The young often equate information with wisdom, they soak up information obsessively on devices all day long and come to believe they know everything they need to know about their world, even as much of the meaning of life seems to baffle and elude them. They are so busy collecting data they have no time or space to ponder what it means. Their bodies are strong and ascending, and they are far from mortality. Google encourages the idea than one can find all of the answers to life in a smartphone or tablet.
Meanwhile, the old have learned somethings about life, but nobody is asking them what they know or interested in their messages. They have become symbols of ridicule and irrelevance, short on buying time, headed for memory homes, edited out of music, movies, television and books. In our society the elders have been almost relentlessly trivialized, reduced to dependence on aid and insurance programs, fussing with one another about their medications, encouraged only to take their pills and tests and talk to their friendly doctors about sexual stimulants and diapers and plea for their long-term insurance benefits.
What I love about aging is that even though I feel my body sometimes beginning to fade, I have only begun to come to consciousness, begin to awaken the possibilities and mysteries of life. Life is more fascinating to me than ever, especially as I have begun to learn something about it. This is lonely process, most people are too busy worrying about their numbers and hopelessly dwindling bank accounts. We are manipulated into living forever, bankrupting ourselves in the process, and then getting blamed for not being able to afford it. Nobody can afford it, it seems, the great conundrum.
In the full moon of life, writes Joseph Campbell, you have to find the zeal in yourself and bring it out. Marx taught us to blame society for our failures, religion teaches us to blame our sins, Freud taught us to blame our parents, the left blames the right, the right blames the left, we blame health care, the economy, banks, China, Congress, the Internet. But the point of the hero journey is this: if we fail to honor the meaning of our full moons, the only place to look for blame is within: we didn’t have the guts to bring up the full moon and live the life that is our potential.
This, writes Campbell, is the mystery of life and its masks. What are you doing to do when the thing breaks, when the mask is taken away. Are you just going to become an old dog getting older and older, sinking back into your body? Or in the moment of the full moon have you made the jump to the light?
As always, Campbell is writing my story. My consciousness is growing as my body weakens. Every day, I am making the jump into the light.