TRANSCRIPT
Getting older is something that I have mixed feelings about in a lot of ways. I don’t like it. My body doesn’t work as well as it used to. I can’t run as fast as I used to. Sometimes I can’t run at all because I get injured, and I don’t heal as quickly as I used to. I’m not as strong as I used to be. I’m not as fit as I used to be. My hair is falling out. I’m getting bald on the top of my head, and I don’t like that. My teeth aren’t as good as they used to be. Oh, I have a shoulder that hurts, and I’ve had some illnesses over time that really have reminded me, ooh, this getting older process is not so much fun.
But what do I like about getting older? Because there actually are some things about it that I really like and I really value. One of the things that I love about getting older is that I’ve become wiser. I’ve become healthier. I have more life experience, and actually, I’ve done a lot of processing of my life experience so that I actually know myself a lot better, and I’m a lot healthier in my behavior. I’ve resolved so many of my traumas from childhood, but I’m actually a lot less screwed up than when I was younger. When I was younger, I acted out a lot more. And what is acting out? Acting out is just symbolically expressing my unresolved unconscious traumas through my behavior in my relationships with other people, misusing whatever power I had in all sorts of different ways, not being the nicest friend sometimes.
But what gives me comfort is that knowing I’ve changed. Also, learning about what happened to me and really understanding why I did the unhealthy things that I did, this is something that has made my life so much more meaningful.
Another thing that I found is that as I’ve gotten older, because I’ve healed so many more of my traumas, I’m much more creative. I have much more creative energy, and also the creative energy that I do have is actually directed toward much more useful things, much less symbolic things. So in that way, I can talk much more directly about healing and not have to symbolize my talks about healing. Like when I first started really being creative as an adult, it was writing about my travels, about hitchhiking in Australia and my travels about hitchhiking through Europe and traveling through Russia and China. And really what a lot of that symbolized was for me about breaking away from my family, becoming independent, becoming more self-aware as a person. But it was symbolic because I was talking about traveling. Instead, now I talk much more about the direct things about growing up, healing, becoming independent through healing traumas.
Back then, I kind of knew about healing traumas, but I didn’t even have the language, the vocabulary for it. Now I have the language and the vocabulary right in front of me, and I focus on that because I know for me that’s where it’s at. Also, I find that I do not harm people a lot less. My relationships are so much healthier. Also, I find that in having healthier relationships, I’m much more able to see where other people are healthy and unhealthy. So in that way, I find myself much more drawn to people who are more healed, more healthy, more mature. And it doesn’t mean they’re necessarily older because what I’ve seen is a lot of people in their getting older process actually are not becoming more wise, are not becoming more mature. Sometimes they’re becoming less wise and less mature. They get more money, a lot of times they become more comfortable, but they become more selfish, more shut down. They don’t give back.
And what I find is those people seem to be much, much less ambivalent about getting older, meaning they actually hate it a lot more. They don’t find any value in it. I hear so many people when they get older, especially when they get into their 60s, 70s, 80s, they say getting older sucks. It’s a horrible process because they don’t see the value. Because for them, there really isn’t much value. They haven’t been doing their emotional homework along the way to make the getting older process, the aging process, a valuable one. And I think what that does is it denies the basic thing that separates humans from every other species, and that is our ability to keep growing on an emotional, on a psychological, on a spiritual level throughout our life.
So yes, like other animals, our body does decay as we get older. We do become sick. Our bodies slowly do break down. It becomes much more difficult as time goes on to function in a physically healthy way. But our minds can keep growing, and they can keep growing for a long, long, long time. I think for many people, they can keep growing right to the very end of their life, into their 80s, their 90s, maybe even into the hundreds. And for me, that is what makes being human so special, that I can keep evolving. I can keep changing.
So in one way, yeah, my body is breaking down, but my mind and my spirit is coming up. It’s growing, it’s healing, and I’m becoming a better person. Now, in some ways, this does bring up grief for me. It brings up sadness. It’s like really a pity in a way that I couldn’t have figured some of this stuff out twenty, thirty years ago. I could have had so much of a happier early life. My 20s could have been so much happier, and it was so much less pain and trauma and sadness and rejection and abandonment and harm that I caused to other people. It really could have been so much more of a satisfying, productive, useful life.
But in a way, it’s like all that pain that I went through, all those mistakes that I made, all that learning that I did, it actually ultimately all provoked me to be a more humble person because I had to self-reflect in order to figure out how to become healthier. And I still do. So ultimately, what all this boils down to is that I find it actually exciting to get older. Yeah, I’m getting bald, and that sucks. My hair’s falling out, and it’s like my teeth aren’t so good, and oh yeah, my shoulder hurts, etc., etc. But it’s like, whoa, what opportunities I have? And what am I going to be like in another ten years when I have fewer traumas, when I’m more healthier, when I’m more fluent in being useful to other people? What I’m able to be more courageous, that’s speaking about what really goes on inside myself? Who knows? Who knows what possibilities exist?
And the strange thing that I find is that the more I heal my trauma, the more I free my soul, the more I connect with that hurt little child that I was and help him heal, the more I become a really healthy, loving parent for myself. The more I treat my deep self, my true self on the inside in a better, more respectful way, the younger I become, the more alive I become, the more spirit, emotional spirit flows through my body, through my veins, and the more in a way life has purpose. It’s like also the more that I look at the world in a kind of childlike way with a healthy new innocence, and not in the childish way where I behave in an immature way, but in a way where I can just enjoy life and the wonder of the mystery of reality, the beauty of nature, the beauty of other people, the way I did when I was a kid. And that in some ways I lost when I got traumatized and when I got shut down.
So that makes me have a lot of excitement about my future and looking forward to growing older. And a final thing that I think is that as I get older, as I get healthier, as I become more healed on the inside, more manifested in who I am, the less I’m afraid of dying because I’m actually living more. And I’ve noticed that again and again. The more that I really engage in my own life, the more that I really manifest who I actually am, the more I really enjoy the present moment, the here and the now, and the less I’m afraid of, oh my god, what’s gonna happen to me in the future. I used to have that fear a lot when I was younger, just that I was gonna…
Die, that something horrible was gonna happen to me. And really underneath it, I had so much fear. Not that I was gonna die, but that I was gonna die without having manifested the best of myself.
And so what I found is the more that I do manifest the best of myself, really get myself out there, really use my life, hmm, as an example of a healthy life or becoming increasingly healthy life, the more I’m useful to other people.
The more I, well, use my age, which is 47 right now, to show, wait a second, 47 year olds can grow. And maybe I’ll be able to grow at 57 and 67 and 77.
The more I feel I really contribute to the evolution of other people and ultimately, well, to the evolution of the whole planet.
[Music]