A Sunday Kind of Love

To be persuasive, one must be believable.To be believable, we must be credible.To be credible, we must be truthful.

Edward R. Murrow

I spent the weekend entertaining a friend. She is always fun to be with and we can talk for hours into the night. Now I am not exactly a spring chicken so drinking and talking till three in the morning is not an everyday occurance. But, it was a nice two day occurance. It took me back to college days and exploring ideas until they were lost in the haze of a drunken stupor at the local pub. However, we are now past drinking, driving and hang overs for the most part. So we drink our vodka and rum in the safety of the living room and our conversations seem more direct and quick and observant due to our experiences.

It is interesting that the more the alchol flows the more the truth flows. We became more and more intensely caught up into the meaning of life from a totally different perspective than when we were young and death was a lifetime away. Now death is closer and has been a visitor in our lives. Mother has died. Her father has died. We have both experienced what it is like to see people we love pass over to the other side. And it is Sunday night and I am thinking about a new day starting in the morning and my work becomes more intensely important as I realize that the times between Sunday to Sunday seems to be growing shorter.

I can remember not that many years ago being amused about how young people would be so worried about needing to get things done now. At 17 or 30 there is a feeling that the moment is all there is and if you don't get that date, that college admission, that right job or that right spouse that life is over for ever. When I was 45 I realized that time was a slow meandering process and that we could not push things but instead needed to relax and let life happen.

Now I am sixty and the moments between Sunday to Sunday seems to have shrunk. Oh I know that there are as many minutes in a hour as there has always been but the minutes seems to be shorter in my perception of time. I can explain it in theory but to express it in the way that it feels in regards to my reality is difficult. I know that I still have work to do and I am growing shorter and shorter on time. Life definitely is slipping faster into the future.

There are new issues that I need address in this time of my life. It seems that until now I have been a perpetual student. I would learn. Then I would integrate. Then I would learn again. However, now it seems that it is time to move to a new phase in my life. I have become a teacher, a shaman of the magic of unlimited possibilities when all of a sudden death is seen as a real possibility and thus a limiter of what I can get done in the 10, 20, 30 years or minutes that I have left.

For the first time in my life I have recognized fears. Fear was always fuzzy to me in the past. Now, it looms before me and wants to enter my consciousness and waste my precious time with worry. I worry about dying. I don't worry about being dead because when you are dead it is pretty much a done deal for this lifetime. I worry about the process of dying. I worry about pain. I worry about suffering. I worry about trusting others to make sure that I don't suffer. I want to push it out of my head on Sunday and wake up on Monday just doing the things that make me happy. I want to work and then I wonder about what about when I can't work. What will I do?

I think it was easier when I worried about the right date on Saturday night rather than worrying about how many Sundays that I will have when I will be able to wake up to Monday and do the work.

Is my work of value? Or, more appropriately has it more value to me than to others. When one reaches the time when one is not climbing up the hill but trying to keep from sliding down the hill and the momentum is building and we are sliding faster and faster it is hard to keep focused on the goal that took us to the top. Instead we become intensely caught up in slowing down our decline into the abyss.

I have, fortunately, reached a time when whether I am credible or not doesn't bother me. I know my experiences. I know my layers of truth. I know my value as a person but I then get caught back in the fear that as I grow older my value to others will decrease. When one can't walk the walk, one had better be able to talk the talk. I play games in my mind to forget that death is now my companion and is fully awakening. It was easy up till now to avoid that reality - the reality that when I was born I began a journey through life with the ultimate goal death.

As more and more men and women will be faced with the reality of death. Parents die. Friends die. We die. However, until that final goodbye, I am here and it is Sunday night and I am in love with life.

http://lifewithmother.com - Life with Mother: A Journey of Love, Death and Rebirth.