When I got older, the ability to see, hear, and understand things in my life became difficult.

In aging, we step back from the world, and the world steps back from us. So the question is almost always, where do we go from here?

In my case, the eyes moved away from being rich, getting a job, being famous, and writing books; what was in front of me was strange and very new.

All of the platforms  I walked on in my life fell, and quickly. Nobody wanted me to speak to them anymore. And kids walked by me and stopped seeing me at all.

My cultural vision faded a bit, along with my other parts. It was a time to let go.

I gave up mourning, seeing in the rear, and self-pity. Most of the people I had known had died, disappeared,  moved to faraway condos, or left the children to take over. Their goal in life seemed to be keeping warm.

It was time to turn to the Spiritual value of things, the thing that would most carry me from the point of resolution on.

When I was young, life had followed an ancient cycle – accumulation, family, work, sex, success, and the many choices of the future.

There is a natural, almost shocking, sense of divestment that comes with old age. But if I didn’t do it, life would do it for me. And time was certainly running out.

I was blessed with heart disease and diabetes. Those are both wake-up-to-life calls. It sped me along.

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But I wasn’t sure what I’d be seeing now. Both sides of life are essential; neither is unavoidable. In the early years, a series of milestones.

Then, a lifetime later,  great silence, a fear of the unknown which can’t be seen, a fear of the ending that is all too visible. Today, a friend came up to me on the street and said, “You’re 78? Boy, nobody I know has lived that long.”

Thanks, pal, I said, patting him on the back. People say the nicest things when you get old, even friends.

One writer I talked to called aging the “great crossover moment.” I like that description.

The challenge was this. How and when would I discover the meaning of my life now, and more to the point, what would and could the future be? What to do with a car I don’t need? Stairs, I might not be able to climb. A house I might not be able to maintain or afford? A wife stuck with caring for me. Health that might strike me down at any moment?

“Don’t fall,” one of my early doctors told, “some people never recover.”  OK, I wondered, just how does an older adult promise to never tumble or fall? There is no pill for that.

I changed doctors, but I knew he was telling the truth. I like the optimistic look. A fall was no longer just a fall.

A fall could change the direction and freedom of my life. But as I kept my eyes open to the new life, I began to see the liberation, the freedom, the opportunity.

Sleeping late and walking in the woods. Learning how to use those cameras I had painfully ignored for so long. No more big decisions about jobs, no more struggles with bosses I didn’t like, no more being told what to do and when to do it. No more deadlines.

No more people telling what to write.

The Spiritual choice was the right one for me, and almost instantly, my calling. Keep my skills and use them for good. Avoiding hatred and gloom. I got a blog and write on it just about every day. I love writing freely; I can tell the trolls and yentas to get lost.

My work now is the shaping of my soul that occupies me, the creative churning I wanted to expand, the creative spark the Gods had given me but had never fully freed.

The Spiritual life is not about praying or meditating for me, but about being faithful to my right to be happy and my moral obligation to treat others well and help those who struggle to help themselves. They are always near; they always need help. That will always keep my spirits high. There is always work to do.

For me, this is what I see now: always continuing to find out who I really am – what Spirituality is all about – what I really know, what I care about, and how to be myself in the world, and for the good, when possible.

This is the time, the only time, the last chance to become what living has blessed me to be. Now is the time to make sense of it all. I have some time, I make some time. And I embrace the creativity within me, I am keeping my promise to the creator of the creative spark. I will never waste it again.

There really is a sense of liberation, of freeing. I think of my life as a stream, splashing over the small rocks.

The sacrifice? Letting go of the past. It does me know good.

At long last, I’m free to become simply human instead.