind gets opened and fresh new sunlight starts to filter in and somehow new priorities creep through in a way that is so refreshing to your soul. You begin to breathe deeper and a new understanding creeps into your cells that makes you aware that everything is really fine somehow. Everything is, in fact, exactly as it should be. All that limited thinking and self-induced writhing, all that batting at and bumping up against the world like a blind child with outstretched arms had a purpose. This whole damn exercise was about you getting to this point in life where things begin to make sense.

You suddenly realize in some bitter-sweet euphony, that you have been the one who created every thought, every action – every reality in your whole life through your own choices and thoughts. You suddenly get that every experience and every individual in your life, whether perceived as good or bad, was a master teacher in service to your own soul. All those people you thought did you in – wrong! You did yourself in when you called them into your life and chose to dance with them. It was all perfect because of everything you learned. You find an awareness creeping slowly into your body at a cellular level that says, Wait a minute, if you created the past, you can now create the future differently with different choices – more loving and self-respecting ones. And then and there you have it. You are finally awake – at about age 40 something. Freedom has finally and truly arrived. It is an exquisite, mind-boggling, spine-tingling awareness – with one exception – there are no more excuses!

So what do we do with it? Nothing – everything – just be it. I guess the truth is that if I had come to this when I was in my twenties, I would not have appreciated it so much. I would not have felt such compassion and love both for myself or others. I would not have that certain sense of pride and self-respect from making different choices.

I guess the exquisite wisdom is after all, that until you get to some place near the end, it is impossible to know that the whole point, is the journey itself.

© Dr. Dina Bachelor Evan 2013

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