The Age of Miracles (3 page)

Authors: Marianne Williamson

A
t a certain point, life becomes less about who you’re becoming and more about who you’ve become. What you used to think of as the future has become the present, and you can’t help but wonder if your life wouldn’t be better if you’d just lived it more fully back then. But how could you? You were too busy thinking about the future!

Once you’re past a certain age, you can hardly believe you wasted even one minute of your youth not enjoying it. And the last thing you want to do now is steal any more life from yourself by failing to be deeply in it while it’s happening. You finally get it—not just theoretically, but viscerally—that this moment is all you have.

You don’t close your eyes anymore and wonder who you might be in 20 years; if you’re smart, you study the tape of your current existence to monitor how you’re doing now. You see the present as an ongoing act of creation. You look more closely at your thoughts, behavior, and interaction with others. You understand that if you’re coming at life from fear and separation, you have no reason to expect anything but fear and separation back. You seek to increase your strengths and decrease your weaknesses. You look at your wounds and ask God to heal them. You ask forgiveness for the things you’re ashamed of. You no longer seek your satisfaction in things outside yourself, completion in other people, or peace of mind in either the past or future. You are who you
are,
not who you might one day be. Your life is what it
is,
not what it might someday be. Focusing on who you are and what your life is right now, you come to the ironic and almost amusing realization that, yes, the fun is in the journey itself.

One of my biggest regrets is missing the Christmas pageant at my daughter’s preschool when she was three years old. On the one hand, someone working for me didn’t bother to tell me about it; on the other, I’d obviously given off the vibe that I wouldn’t care or didn’t have time to go. And now I sometimes think to myself what I wouldn’t give to see that pageant now. I have a memory missing, and it feels like a hole where a smile should be.

I was ashamed to admit it, when finally I did, that I’d become a bit like my father, who was so concerned about his career in his 40s and 50s that his emotional availability to his children was relegated to only one day of the week. On Sundays, I had him; every other day, I longed for him. Years later, when his first granddaughter came along, he’d aged to that more mellow place where being present to a child seemed at last more satisfying than being present to his work.

I used to feel jealous of the little girls whom he grandfathered with so much care and attention. I knew that if he had fathered me the way he grand-fathered them, I would have become a different woman. How horrified I was years later to hear my five-year-old daughter say these pitiful words: “I miss my mommy even when she’s here.”

Seeing places where we have been unconscious before, we have a desire to do it all again—but
right
this time! And in some cases we can. Many people atone for not having been better parents by being much better grandparents. And that’s often how their children forgive them. But some situations aren’t so amenable to redoing, and some years can’t so easily be made up. That’s why it’s so important to appreciate that the best time to try to be your best is in the present moment. You’ll never have a better chance.

Dear God,

Please expand my constricted mind.

Open my clouded eyes that I might see.

Do not allow me to escape my good.

Help me not to miss my life.

Prepare my heart for better things.

Amen

O
NE DAY
I
LOOKED AT MYSELF
in the mirror and indulged in full-scale self-pity.

Oh, I remember when I was young,
I thought.
My skin was tighter, my breasts were higher, my rear was firmer, my entire body was voluptuous. I had so much more energy, and I practically glowed. I wish I had realized what I had when I had it … and now I’ll never have it again.

Then another voice in my head intervened.

“Oh, Marianne … ,”
it said, “
shut up! Let me give you a rundown of what it was like when you were younger. Your nerves were jangled, your heart was restless, your mind was disordered, your appetites were addictive, your love affairs were tragic, your talents were squandered, your opportunities were wasted, and you were never at peace.

“What you did then, in fact, was exactly what you’re doing now: You kept thinking that if only things were
different
, you’d be happy. Then it was whatever man or job or resources were there to save you; now it’s if only you were still young. Reality check: In those days, you looked good but you didn’t know it. You had everything but you didn’t appreciate it. You had the world at your feet but you didn’t realize it.

“You know what it was like? It was
just like now!

” Thus began my recovery from “youth-itis.” I slip back into it every once in a while, but as time goes on, I snap out of it faster and faster. I realize it’s nothing more than a mental habit to idealize another time, another condition, another reality—as simply a way to avoid the reality of my life right now.

And in avoiding the reality of our present circumstances, we avoid the miracles they offer. Everyone does it because that’s the way the ego mind works. But we can stare down this self-defeating habit and cultivate a truer perspective: that wherever we are is the perfect place, and whatever time it is now is the perfect time. That doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t improve things, particularly ourselves. But indulging the thought that
if only we were younger, things would be better
is a surefire way to age with pain.

M
Y FATHER ONCE TOLD ME
, “When you’re old, you don’t feel old.” I can appreciate what he meant when he said that, as I ponder the fact that the essential being I am inside myself is the same in my 50s as when I was only 15. So who am I really? Am I the woman who has changed with age, or am I the changeless self within? Am I the woman who is encased in time or the being who dwells apart from it?

Sometimes when referring to things that happened long ago, we say things like “I remember it like it was yesterday.” And that’s because in a way it was. If time, as Einstein declared, is merely an illusion of consciousness, then linear time itself is a metaphysical fiction; everything that has happened, is happening, or will happen, is happening
now.
There, in that realm of the eternal now, is the true “I am.”

The eternal self dwells in eternity, and eternity intersects linear time at only one point: the present. Who you are in this moment, therefore, is who you truly are. And who you are is love itself. From that essential point of perfect being—created anew by God every instant—miracles flow naturally. Love interrupts the past and opens the future to new probabilities. No matter who you are, no matter how old you are, in the present, all things are possible.

The physical self ages, of course, but the spiritual self does not. As we identify more with the spiritual dimension of our lives, then our experience begins to shift from the changeable to the changeless … from limitation to limitlessness .
. . from fear to love. As our journey through linear time gets shorter, our consciousness can in fact expand. And as it does, time itself is affected. The deeper we go into the love at the heart of things, the more we actualize our earthly potential. The understanding of that which does
not
change is the key to our power within a world that does. In aligning ourselves with the eternal self, we age not in a straight line leading from luscious youth to decrepit age, but rather like the flowering lotus opening more and more to the light of the sun. And age becomes a miracle.

Physically, we get older and then we die. Yet spiritually, whether we go backward or forward is a matter not of the body but of consciousness. When we think about age differently, then our experience of it changes. We can be physically older but emotionally and psychologically younger. Some of us were in a state of decay in our 20s and are in a state of rebirth in our 60s or 70s. King Solomon, who supposedly was the wisest of all men, described his youth as his winter and his advanced years as his summer. We can be older than we used to be yet feel much younger than we are.

As we become more spiritually intelligent, more aware of the forces that underlie and cause all earthly reality, then issues of age begin to transform. Spiritual growth increases our sense of what’s possible. And as we
sense
new possibility, we can
step into
that possibility. With every word, every thought, every action, we choose what we wish to call forth in life. Old thoughts create old scenarios, and we can choose to let them go.

According to
A Course in Miracles,
we achieve so little because our minds are undisciplined. We’re too easily lured into self-deprecating thoughts, limited beliefs, and negative self-perception. No one
forces
you to think,
My best years are behind me,
or
No one will want me anymore,
or
I missed my chance.
But whatever it is you choose to think, your subconscious mind takes it very seriously and your experience will reflect your thinking.

Our very cells respond to the thoughts we think—with every word, silent or spoken, we participate in the body’s functioning. We participate in the functioning of the universe itself. If our consciousness grows lighter, then so does everything within and around us.

This means, of course, that with every thought, you can start to re-create your life.

A
T MIDLIFE, YOU SUDDENLY SEE AN ENDGAME
where you used to see an endless stretch. You know now on a visceral level that this lifetime will not go on forever. There’s no more time for five-year detours. No more time for getting it wrong. No more time for relationships that don’t serve, or for staying in situations that aren’t authentically you. No more time for playing small, false pride, or whatever other roadblock emerged from the dark waters of your psyche to obstruct the joy that’s meant to be yours. You want to become a precision instrument now—focusing on exactly what you want to do and being exactly who you need to be.

According to ancient Asian philosophy, life is not a circle but a spiral. Every life lesson that has ever been presented to you (which means everything you have ever been through) will come back again, in some form, until you learn it. And the stakes each time will be higher. Whatever you’ve learned will bear greater fruit. Whatever you’ve failed to learn will bear harsher consequences.

Whatever
didn’t
work in your life before this point was a reflection of the fact that you hadn’t yet integrated the different parts of yourself. Where you didn’t yet accept yourself, you attracted a lack of acceptance in others. Where you hadn’t yet dealt with your shadows, you manifested shadowy situations. Broken parts of you encountered broken parts of others. So now you know! That was then and this is now.

Midlife is our second chance. If you want to spend the years you have left simply reenacting the dramas of your past, you can. The same script will indeed be coming around again for your review. It always does. But if you choose, you can take the script and give it an awesome rewrite, totally get on top of your material, and take a bow at the end that blows everyone away.

Your play might be set in another town this time and the characters might be different. But it is essentially the same play. Whether you were ready for your starring role last time is another story. Whether you behaved in a way that welcomed your opportunities and maximized their benefits is another story. But the fact that you ever attracted opportunities in the first place means that they belonged in your script. Now—through the power of your atonement, humility, and a sincere desire to get it right in areas where you might have gotten it wrong before—you will attract the same opportunities again, in another form. An all-merciful God has sent them around once more, with even bigger plans for how they can bless you and others now.

Do the rewrite carefully. Your character should not say “I’m too old now,” but rather “I’m just getting started.” “I’m too weak for this” can be “I am strong now.” “I blame them for what they did to me” can be “I choose to forgive.” “What can I get from this situation?” can be “What can I contribute?” And, “What do I want to do?” can be “Dear God, what would You have me do?” With every new thought, you can work a miracle—changing your script and changing your life.

Dear God,

I wish to change my life,

so please, dear God,

change me.

Remove from my mind all judgment

and from my heart all fear.

Release the chains that bind me