The lost Apollo syndrome. Growing old.

Growing older is exciting when you are seven. Grandma has got nothing to do with age. She belongs to a pre-historic group and you do not classify her gender. She is sweet and nice and gives you cookies and hugs, and yaggh...a kiss.

Mom, yes, she is old. Old people tell you to do chores. They have long since forgotten what it is to be a big person of seven years of age!

Eventually seven will turn into seventy-seven. You had forgotten how your seven year old grandson do perceive you. You have reached the lost Apollo syndrome-landmark.

A major system granted the origin of the modern wisdom, originate from the ancient Greek sources. The agony and tension of the ancient Greek soul reflects the same bipolar sides observed in modern times.

On the one side is the orderly and rational, and opposite is the unruly and instinctive. Between these two the soul must be purged. When this tragedy of catharsis, rightfully called thus by Aristotle, is finished, we reach it. The ultimate goal - The lost Apollo syndrome.

Apollo was the Olympian god of symbolising light and reason. Once this personality leaves us alone, we enter a valuable old age. We become our own Apollo, ruling over your own mysticism and revolt in intellect. The school of life and truth gave you this exact authority.

Many years now, your leading notion of  life's principles on the agenda was family, responsibilty, community and retirement.

Denying the realities of the unimaginable and un-tolerable packages of life phases, you conversed with your soul. You watched as much older people than you grew more old. You saw them change, and most of it you disliked.

As time passes, you make recollections of observations on being a "good Old timer". You will work very hard on yourself, you will upkeep the dicipline of respectability. You will fight poignancy and cynism. All the while the tides of life will keep on coming. There is no controll, except for strenghts built during a lifetime living life.

Then one day, the children and grandchildren get in the car and wave goodbye. Just after a Sunday visit, an overwhelming sense of nauseating loneliness knocks at hearts door. You save the feeling unpublished in the deepest dungeon of the least used part of your mind. The dogmatic side in you inform the emotion as deleted, because it is more convenient, most probably more so, irrelevant.

Staring to the glory of the golden glow of a hazy sundown, made you feel so relaxed. Why then, was this uninvited invisible visitor disturbing you then.What on earth has triggered you to accept the notion that education has arrogance. You have never thought about that. In your dreamy state of mind, you just suddenly realised a new truth has looked you in the eye, and tested your logic. It scares you. Truth is usually more correct than logic!

The  shafts in the mine of your imagination starts caving in. You recognise that loneliness you thought did not existed. Like a nightmare it chases the limits of your tolerance. You do not wake, and it is not a dream. You have to face it.

It eventually dawns on you, the loneliness was caused by your own lack of making peace with yourself. It was not caused by the abandonment of your children, now leading their own lives. Defending the initial concept formed, will ultimately lead to a destructive road.  Smugness will smother creative investigation and in the process you may lose yourself.

Emerging from the darkest corners of your hidden self, the confrontations about contradictions in ideas hunt you like ghosts. If man can be able to realise the lessons learnt in life, and embrace the tolerance truth can provide, change occur.

You watch the younger generation with more interest now. They rush, as you did when their age. They do not see the pulse of life. You feel it now, and knew it was always there. Contraction and retraction, all lives pulsating together in birth and death and was always in all things. It never separates from itself, because there is only life.

You sense this eerie little voice telling you in no words of the waste of humans blocking themselves from their own energy flow. You understand the concept, you have to make changes, you have to warn the others. There is not much time left and you do not have the ability to explain the danger.

Time passes, and you are sure now that there was never a yes or a no, there was never a left and a right, there were never rights nor wrongs. There was only life. The danger of our own effectiveness has locked the spirit in the rigid jail of limitation.

You remember vaguely the promise you've made to yourself, the one of growing old with dignity. How silly!

Slowly you start to change, without realising it. Trying to explain the awareness to the children only confuse them. In the process it confuses you too. You stop to explain, and the grandchildren would whisper : Gran'pa is weird!

You have come to embrace the validity of other ideas even if it is contrary to your own available information. You are willing to explore the topics formerly alerting all defense logic in the core of your being.Your rigid, fossilised assumptions and concepts only supply fuel for a new found uniqueness.

You are aware that you are incomplete. As the driving pulse of life is expanding your awareness of connectedness, the body let go. The physical state will now enter a retraction, in order to release the powers in you. The same as what will happen to a quasar, your brilliant exit from the body will sparkle unto eternity, forever pulsating this life changing energy to the future.

Like a cloud, driven by the wind, you are now high above, and can see further than the horizon. The veil between this reality and the next reality becomes ever more flimsy, and you can see.

You do not get annoyed when they label you as senile. You understand they will see as well, later, much later. There is no rush anymore. The body must leave the spirit now, it has served its purpose. Only those who cannot see yet, will say the spirit leaves the body.

Spirit are not bound to the body, it is the flesh that desperately clings to the life of who you are. The complaints of the aces and pains are gone now, but not the physical pain so. You welcome the chatter of small children, for they can still remember the other realities. They will allow you to look through the veil, without mocking, as they can still dimly see.

Soon the curtain will close for them as well. They will experience the pulsating rythm of the cosmos in their lives. They too will grow and expand, ever evolving. They will temporarily forget as well. Then they will one day re- experience the discovery of life - in their old age! The human race will propell into the future, ever better and always smarter.

The grey, between the black and white, has become an attitude and a tool. Apollo has taken his hat and left. His light and reason was given to him through men by the means of phylosophy and books. Accepting to look at things differently is making you free unto life itself.

Are you willing to accept the change that life will demand from you when you grow old. Or will bitterness, resentment and cynism make you die a hypocrite? Just asking!

Photographs: Courtesy from fotosearch.com and from mail friends.