As We Age
As we age I believe one of two things happens, we either soften or we harden.
As we age some of us crave deeper meaning, deeper relationships and deeper experiences - we crave change. Others of us work hard to control the outcome of our lives by repeating what is familiar, hiding unnamed pain and keeping love at arm's length - we resist change. No matter our path, each of us makes a choice about this everyday in the things we give our attention to, the people we invest our time and the way we respond to life. Softening or hardening is therefore an active choice that completely shapes the way we live.
My observation of hardening is that although it may have kept us safe from things that felt too big and too painful to process in the past, a lifetime of armoured living is limiting. When we block out memory and avoid naming our pain, we deny parts of our reality. This denial creates layers of disconnection and resistance against the reality of nature which is constantly moving and constantly changing. Hardening weights us with an armour that no heart can fully enter and no love can freely leave. It limits our growth, intimacy and connection and drains our energy, solutions and trust. Hardened is not how we enter the world, but if we deny parts of our life, will be the way we leave it.
My observation of softening is that it comes from allowing ourselves to feel. There comes a point for many of us - usually in the ache of heartbreak - when we see that it is much easier to let go, than it is to hold on. In letting go we loosen our grip on control, dissolve judgements and expectations while maturing into the realisation that we will never have all the answers. The very realisation of this opens us up to greater states of understanding, intelligence and wisdom enabling us to befriend the mystery of being alive and enter a space where everything is possible. When we actively sort out a deeper sense of living and willingly lean into our pain, we invite new experiences in. Returning at life's end supple and well rounded, to the tender place from which we have all come.
Softening allows life to change us and hardening creates the illusion that we are unchangeable. Unchanged, our soft skin toughens and our vast minds narrow. Yet changed we become porous, open to life's constant flux, yielding growth through willingness and wisdom through loving beyond the fear of hurting.
It takes great courage to loosen our grip and to let go of what is familiar, but this is what resilience is born of. Resilience is not walking through life so armoured that nothing comes in and nothing goes out… no. Resilience is born of allowing all of life IN and even after the anguish of hurt, still choosing to open again and again and again. The reality of life is that we cannot avoid pain, but we can learn how to live with it. We can welcome pain in, invite it to take a seat in our body and listen to its troubles the same way we would a friend. Pain is not a mistake and feeling it does not make us weak. It is a natural part of our growth and one, that to a softened eye, can mature our entire understanding of what love is.
In the same way the atoms of your body are expanding and contracting, and the same way your lungs are filling and emptying, and the same way your eyes are opening and closing we, as human beings, expand and contract in every moment. It is the denial of this natural rhythm that we get stuck and begin making decisions that lead us away from ourselves.
We are made to overcome the pain we experience.
We are made to understand that resilience is not born of moving past pain, but through it.
We are made to explore our unnamed depths and to share our lives intimately with others.
We are made to remember that falling in love with life and all of its mysteries may be the deepest seat of contentment we will ever know.
