We've allowed ourselves to become obsessed by youth.The way this has shaped our public lives is quite easy to see, from the relentless focus on youthful beauty in our media to the cruelty of causal ageism in the workplace.What's harder to see is how it is affecting the narratives we have about ourselves.We see all the ways that growing old is a falling apart, an endless series of losses, a disintegration. And so we try to stave it off, denying what is happening to us. As we grow older and as the time remaining to us diminishes, we become diminished in our own eyes. In this way we rob ourselves and others of our dignity.But here is an account of ageing from the Jewish mystical work, the Zohar, which points to a different possibility:
All the days of a person's life are laid out above,one by one they come soaring into this world...If a person leaving the world merits,he comes into those days of his life,they become a luminous garment.
Such a different way of looking, this - our inevitable, inescapable ageing as a gathering and weaving of the days of our lives into a single luminous garment. We wear the sum of all we have been and done in our bodies, on our faces, in our entire way of being in the world.This gives us growing older as an integration, a chance to unify ourselves, turning towards the shadow parts that we pushed away when we were younger.And it invites us to give up our dependence upon looking good or being liked, so that we can have our ageing usher us into the fullness of our humanity.
Photo Credit: aka Jens Rost via Compfight cc
Could it be that we're so harried, so unhappy, so stressed because we've forgotten the simple pleasure and discipline of being up to one thing at a time?When we're committed to being always on, always connected, always responsive - and to reacting to every email, phone call, tweet, facebook posting, news report - how can we expect to lose ourselves, completely, in something that's both fulfilling and of value?Everything is interrupting everything else, all the time. And we keep it this way because we think we like it. It makes us feel important.And perhaps most significantly, it saves us from having to feel, really feel, anything in particular - numbing both our anxiety and our joy.
We discover early in life what the people around us expect from us. And we find ways of doing just that. Even if we've completely misunderstood what was being asked.Meeting these expectations becomes, before long, central to our identity. We know ourselves as this or that kind of person, and then actively work to keep the identity we've established going. It feels familiar and comfortable to keep having people around us respond to us in the way to which we've become accustomed.I learned early on to be the peacekeeper: the pursuer of harmony, making sure I and everyone around me remained undisturbed and untroubled; listening, supporting, staying quiet, defusing conflict, avoiding anger (my own and other people's).All these ways of being seemed, unquestionably, to be me.And of course they affected and shaped what was possible in any kind of relationship with me. Peacekeeping can be a great gift to the world, but also stifling and frustrating for others when anything genuine and troubling and sharp needs to be said.Other people around me took on other kinds of identity - the helper, making sure everyone is cared for and nobody is left out; the achiever, getting ahead and making things happen, knowing themselves through the outward signs of success; the challenger, being sure to be in control, using assertiveness and power to have things happen.We have powerful inner forces that keep us inside the bounds we've established - among them the 
The problem with being sure of your story - the one you have that explains to you who you are, who other people are, and what's happening - is what is inevitably left out.Your confusion, longing, terrified waking in the quiet hours of the night, your disorientation -
Trust, in the end, is not built by waiting until the conditions are right - "I'll be able to trust them when I feel confident and secure... when they've given me sufficient evidence that they are trustworthy"Instead, trust is always engendered most by our first extending our trust to others - which requires us to be open enough and vulnerable enough to let others in.And trust is deepened by exactly what we do when we experience breakdowns in trust. Closing down or backing off, declaring the relationship over or under threat, does nothing to build our capacity to trust others, nor they us, in the future.No, trust is built precisely by turning towards one another when it breaks down and talking about what is now possible and required. We invite trust precisely by how we respond when our capacity to trust seems most under threat.
We spend the first part of our lives folding ourselves into the shape made available for us by our culture, our family and, later, our work.How else could it be?We are born with so many forms available to us, yet we must find ways of being understood and met by those around us so that we can survive and hopefully thrive. Even our rebellions are mostly a means of finding some way, some place where we can belong.But if we live long enough, we might gradually start to feel the constraints of our own folding-up. We catch a glimpse of a bigger freedom that's been there all along but which, so far, has been necessarily denied to us. And we begin so see how much of ourselves is unknown.We're mostly not taught what an opportunity is there, in the longing and uncertainty, the doubt and confusion, in the sense of being lost.Feeling that something is wrong, we turn away into distractions - a new job, a new relationship, possessions. But if we're lucky enough at this threshold to find people who can help us and be alongside us - friends, family, teachers - or circumstances that invite it, at last we can begin to unfold again.At last, an opportunity to give up on all you're sure about and discover a new way of being in life.W
What's your relationship to the unknown?Fear, avoidance? Getting busy?Doing all you can to be in control?Desperately thinking through of all the possibilities you can imagine, and all their outcomes?Curiosity?Delight?Acceptance?A question worth asking seriously. Because, despite all our protestations to the contrary, every coming moment is essentially unknowable.So much that could be about to happen.Including events that undo all the stories about yourself, others and life - the stories that you are sure are true.
There's a certain harshness in wanting change, transformation, improvement all the time.Does it arise from feeling ashamed at how things are? At ourselves?A response to the gnawing of the inner critic - its demand that we do better every day?Today, can you allow yourself to know your glorious ordinariness? To feel the simple weight of the dishes as you wash them? To marvel that you can breathe, move, experience? To gaze into the eyes of your glorious, ordinary loved ones?There's much to be said for turning our attention away, some of the time, from what we imagine needs to happen and into the exquisite texture of what is here already.
So often our experience of an emotion or mood is of its totality.I'm scared - so the world is scary. I'm bored - so this situation is boring. I'm angry with you - so you're making me angry.We forget, when we account for ourselves in this way, how partial our story is.There's so much of ourselves, and of the world, that we're not paying attention to in our explanation. For instance - everything that's not boring, all the parts of me that are not caught up in anger but in love, all the parts of you that I know still care.And we forget also that emotions don't simply happen to us: we have a hand in their appearance and many, many choices in what meaning we ascribe to them.Here's Peter Gabriel's song Darkness, a song about our relationship with fear, which beautifully takes up all these questions.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXWjKrRE7YQ]