Pilgrimage Check-In, #1
“To set out on a pilgrimage is to throw down a challenge to everyday life.” – Huston Smith, from the Forward of The Art of Pilgrimage, page xi
For a couple of years now, I’ve been pondering Aging. Not in a morose way, but in a questioning, challenging way.
I have been throwing down a challenge to our mainstream cultural beliefs that generally hold that Aging is a slow but steady process of physical and mental deterioration, diminishment of energy, and a dampening of our passion for life. Who wants to sign up for that?
And, why does it have to be that way? My clients, friends and colleagues are thriving examples of increasing creativity, contribution, and love-of-life in Aging.
As I was contemplating my intention for this pilgrimage, I had one of those Blinding Flashes of the Obvious. I choose. I choose.
I choose to Wither or Wake Up. This is a choice that I can make in every moment. I may not choose my life circumstances or events, but I do choose my response to them.
Pilgrimages don’t let us go to sleep. They demand Attention and Aliveness.
Wither or Wake Up. My intention for this pilgrimage is to Wake Up. To my life.
What do you want to wake up to?
Hey Lynne
I love this posting – as a singer in my spare time I have enjoyed working with conductors who have continued their work well into what some call ‘old age’. My mother, aged 82, is full of life – still churchwarden in her local church, keeping her allotment, cooking for the ‘old people’ in the village at the vintage club (many of them younger than she is). When she moved house after my father died we did veto the idea that she would keep the books for the monthly village market bookstall in the attic and bring them down every month! But largely we just sit back and admire.
Thank you and much love
Dorothy