Why we age, according to the Oaqui

Reflecting a bit more on my Growing Upper post, I found the following in my archives:

In the beginning we were ageless.

We had no age.

We were neither young nor old, adolescent nor decrepit.

Without age.

Ageless.

And great fun was had by all forever.

A little later, somebody noticed that it was even more fun to be ageless when we were also pretending to have age. We pretended all the fun parts of infancy and youth, maturity and old age. We especially liked to pretend the fun parts of being grown up.

Because to pretend to be grown up we had to pretend that we weren't pretending. And that is the hardest and most fun of all.

So we devoted year after decade to it until we got so good at pretending to be grown up that only drugs and enthusiastic charismatics could get us to pretend to be children again.

...In the mean time almost completely forgetting that we are all each ageless in the first place.

The Oaqui

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Growing upper

I've managed to live long enough to understand that my particular life, like all particular lives, will someday reach its ultimate conclusion - i.e., (as well as e.g.:) my personal, physical demise. O, I've known about the consequences of mortality and such for many years now. But I've only recently begun to take them personally. I realized, to paraphrase a well-known source, that: I will my actual self have passed on. This being will be no more. It will cease to be. It will expire and go to meet its maker. It will be a late being. Bereft of life, it will rest in peace...pushing up the daisies. Its metabolical processes will be of interest only to historians. It will have hopped the twig, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It will be an ex-being.

And then I had a moment. I started thinking about my parents' deaths, about my wife's parents deaths. And certainly not that they intended it, but I realized that their deaths somehow prepared me, in some deeply visceral way, for my own.

And at that moment it all suddenly seemed somehow beautiful - exceedingly so - this living and dying thing. From a very certain perspective, which apparently I had actually momentarily glimpsed, I could see how each generation helps prepare the next for the natural consequences of life. I could sense how the love my parents shared with me made their loss that much more deeply instructive. I could almost see the crystal delicacy of the whole of life - generation after generation, holding on and letting go with such intricate beauty, like so many leaves on one big tree, in one glorious fall.

And my diabetes and my glaucoma took their place alongside my last memories of my parents, the clear shining eyes and glowing skin of my grandchildren, the deepening love of my children, and my wife's always growing grace. And, for that moment, I understood. And I grew upper.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith