Stream of Consciousness Conversation #1

Love and loss are some of our greatest teachers. They teach us how to forgive and let go. How to be grateful. How to be present. How to be sorry, and when they teach us how to be sorry they teach us how to change so that we don’t have to hurt someone again. They teach us what really matters to us, what we should keep doing and what we should maybe consider letting go.

If there was no love, there would not be grief. Grief is not inherently a negative emotion. Grief means that you love something so much that you can feel a hole in your heart because that thing is no longer present in your reality the way that it was before. Then you have to learn how to keep loving knowing that you will have grief again. You must find the strength to stay open, to not let your heart become closed. Because if you love something one day, you’re going to have to let it go. Nothing is permanent everything and everyone that you love is going to die.

And along the way there are little deaths deaths. Death of ideas, relationships, dreams, goals, days, years, chapters of your life, friendships... And each of those things also has a birth. So each of us is constantly experiencing an innumerable amount of births and deaths in our life and every day. Every day of itself has a birth and a death, and what happens in between is life.

And so we can use a day to conceptualize a larger image which is life. We have a born in the beginning or in the morning and we die at the end or at night. And with all of this birth and death you’re also experiencing love and loss. And the greater the love the greater the loss.

So people who’ve been around longer, who’ve experienced more births of dates and deaths of days and more life… We call them our elders. And our elders are people who have gone through the cycle of birth and death more than we have, they have more experience with the birth of everything, ideas, of little babies, of friendships, relationships, and dreams and the death of those very same things and depending on how much they love those things they have also experienced that equal amount in grief and loss.

And it takes something divine within you to face loss and to not shun it. Because to shun that loss would be to shun the love. It takes something divine to not be so terribly afraid of loss because to be afraid of that loss would be to be afraid to love, and so there are people who keep their hearts open and continue to allow love and loss to pass through them so that they can experience the full spectrum of life, the birth of a love, the death of a love, and that’s not something that can be read about and then change you. You have to physically experience that and let it rewrite your physiology.

And so our elders are kind of like veterans of love. And a lot of times in this day and age we’re seeing Our elderly, not being revered. Better yet, we’re simply not even seeing them. We’re not seeing their experiences, their lessons, the wisdom that they hold not because they looked it up because they went through it and it rewrote the story of who they were.

And no matter what changes in technology or the world or how fast things start moving we as humans are always going to experience, love and loss. Long lost are the days when you would sit around the fire with an elder because they were the source of knowledge and wisdom, listening to the lessons in their stories. Now we’re going straight to the internet. We’re going straight to AI.

We aren’t seeing any value in our elders' stories anymore. We aren’t listening to the patterns they have noticed in life, we aren’t absorbing or even curious about the lessons love and loss have taught them. We are simply waiting for a question to come up and looking up the answer…

And because of this, we’re not seeing our elders as ahead of us. We’re seeing them as behind us, that we’re leaving them behind, “we are too fast for them and they are too slow to keep up.”

What we fail to realize, because we deny aging, we deny death, is that we all will become the elders one day. And I am here to tell you that your life has value. The experiences that you have, the losses, the lessons, the life-changing events that shattered you and you rebuilt yourself from, those have value.

Those stories that shaped your bones and continue to shape your actions, those have value and there’s nothing that a computer can do or calculate that will equal or replace the experiences that you’ve gone through.

A large part of it is hyper fixated on anti-aging. Staying as young and youthful for as long as possible, as if growing old is the worst thing that can happen to you. As if continuing to gain stories and gain experience and become a sage of wisdom, and a magician of reality is the worst thing that could happen to you.

Each part of your life contains its own set of experiences, unique to that chapter of your life. When you’re young everything is wondrous and new and it’s the first time you’ve seen it and you haven’t experienced great loss yet. You can run around and fall down and get back up.

And as you get older what becomes the value is not the newness of it all but it’s becoming a skilled swordsman. Every year you’re alive is another level and in some ways the game is getting harder because you can’t run as fast as you used to but now you have the wisdom that you don’t have to run, but if you instead turn and face the problem, it will go away.

Instead of continuing to run you gain the knowledge that when you have your heart ripped out and broken that wouldn’t have happened unless you loved that thing so deeply in your core. You learn how to love people, you learn how to forgive people, you learn how to be present and that is the richness of reality.

And that’s not something that you are given. It’s something that you learn and the more you practice it the better you will become and whether you intentionally practicing it or not, you’re going to learn.

When we had to hunter and gather, the hunters are fast not because their goal is to become fast, It’s because they are just doing what they know they need to do. And a byproduct of that is that they are fast.

And it’s the same thing with life. You don’t have to try to be faster. You don’t have to try to be wise or you don’t have to try to gain experience. It will simply happen as a byproduct of life.

Beneath the obsession with anti-aging lies a deeper fear—one that goes beyond the beauty industry’s fetishization of youth and demonization of old age. It’s the fear of death itself. And that fear is part of why we’ve started to see our elders as behind us, instead of ahead.

We have lost touch with the bigger Life, with the bigger consciousness. Each individual soul is a small portion of that consciousness and the more than that portion of consciousness experiences and learns and loves and loses and forgives and is present and is grateful, that doesn’t just go away. That’s consciousness expanding. That’s consciousness experiencing itself.

The fear of dying, this massive, collective fear we carry, seeps into the consciousness of the world.

But what if dying is not the end? What if it's like the end of a day?

Every night, we lay our heads down and surrender to sleep. The day dies, and we enter the dreamworld.

We’re not afraid to fall asleep.

In fact, we often look forward to waking up again, refreshed, renewed.

And yet... we don’t know what will happen while we dream. We don’t even know for certain we’ll wake up at all.

But still, we sleep.

Because we trust the rhythm.

And life is the same. At the end, we know we must sleep. We know the day must die.

We don’t know what comes next. But maybe, just maybe

when we wake up... we’ll be excited.

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