A lot of the experiences that we have in the world are torn, broken, hard experiences, and in broken, difficult, lonesome experiences you earn a quality of light that is very precious. I often think of it as quarried light. When you come through a phase of pain or isolation or suffering, the light that is given to you at the end of that is a very precious light, and really when you go into something similar again, it is the only kind of light that can mind you. It is the lantern that will bring you through that pain.
One of our difficulties in contemporary culture is this massive amnesia. We forget so much because we are addicted to the moment. If sad, difficult things have happened to you, and you have earned quarried light, again and again you should visit the light, and almost like the light around the tabernacle that signals the presence, you should allow that light to come round you to awaken the presence that is in you, to calm you, to bring you contentment, and as well to bring you courage. When a person is aging, one of the things he really needs is courage.
I love the word “careless.” You know the way people say, “Well, he’s a careless kind of an individual.” In one sense, that can mean that there is no responsibility in him. In its literal sense it can mean that he is care-less, that there are no false burdens of care on him, and that when he comes to the threshold of an experience, he enters it with full availability, full courage and full wildness. It would be lovely in old age, as the body sheds its power, if each of us who would be pilgrims into that time could shed the false gravity and the weight that we carry for a lot of our lives and if we could enter our old age almost like a baby enters childhood, with the same kind of gracefulness, of possibility, and the same kind of innocence, but a second innocence rather than a first one.
POSSIBILITY
There is great wisdom in the mystical tradition and in the Catholic tradition, and the Catholic tradition always recognized that the contemplatives need ritual to make their way through the deserts of solitude. If you sit down in an armchair by the fire and you allow the days, like big empty gray rooms, to come around your head, you will turn and feed on your own negativity. Contemplatives survive because the day is divided into times of praise, prayer, ritual, and in order to survive solitude one needs ritual. There is really no kind of education for getting old. You get old, you begin to lose your power, suddenly you find that you are left with it, you are on your own with it, and no one sees it like you do. There is so much that could be done to make people aware of the possibilities that are in old age. Old age, like illness, is a time when you really need to mind yourself. If you get hooked on some of the down-pulls of gravity in your soul, it can be a time of torture so that you pray for release—to die would be total peace. If you look on it as a time of possibility, amazing things can happen. A good axiom in life is to try to see the possibilities in a situation. Often in a situation, it is the walls we see, it is the door where the key has been thrown away that we see, and we never see the windows of possibilities and the places where thoughts and feelings can grow. In old age there is a lot more time, and freedom comes with that. In old age one can totally reorient one’s life and find fascinating companionship with one’s own soul.
How we view the future actually shapes that future. Time isn’t like space at all. When you think of space, you think of Connemara with the mountains stretching out with no walls at all, and if you look at Clare you see the little fields and the space stretching out towards the mountains and towards the ocean. We falsely think that time is like that too. You walk through the field of today and then you cross over to the field of tomorrow and then to the field of the day after that. But it’s not like that. Time comes towards us unshapen, predominantly, and it is our expectation that shapes the time that is coming. So expectation creates the future. If you bring creative expectation to your future, no matter what difficulty may lie in wait for you, you will be able somehow to transfigure it. Whereas if you bring really negative expectation to your future, you will turn yourself totally into a tower of misery. It is amazing actually, when people are in limit threshold situations, the resources they can call on which they would have never been aware of until it really gets very difficult. Nuair a thagann an crú ar an tairne, as they say in Connemara—when the pressure comes on you. There’s great wisdom in perspective and distance. It is usually when we are myopic and close up to a thing and we can’t see its contour at all, that it totally imprisons and controls us. Whereas sometimes when you step back, you get another view, and you pick up a way of relating to the event or the situation which frees you predominantly.
One of the most beautiful films I have ever seen is a film by the Japanese director Kurosawa. It’s called Dersu Uzala, and it is told about a platoon of Russian soldiers who go in to map an area of Outer Mongolia. The leader of the troop is a very elegant, dignified, intellectual man, and he comes across an old Mongolian man who is very wise. An amazing friendship builds between the two men, which is a classical theme in literature—the mentor and the disciple—and they get very close. The young man is learning so much from the older man and they deepen this amazing spiritual friendship, but what the young man doesn’t realize is that his passion, his sense of life, his curiosity are enabling the old man to prepare for his dying. There is one famous moment in the film when the old man suddenly sees a tiger, and it is a moment of pure dark epiphany. You know in that moment that he knows he is going to die, and the rest of the film just fills out the moment. It is an amazing film about a way of ritualizing one’s leave-taking of the world—with dignity, with courage, with great peacefulness, and as well with a sense of what you are actually leaving behind to those that you love.
TEMPERAMENT, NOT TIME
There is a story that my brother told me about a pub near us at home. You would never get a lift going to the pub if you wanted to get there. You would go to a little village in order to get back. He was driving home one evening and he was passing this man who was going in the direction he was driving in, so he said, “Will you sit in, John?” and John said, “No. Even though I’m walking this way, I’m going the other way!” It is a good metaphor for the false direction that masquerades as power and as achievement in contemporary culture. A lot of that is misdirected, and we need to steady ourselves and have a look at where we actually are. I really believe that age depends on temperament, rather than on time. I know people who at twenty-six and twenty-seven with the gravity that is around them, the seriousness, the lack of any little bit of spring or wildness in them are really about ninety! I know people of seventy, eighty and even eighty-five years who have the minds of seventeen-year-olds! They never managed to get old at all! For some strange reason, the passionate heart never ages, and if you keep your eros and your passion alive, then in some subtle, inevitable way, you are already in the eternal world. Several years ago I wrote a poem called “Cottage.” It is about time and the fact that we don’t recognize the days that we have; and part of the lack of integration in our lives is that we feel they don’t recognize us either—