Some people take to health and fitness programmes in an effort to delay or reverse the ageing process, to freeze life where it is. But life is like a stream, it is only ‘streaming’ when it flows from one moment to the next.
Our body might be 20 years old, or 60 years old, but at the cellular level, there is a continual lifecycle of birth and death in every moment. Hundreds of billions of cells are created and destroyed every day. Blood cells are continuously created and destroyed, thousands of skin cells are shed during the day, and the cells of our organs and the neurons in our brain undergo constant renewal. Even bone tissue is a living organism which completely replaces itself every decade or so.
No matter our chronological age, we could wryly say that we’re no older than 10 years, and much of the material that makes up our body is considerably younger.
On the other hand, at the atomic level, the stuff that we’re made of has been around since the Big Bang, and perhaps even longer at the level of pure energy. We breathe the same molecules that were once exhaled by the Buddha, Jesus, Gengis Kahn, and Hitler.
And what if consciousness precedes matter? How old is the consciousness from which we take our form? Is Mind at large an infinite timeless reality - outside of time as we perceive it?
The body will one day be unable to sustain its coherence any longer as we exhale our final breath in the ever-continual rhythm of creation and destruction.
No matter our efforts to improve our health or stretch out our lifespan, all we ever have is this moment, this breath, this heartbeat.
Waterfall
Nothing can harm me at all
My worries seem so very small
With my waterfall
I can see
My rainbow calling me
Through the misty breeze
Of my waterfall
Waterfall
Don't ever change your ways
Fall with me for a million days
Oh, my waterfall
- Jimi Hendrix
As Alan Watts suggests in “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, to cling on to life, to “hang on to life, to grasp and keep it for one’s own” is as futile as trying to scoop up a stream in a bucket and wonder why it is no longer ‘streaming’.
Life is a process, we are deluded if we think we can stop it processing, but in looking after our health we make the process more enjoyable.
You speak to one of the most important realizations: that all is in process. Even things that appear fixed like oak trees, headaches and mountains.
Discovering this for the first time was revelatory and ultimately liberating, like finding a previously hidden world beyond my small, limited perception.
Thanks for sharing your wisdom.