I had lunch with a friend who just came back from visiting her hometown. She asked if I remembered someone I met thirty years ago. I remembered a vivacious blonde. “She’s retiring,” my friend said. “And I think she has health issues.” Later, I saw a Facebook posting from another friend, in memoriam to a high school classmate. The I Ching tells us that all of life is change, and yet we sometimes have a hard time embracing this idea. What about our own aging? As unwelcome as it might be to contemplate, we embody change. Can we use aging to make our lives better? Some may dismiss that as a wishful notion. My father’s blunt philosophy was, “When your number’s up, your number’s up.” The counterpoint to that was a poet my mother liked, Dylan Thomas: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Both my parents are gone. But still, I know we all embody change, that we have to embrace change up to the seemingly final one, and that we continue to change as we merge with the great Tao.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 11:00:00 +0000