Youth-old age
Rebuild your future with more hope. You were told that life would be clouded with bad auguries, surrounded by terrible possibilities for a gloomy, frightful tomorrow.
Renowned filmmakers have picture the eons that will follow with paints that are so gray, having no idea how ridiculous they will feel when the times that they have prophesied come.
There will be nothing of the murderous androids and much less of the intergalactic federations of feudal, if not tribal ways, with imperialist impetus. The future points toward the advancement of the human being’s humanitarian, transcendent feeling, and not toward a return to barbarism, as some frivolously surmise.
The best cinematographic productions of this kind will be considered bad comic books for children of the past, unlike some classics of cinematography that will always be admired for their timeless content, as well as the pictographic works, sculptured or architectonic in quality musicals, which challenge the centuries.
When looking forward, do not gaze at elderliness and illness. Take care of yourself, of course, so you have a healthy old age, but instead of focusing the mind on the inexorable decay of the shapes, of the vigor and of the liveliness, polarize your attention on everything you can gain, such as more ample, profound and genuine wisdom, experience and vision, which the time well lived favors.
Be like the oak, which, the older it gets, the greater it becomes, the more shade and fruits it offers to the passersby, and not like the grass, so green, but lasting no more than a few days. There are men and women-oaks, as there also are men and women-grass.
Stick to the lasting side of life, in its true aspects, in all that is undying, because it has a permanent value to humanity. Pay more attention to questions of the spirit and less to the expressions of the matter, and you will be happy, becoming even happier, as you get older.
Concentrate on the pursuit of knowledge, on the polishment of feelings, on the consolidation of character. Dedicate yourself to the good you can do, in your experiences of love, in your family, in philanthropy, building a work of public benefit or taking part in one that already exists. In doing so, you will be approaching yourself to the nature of the oak and distancing yourself from the nature of the grass.
The more mature you become, the happier your future will be. Senescence is for a greater well-being. Just as the unripe fruit does not taste good and is not yet fit for human consumption, in the same manner, the human mind was designed to achieve excellence in the advanced years of the body, a time when the empire of the instincts is less pronounced, and one can gravitate more freely toward the soul’s great conceptions and abstractions.
Obviously, when we speak of senescence, we do not allude to senility, to decrepitude, and all the diseases and degenerations concerning the dysfunctions of old age. You can be old without being sick and insane. This is what we refer here. The fullness of old age is well portrayed in the archetypal image of the wise old man or the wise old woman, as someone of advanced age, but entirely lucid and healthy.
So, be, you, the one who volunteers yourself for the best. Only those who are fixed on the worst of what characterizes the human being can presume that youth, with its conflicts, uncertainties and anxieties, is better than the middle and old ages.
Do not, thus, demonstrate such ignorance and immaturity, lack of intelligence and evolution. Only those who are here to be the objects of vain desires and the agent of momentary physical adventures can aspire to be young “forever”. There are much more satisfying desires to be attended to than the ones merely correlated with the physiological functions of the physical body.
There are far more inciting, exciting and ardent adventures than those that material world can provide. The experiences of culture, of art, of personal and professional fulfillment, of love, of creation in all spheres, of humanitarian service are much more gratifying than those that regard the body. And, most of all, while the experiences of plain physical pleasure pass, leaving emptiness and weariness afterward, the contents of the spirit’s experiences (including here those of the intellect) are indestructible, cumulative, and because of this, increasingly more satisfying and enriching.
Those who grow old and grouchy, bitter and pessimistic only show that they were a futile youngster, and worse: they still remain a slave to this futility, seeing the world through naive, simplistic lenses, dichotomized in good versus evil, youth versus old age, without understanding that elderliness is the end of a process, a continuum youth-seniority, which, if lived well, leads to a happy old age.
But, now, at whatever age you are — because the wise youngsters of today are those who were once wise old men or women — prepare your future, of this life and of the next ones, for a greater level of lucidity, of common sense, and understand that, in the blooming of the first years or in the fall of the last, wisdom is what defines the quality of life one has, since there are springs of youth turned into true hells of unnecessary afflictions, as there are serene and delicious autumns of old age like garden-antechambers of Paradise.
Choose your future by defining your present. Choose, always, wisdom, the option for the best.
Spirit Eugênia-Aspásia
Medium: Benjamin Teixeira de Aguiar
January 25, 2001