I’ve recently learned that, as I age, living fully depends much more on my frame of mind than on my momentary state. Living in the now can be beautiful, but it is not a magic wand for contentment.

Neither does wholesomeness depend only on my physical condition. For some people, seeing God can make life seem good. They know just where they are going.

For me, the challenge is more complex. I’m a mystic, and we generally only believe what we can see and know to be true. Everything else is a search.

My faith in life is simpler, or perhaps more complex than I know. Here is what I believe:

We are not given life in order to suffer. We have the right to be happy, no matter who tells us who we are and who we must be—people who do that are neither content nor wise.

We are mortal human beings, and that means learning to deal gracefully and honestly with the natural suffering of being human, a very mortal creature.

When I failed to live life head-on, I failed to live it fully. Old age is not about giving up life; it’s not about what we can’t or don’t do anymore—or forgetting people’s names. It’s about what we can and want to do, what we can learn to do anymore.

It doesn’t take muscles to do that; it takes heart and soul. I’ve met people dying in hospice who are more alive than most people I know.

If I didn’t take the next step to begin something new, I would have failed to go on becoming something new and alive. I won’t stop in my tracks with years of life ahead of me. I give thanks for the gift of life, and as one spiritualist wrote, I won’t return it unopened.

I accept that I can’t do everything I did, and that I can’t do everything period. But none of that justifies substituting breath for life.

For me, it’s not simply the end. It’s the start of a new beginning, and I’m loving learning where it might go. As of now, I have no solid idea.

The threat of these years is that I may allow myself to become less than I am able to be, faster than I should.

These years are holy things, God or not. They call me to go down deeply into myself every single day of my life in order to discover every single thing left inside.

I call this the spirituality of wholeheartedness—no retreat without a struggle.

And right now. Every day.