This morning, with no authority but my own, I imagine two faces of the ego: a public ego and a private ego. Let me put words to this inkling. Eventually it will become stories.
The public one holds the self-display, competition, pride, ambition, success, praise, showing off, accumulation and such.
These are admirable or dubious based on whether they are serving only the self or serving more than the self.
Private ego undermines whatever beautiful aspirations we might have. It’s emissary is the inner critic. Even this can serve if it shocks us back on track.
Coming of aging may be enduring and ultimately embracing the little deaths on the way to our final one. One death, especially those who’ve intentionally influenced others, is of the public ego. We can lose our edifice chink by chink. Coming of aging is allowing oneself to become see-through, enjoying the wind that more and more comes through the open spaces.
In my life, in this moment, it feels like I’m on a surf board paddling through turbulence, out beyond the breakers, to the calmer waters where I might catch the big one.
Or getting a kayak out of the calm lagoon and past the rocky reef. Or paddling into a rapids, picking a perfect enough line to make it through to the easy flow of the river.
The losses are coming on stronger now. Loved ones with Parkinsons or Alzheimers or going to bed vital and never waking up. We learn to grieve by grieving - by letting our hearts break and break. It’s so much work, and I now know it’s a fact of my life until the end when others will grieve me.
I’ve lost mentors and guiding lights in the last few years. Each time I feel the burden they carried for me come back to me - to be kind, to be spacious, to be kick-ass, to give my best, to think beyond what I know, to be the one still living. I feel myself to be part of the great chain of being, the one who lives in this slice of eternity, lurching around, finding my way, taking a path and walking it as well as I can.
I’ve also lost a couple of my dearest friends and confidants, irreplceable as they carried me along for decades. How will I ever make new friends like that, who hold my history with kindness? I doubt I will.
Coming of aging is letting this be so, and wondering what kinds of friendships I will form now. Maybe with people - or trees or animals or ancestors - I would have never given the time of day.
We lose someone and then we fill that space with something. I’m doing my best to make that valuable. I feel the tug of shutting down the space a friend or mentor occupied, of just not feeling so much by eating or scrolling or other distractions. Sometimes I do have to dial down the heartache - or complex soup of love and hate.
Literally heart ache. I’m having a lot of trouble letting go in this terrible time of war and hate and murder of kin. I’m letting this teach me… something…. perhaps the kind of endurance billions have learned through such losses in the past.
Coming of aging, resisted, is shutting down to not feel the sting of the ego getting trimmed, and the disappointments, and losses. I will not live in a tiny room of disappointment and fear. I’m aiming for the wide open spaces of love. It’s work.
Coming of aging is being a loser, and letting each loss be a liberation.
Or so it seems this morning.
This video is a beacon for what might be coming… beyond the reef of resistance. Apologies to those who refuse to go on Facebook, it might not open.
"In my life, in this moment, it feels like I’m on a surf board paddling through turbulence, out beyond the breakers, to the calmer waters where I might catch the big one." I love this and can see that you are right there, where you need to be. I am entering the turbulence, or maybe even just launching the surf board, and have much to learn from you. Just writing this for perspective, so you know how far you have come. And a quote from Joan Baez that really struck me on Monday, as I was reading news about Gaza, sat there crying watching the sunrise, then went to The Open Table soup kitchen, and shared so much love and laughter and a few good tears. "When I was working on “Diamonds & Rust” (1975), I was at a low point of my career and I made a decision that I was going to concentrate on music and quit globe-trotting for different issues. I realized that the music needed my time and attention if it was going to be any good. Learning to live with the state of the world’s a daily practice. Everything we do, we do against the backdrop of global warming and fascism. I never dreamed I’d live in a world this chaotic and discouraging, and I’m overwhelmed but I’m also a great believer in denial — I think that’s where you have to be in order to create, or have fun or dance — providing that we set aside a certain amount of time to come out of denial and actually do something to help." — Joan Baez
And this is, I guess, the nature of the river of life ... the rocky rapids, the calm eddies, the confluences and occasionally the separations. We love, we lose, we feel a tearing of pain or loss and we pick ourselves up and learn to love and befriend again. I used to literally whitewater raft with these metaphors in mind. Also to toboggan down snowy volcanoes for the sheer thrill of it - and sometimes life can be a bit like that too, but hey! So glad to have come across you, Vicki xxxx