We are all going to die. There is much freedom in this

There is a stage you reach in your life where you realise that you are going to die.

In our youth, life is forever. The end is so far away we cannot and do not imagine it. But somewhere in our forties and fifties, if we are lucky, we suddenly realise that we are moving ever faster towards the finish line.

The person that stares back at us in the mirror looks like us, but the face has begun to take on the lines of life that we never imagined would happen to us.

Time becomes more significant and, ironically, faster-moving. There is a yearning to stop, to slow, to pause. And then the crazy schizophrenia of urgency to leave your mark.

Like any gate of life, this realisation happens slowly, then suddenly. The signs were always there, had we paused enough to heed them.

As I was running this morning, I saw ‘me’ in the larger rhythms of life. I saw the ‘me’ running in my world, a very small part of the larger world, and an even smaller part of the cycles of the planets around the heavens. Pluto’s cycle through the heavens, and its insistence on breaking down so very thoroughly every vestige of my old self-identity in work in order to birth the new, is simply another cycle of the many that are beyond the comprehension of a single mind.

As a child, I had the clear knowing that we were infinitesimally small parts in a very large whole, no less significant or insignificant than any other small part.

But the play gets more important now as we see our own death looming.

It is into this frontier that I now jump. A new identity is emerging. There is urgency co-joined with grace. Do you feel it too?

I am increasingly feeling that there is nothing to lose. Dare I really risk the jump? Risk fully? Maybe there is no choice. I either jump or the Universe will push me in her wonderful ways…illness, financial stress, loss…

This is the edge I sit upon. I must give up any notion that it is about me at all.