Theme of Life
I like reading about the primitive brain. It fascinates me how the primitive brain sometimes dictates how we react in certain situations that life throws at us. This post is not so much about the primitive brain, but about what I am going to call the theme of life, based on the primitive brain.
I can only talk about my life because I am looking at my own life right now. As I grew from childhood to maybe to the age of forty I had been in survival mode. I am talking about finding work, making money, finding shelter, living in an apartment then saving money for a house, then buying a house.
Life was about making decisions to have children or not, saving for retirement and just trying to do the right things to guarantee my survival or the best survival that I can provide for myself. All these actions that I have taken in my past are what I am calling my survival theme.
Now I am older. My survival has been established. My parents have passed on. I am dealing with other family members that are older and have Alzheimer’s. If you know Alzheimer’s, besides affecting the person who has it, it also affects their family.
So, right now I am wondering what my theme of life is. I am now older and monetarily I am surviving, but lately I have been around aging and end of life. I am looking for meaning, I am questioning my theme.
I need to create life again and my theme is at a loss right now. Some people call this a mid-life crisis. I call it the finish line of the survival theme of my life. I am done being the hunter/gatherer, warrior protector, the creator of children, the student of life, and becoming an elder of the tribe, a wise man, a teller of stories, to help the ones who follow.
I understand better now what my parents were always telling me: learn from history. I looked at history books but it’s not from books you learn, it is from the stories of the elders around you and from your experience. Elders have stories of survival that you can adapt to your life to help you with making a smooth change from hunter/gather/warrior theme of life, to wise man, tribal elder, and diplomat.
To understand that it is time to look at the wisdom of nature and gracefully move into the next theme is one thing. To do it is another. One thing I have been doing is looking back at what I have done in the past and trying to recapture what Bruce Springsteen would call my “glory days”. I am also looking forward, thinking about creating something to be proud of by helping the tribe we call the human race. The present moment is the transition, a limbo between the action of the hunter/gatherer and the objective observer of the elder, where I am questioning and reevaluating my theme. It is hard, sometimes frustrating because it means leaving something known to go to the next, which is unknown.
What it takes is, as I tell my class, being at my address. Sitting and observing the transition, asking questions and listening. Seeing that what I want to create in my new theme of life is sharing my stories of healing and energy work and maybe making a difference in the world we live in.
I Healed my Crohn's Colitis 