Photo: Sander Hallaste / Unsplash
What makes for a life where, at the end of our time, we can sit back and say: I’ve learned what I was supposed to learn?
I’ve always been incredibly cognizant of the passing of time, and of the urgency - at least in my mind - of fitting it all in. Life has always seemed like an enormous opportunity to learn. To learn about nature, the human experience, the planets and the stars, energy, frequency, vibration. To learn about food and nourishment, our bodies and how they function, what they can tolerate, what it feels like to live in a body. To wonder, to imagine, to create. It all seemed like so much to fit into one lifetime - and, as Thoreau wrote in Walden; or, Life in the Woods, I intended to “suck out all the marrow of life.”
It’s always been confounding to me when I come across a person who decided on their life path early on and dedicated themselves to it wholeheartedly, with conviction and certainty. It’s even more confounding when I learn they carried that path into adulthood - and, God forbid, for a lifetime. I say this with both admiration and confusion. It takes incredible self-discipline, and I imagine great hardship, to return again and again to one pursuit.
But at the ripe age of 51, after attempting to follow in Thoreau’s footsteps - looking through every lens, examining through every microscope the experience of living - I may have stumbled into an understanding of what living with that sense of purpose feels like.
It’s not without questions or doubt. But there’s an urgency to it now, grounded in and driven by a focus, a deep knowing that this - this - is what all the suffering was leading you to.
And apparently, it comes to some of us not inherently, but by way of sifting through the mess - like a miner of gemstones, a lapidary, turning over every pebble and every stone to find the gem, the truth, the way. When we’ve done enough digging, enough searching, enough turning, enough polishing - when our hands are tired, our eyes are strained, our knees can’t stand much more kneeling - we finally arrive at the gem we want to hang around our necks.
And now. Now the fun begins.