“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher'
must expect someday to suffer vertigo.
What is vertigo?
Fear of falling?
No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling.
It is the voice of the emptiness below us
which tempts and lures us,
it is the desire to fall, against which,
terrified,
we defend ourselves.”
Milan Kundera,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
How strange it will feel to be you, when you are old.
When you are old the convulsive trepidations of your youthful self will seem the melody of a much cherished song its lyrics long forgotten. The fears, the uncertainties, the doubts, the wonder and the awe - a full-bodied elixir of melancholy, a joy of sadness for an existence slowly drawing to an end.
How strange it will feel to be you, when you are old.
Stranger still will be to feel so near death, this abstract idea suddenly looming into stark certainty - like gravity, like time. When you are old you will wake up happy every morning.
When you are old you will finally become fully aware of your own breathing. And gone will be the years struggling to grasp the practice of mindfulness and to pull yourself above this consuming, billowing, swirling well of the living.
How effortlessly you will start to lift and evaporate. Like heat. Like whisper.
This life whose grip you've always struggled to loosen, whose passions you've always battled to win - how dispassionately she will be letting you go, and drift, slowly, into non-existence.
And how fully and how wholly you will regret it and rejoice it.
The having lived, a drifter and a mourner, this life amongst the living, such as it was.
When you are old you will finally become fully aware of your own breathing. And gone will be the years struggling to grasp the practice of mindfulness and to pull yourself above this consuming, billowing, swirling well of the living.
How effortlessly you will start to lift and evaporate. Like heat. Like whisper.
This life whose grip you've always struggled to loosen, whose passions you've always battled to win - how dispassionately she will be letting you go, and drift, slowly, into non-existence.
And how fully and how wholly you will regret it and rejoice it.
The having lived, a drifter and a mourner, this life amongst the living, such as it was.
