Living and Dying

by Cynthia Hazen

Thriving in early and mid adult life entails the mastery of survival, finances, physical fitness, skills in affiliating and cooperative engagement with others which includes having and raising a family for many.  It also involves cultivating perspective on our purpose and meaning.  Once we have gotten the lay of the land as children and launched our own path, this is what life is about.

What of thriving beyond this phase?  That question has my attention these days.  What drives peoples’ appetites for life once survival is mastered?  What sustains us in the face of inevitable losses and in the face of our mortality?

Some people take the position that life is happening to them and therefore it continues to be a journey of adjusting and adapting to what is thrown at us.  I see it as a chosen and constructed expression.  We are living our choices, our dreams and/or our fears, all in the making.  What is happening to us from my point of view is a feedback loop in which our choices and beliefs play out individually and collectively.

At a deep level of consciousness life pulses, it oscillates.  We breath in and we breath out.  We express and we experience the expression and we choose or simply react and life moves on.  We are free to be alive.  We can’t get it wrong.  Life is eternal. At the same time this is true of death.  There are many deaths and we are continually dying and being reborn.  Every cell in the body dies within 30 days and is being replaced/reborn continually.  We are free to choose to live or to die into and out of experiences, relationships and ultimately this existence when we shed this mortal skin as some would say.

Thriving with the understanding that we are living into our choices and that we can continually change our minds anew is often thrilling and wonderful.  Obstacles and consequences unforeseen and undesired are simply a jumping off place for newly desired life direction.  There is nothing to fear when anchored in this deep seat of perspective.  Each moment expresses our desire and offers opportunity for new desire to be born.  Obtaining and re-centering in this perspective allows my heart to soar and me to thrive, to be fully alive, to choose life unequivocally.  It allows me to witness, bear, accept and make peace with the choices and consequences those around me are making in their lives and deaths with respect and appreciation.