“Where do you go from the top of a thirty-foot pole?” This question, posed by Thomas Merton the day he died while attending a monastic world conference in Asia, stated at me from a box of old handwritten notes and collected writings I had put away in my thirties. Scribbled in my own handwriting on an old index card, the question stared at me and presented itself as if for the first time. At thirty-something, I found the question provocative but not particularly revelatory. In my fifties, I find it profound.

Living for fifty-plus years gives me a purity of perspective, an intuitive inner knowing, a sense of detachment I did not have in my thirties. Like Mark Twain, I finally have the wisdom (I didn’t have in my youth) to go with the experience. Rather than accumulate, I long to simplify. Rather than respond to authority outside myself, I am grounded from within, in what I know because of my personal journey.

Rather than invest energy in discovering the truth of the matter, I know now the importance lies in my ability to experience it, fully. I find myself choosing professional workshops, reading matter, or general sharing of ideas, not for knowledge I do not already have, but to enjoy the metaphors others use in describing their journey with a question of subject. I can see it through their metaphors and experience it in a way I wouldn’t have on my own.

This enlarges and opens new doors in a house I am already building from a different direction. Rather than seek only those who are more like me, who think like me, live like me, I delight in people’s differences as a source of richness and dialogue. This does not mean, as we age, we don’t seek a close circle of fellow soul mates, but that others’ perspective of the truth are interesting instead than threatening.

I’m comfortable at my age with mine not being the last word, or if what I say has no interest for others. We each start up different poles and therefore have a different view and experience of the mystery. Even though the mystery itself is universal, our personal experience of it can only be told in our own story and adventure.

My spiritual journey has gone full circle, rounded out and reclaimed the joy I knew as a child at play. My view of death from the top of my thirty-foot pole is a swan dive off the tower on the lake at my old summer camp. We stand in hushed silence as we watch one another take a turn, one by one, climbing the ladder to the top of the tower.

Only one person stands on the tower at a time, but we are all standing with that person, watching, waiting, being with them as they take their turn at diving. Good luck, we say. Good jump! we clap. And then the turn is ours. We climb the ladder, glance around at those who love us, who cheer us on, then relax and dive into the unknown.

Death, releasing ourselves into those invisible hands that have reached for us from the other side of our understanding, is something we each experience when someone dies. Like consciousness, we participate in death as something the other end of which we can only guess. As those around us die and return to their origins, part of us returns with them as much as part of them remains with us.

I have, indeed, opened this gift of life. I have tasted the wine. I have danced with the stranger. I now seek more passionate ways to enjoy, to share, to live out this grace. Being at the top of my thirty-foot pole allows me the time to resolve unfinished business, to redeem any dissatisfying relationship I didn’t have wisdom enough to handle in my twenties or thirties. I have eternity spread out before me now.

I have the opportunity, during this phase of my life – which Erik Erikson deems the time to resolve whether my life has integrity or causes me despair – to be the person I am meant to be and to enjoy the fullness of this awareness into which I have grown.

When I take my early morning walk, I find myself, not taking an examination of conscience, but an examination of consciousness. How conscious am I of the richness, the privilege, the wisdom of all that has brought me to where I am? Am I able to absorb and integrate the revelations available to me here from the top of my pole? Am I suitably grateful? Am I conscious of those things in me I must let die and those I must nurture?

Mountain tops and thirty-foot poles and sunrise vistas have always stirred the human spirit to reach beyond itself. So too, those internal ocean depths and spiritual valleys and spiral pathways have wooed us deep within. Within and without, above and below, loud and soft, mystery invites us forward.

I have reached the top and found there to be more, within myself, within my personal experience of becoming, within the circle that includes my own experience of death. I embrace them all as long as breath holds me in her eternal rhythm and leads me still.