By Eliezer Sobel | Website
There is much talk on Serene Ambition and elsewhere about altering one’s perspective and internal conversation about aging so as to “create a future to live into” that infuses the present with passion and energy, as distinct from the dreary resignation of merely playing out the repetitive and predictable habits and tendencies generated by the past.
And yet, while this sounds good in theory, what of the physical limitations imposed by age? I read Marilyn Hay’s posts
By Shae Hadden | Bio
It might be said that existence isn’t possible without both pleasant and unpleasant experiences—without pain and pleasure. They are like a guidance system, helping us navigate through life and orienting us away from illness and danger and death.We have pleasant, positive
emotional states like love, joy, sympathy, affection, self-confidence,
happiness. And we have unpleasant emotions like boredom, loneliness,
jealousy, fear and sadness.
I’ve been relating to the physical
pain I’m experiencing since my car accident as a source of learning.
I’m actually living ‘in joy’ with it —you might say ‘enjoying’ the fact
of being alive and being in pain. Many people I share this with seem
surprised,
If I could give one gift to my children, I think it would be “acceptance”. It isn’t too hard to understand intellectually that we should simply accept life on life’s terms and not try to control what we can’t really control. Yet, it’s a hard lesson to learn. I think not accepting may be the source of most, if not all, suffering. When we live with the view that reality ‘should be’ other than it is, we are living in a dream (at best) and a state of self-deception and denial (at worst).
I like this word. I don’t know why…perhaps because it is one of those words that seems to express itself in speaking of it. The word means ‘anxiety’—a kind of generalized anxiety with being alive.
The existential philosophers talked a lot about angst. In fact, we normally associate angst with existentialism—existential angst. The word is usually associated with a negative mood such as depression or what Thomas Merton characterized as "the dark night
One of the things we need to learn if we haven’t learned it by the time we reach retirement and our ‘golden years’ is how to deal with loss. Aside from the obvious loss of friends and family though death and incapacitating illness, we have a host of other things we can ‘lose’, such as systems of support, material possessions, our physical abilities and perhaps most importantly—possibility. Not everyone experiences loss and certainly not in the same way. But loss, whether real or perceived,