Climbing the Mountain
On Valentine's Day, Stonefishspine posted a wonderful entry entitled "Love & Death" on aging and love in spite of mortality. As a tangent to that, I would like to reflect for a moment on some of my current reading that I found applicable. At the tender age of 24 (it's curious that he chose that age as an example), I am only beginning to grapple with the prospects of aging and death. I do not feel immortal, but I do feel the naïveté of my age in these matters.
In the first chapter of A Monk in the World, the author tells the story of ascending a mountain in Sri Lanka called Sri Pada (Adam's Peak), a pilgrimage site to four religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. Pilgrims begin climbing the mountain, meditatively, at dusk and reach the summit at dawn, where they watch the sun rise. Viewing this ascent as one's journey to God is perhaps an easy and obvious metaphor, with its difficult, dark and sometimes hidden path culminating in the splendor of a new day. The real substance of this example lies in the next step--the journey up the mountain as a metaphor for our lives.
So often we allow our concrete conception of time to dominate us when in many ways it is as arbitrary as any other measure. Who's to say that thinking of aging as progress in one's journey to God is any less accurate or meaningful than anything else? Not me.