-- Old Age -- ( Excerpts from a book I'm writing to get published )

Old Age

We spend our lives thinking tomorrow would never come. We lose ourselves into the improbability of our existences, yet forget the inevitability of life. Inevitability embodied by the natural facets of what makes life what it is in the first place – Truth and a whisper. The truth of youth, the truth of joy, success and glory – things we want to embrace, recognize, realize and accept.

The whisper of death, pain, agony, suffering, imperfections, failure – things we want to neglect, ignore, dismiss and deny. Truth is a ‘whisper’ when our minds and our hearts fail to conceive, comprehend and accept the realities of life that we feel “imprisoned”, “bounded”, “downtrodden” and “overpowered” by – yet Truth becomes an immaculate and most splendid testament to true “fulfillment” when our minds and our hearts leap to embrace the realities of life that we feel “proud”, “confident”, “happier”, “stronger”, “satisfied” and “unconquerable” by – Things like money, status, respect, material objects and things that put spice and joy into the days, weeks, months and years of our lives.

Funny isn’t it.

All our lives from the magical days of youth full of dreams and aspirations, to the weak and feeble breaths of survival in old age – we strive for acceptance powered by pride, we wish for love fueled by need and we search for hope driven by hopelessness. Yet, the improbability of life gets the better of us through the sirens of truth where the same “whispers” we spent all our lives ignoring, denying and undermining – becomes the melody of our ultimate demise.

Life is an ocean and just like every single drop of water in the ocean goes through the same tidal ups and downs, thrashing of the waves against the rocks on the shore, torment and wrath of the storms and the deafening shudder of the oceanic floor earthquakes – so do we as human beings.

There exists beauty beyond imagination with the thundering majesty of grace under the same waters, yet the most treacherous of predators beyond thought at the same time. There are meadows that portray an eternal mosaic of paradise under the mystique shelter of the ocean water in the midst of all life and death, yet the waves keep moving on, the sea never grows less nor does the life that inhabits it mourns death whether for the most colossal of whale or the most insignificant and smallest of fish.

However, what separates us beyond the depths and bounds of all that exists from the deepest core of the oceans to the highest most soaring heights of the universe - is our humanity as mortals and our grace as beings of intellect possessing the ability to reason through the privilege of “consciousness”.

As human beings, our old age – gives us the opportunity to liberate ourselves from the shackles of what we’ve ignored all our lives. It gives us the chance to free ourselves from the steel bars of pride and ego that we succumb to yet bask in the self-imposed glory of – all our lives.

Old age – is the final chapter in a well illustrated book that we author through the pen of our existences and the ink of our veins through which the imperfection of our mortality is represented by our blood, the paper of our future through which the improbability of our fate is represented by empty spaces and the last line on the last page through which our lives meet their demise is represented by the same “whisper” an end – that we never realize when our journey begins from the womb of the mother to the tomb of our finality.

Old indeed is Gold, as they say – but even the profound warmth of ecstasy emanating from the goodness of gold, becomes meaningless when the eyes fail to recognize its glory through the murky clouds of blindness, when the hand that caresses its luxury fails to grab onto the meaning and purpose of its manifestation, when the heart that explodes in materialistic bundles of joy fails to embrace the reality of its truth and the mind that calculates the value of its favorable returns – fails to counter the weight of the treasure chest that holds it.

Yes – Old age, the final frontier in a flying dream of hopes that we strive for all our lives to attain.

Yes – Old age, the final leaf in an aged tree that we watch falling through the overpowering of the wind of inevitability

Yes – Old age, what me, you and all of us – cry our final tears to and bid our final farewells upon.

Old age – the improbability of that perfect mosaic of life we paint all our lives – yet the certainty and finality of a masterpiece nobody wants to buy with the final stroke of a brush!