An elderly gentleman who lived down the street would often startle me with his routine greeting. “Hello, Duncan,” I’d call to him in the grocery store. “It’s good to see you out and about.” He’d look up, expressionless, from the produce he was handling and respond blandly, “Am I dead yet?”

Duncan had lost his wife years earlier, no longer felt productive in the community, no longer found interest in life around him. He was waiting to die. In his heart, I think he was already dead. Like many of our elderly, he identified purposes only in past tense.

“Why am I still alive?” an older person might ask. “Of what purpose is my life? What meaning is there for me?” These are not empty questions, not easily dismissed in a culture that deifies production and efficiency and youth.

If the things that form the center of our living don’t shift with the shifting sands of time, we miss the revelations that throw themselves in our path. If our sole focus remains only on the external facts of our existence – our belongings, our career, our retirement portfolio – we may come to the end of our life and discover, as Thoreau so well articulated, “that we had never lived.” 

Youth is dedicated to bringing to fruition those talents and potentials that define and set us apart as an individual. Old age is dedicated to stepping beyond ego and into a more soul connection with all that unifies, makes us one, allows us to feel comfortable with transcendence and loss. We get in touch with this living thing so we might get in touch with this dying thing so we might get in touch with this living thing . . .

There are things we know that we don’t know with our conscious mind. These accelerate as we age, speeding up with layered awareness. Sudden flashes of insight and profound intuitive connections and understandings break in on us. As the last vestige of sand slips through the hourglass of our being, our black and white thinking, our superficial divisions of things, our clinging, all evaporate into lesser bonds. We care more about our wholeness than about our holdings. Hopefully, we relax into the unity out of which we emerged.

What accounts for this midlife shift at our center, then, and for these revelations unleashed in later life? It’s as if the thread that holds together our outside life slowly weaves its way inward into our very being and unlocks the channel to all that is eternal. It’s as if we come to know ourselves, intuitively, as eternal beings. Wired so, from the beginning.
 
This all happens within the context of daily living. This shift in perspective and intuitive wisdom doesn’t cause one to withdraw, but to become more in tune, more connected, more reverent of who and what have blessed one’s experience. 

Simple pleasures, like planting a garden, painting images, listening to music, become mosaics of the divine, speaking. Moments with grandchildren turn the act of holding into praying. Writing down memories and reflections for future family members becomes, for us, a backward timeline of self-realizations and closures. Life seems full and precious, connected, both within and without.

What would leave a person untouched, unmoved by this natural midlife shift? Discomfort with an inner life, I suppose. Unresolved hurts, a closed mind. A disconnect with imagination. The refusal to make room for the unexpected. An unwillingness to listen to that inner voice. As many things, I imagine, as there are injustices in the world.

Our vocation, as such, as we step into the autumn of our life, is not to become less enchanted with life, but more. More connected, more alive, more passionate about what we love. Like getting ready to take a great leap, or surrendering ourselves into a deep dive, we breathe in as we prepare to breathe out, for the last time.

When the shell of our life falls away, when the voice from within becomes the only sound we can hear, when the night dreams we have collected over the years take on a life of their own, we will dance old age, laughing. We will climb upon the back of the soul that has accompanied us on this magnificent journey and ride it, singing, into death.