And I reread A New Earth the other day, and this part that I had thought “Nicely said” when I was in my forties now really rang truer. So I was talking to Roey about it and she said, “Well, some of these people will confront that issue, and the others are confronting that issue.”

And because I liked it in my forties and I like it again in my sixties, I decided all of us can appreciate it. It is actually a way to enjoy looking forward at the rest of your life. Because as you know, we live in a culture that celebrates youth every time. I don’t do much online, folks. I mean, I don’t go out looking for trouble. I play this little game that makes me slide objects around on the screen, and somehow they’ve figured out that I’m a million years old, and in between sliding the things around on the screen, every single product that has ever been invented to try to make one’s skin look slightly less ancient gets hurled at me through the internet.

It’s depressing. It’s like I could put all your products on in a row, and it would just make a weird thick cake of old over my face. So that’s what the culture says, “Yeah, yeah. You’re not supposed to be old. You’re supposed to be young.” 

But even young sucks. If you look at statistics, satisfaction—first of all, you’re born into this body and you’re like, “What the hell is this?” and you cry for a year because that’s how it is to arrive on this planet. And then you’re trying to get control of everything, and your legs and arms keep growing, and you don’t know how to do it. And then you’re like, “Oh, I’m a big kid now. I’m getting used to things.” Bam! Puberty. It’s like the plague. As I think a comedian I love, Eddie Izzard once said, is like, “Suddenly you have the plague, you have skin lesions and your voice is doing weird things. If you’re female, there’s like [vocalizes] happening—not to me, but to some people. Anyway, it’s very confusing. And then your hormones go crazy and you fall in love and you make a fool of yourself and you try to build a family and you make mistakes. It’s just a nightmare trying to get a handle on being human. 

And then right around 40-ish, you kind of go, “Huh, I think I’m getting the hang of this. I know where my arms and legs are. I figured out the right workout program for me, fell in love a few times, got my heart broken, figured out how to do it. Now I’m in the right relationship. This is cool. I’ve arrived. I can do human.” And at that very moment, it’s like the wave that was coming in to try to confront you with difficulty about how to be in a body starts to suck you back out of it.And you see, you look in, and at first it’s just gradual and you’re like, “Oh, that’s weird. That looks like my mother’s hand” or whatever. And then after a few years, it’s just every single day a fresh hell. And you start getting skincare ads thrown at you over the internet.

Now, this is what Eckhart Tolle said—and see, I’m on my integrity cleanse or I would pretend I thought it out, but it was Eckhart. And he said, “The reason we don’t want to submit to the aging process of the body is that it’s really a strategy of the spirit.” And the spirit strategy is not to master being human and then to stay in our prime for a thousand years—have our heads frozen until science figures out how to keep us alive forever. The whole game for the spirit is about getting in a body, going through the hell of learning how to use it, and then when you get to a place where you can basically handle it, it says, “Okay now for the real purpose.” Which is not to stay young in a physical sense, but to begin bringing the spirit away from the body and the body filling itself with light, with spirit, with more spiritual awareness and with a deeper sense of peace in the physical as an avenue to magnify the spiritual.

So think of: The tide goes in, and our culture says it is just supposed to keep going or stay exactly where it is. That’s not a tide, that’s a tsunami or it’s stagnation. It doesn’t work that way. Instead, the tide goes in, and the water goes as far as it’s going to, and then as it pulls out, it leaves a space inside us—as we remain physically—that is now available.

And we can fill it with second-guessing and regrets and misgivings and fear of death and all those things. Or, we can use it as a receptacle for awakening. And it’s very, very rare for people to have that experience when they’re super young. So it’s interesting, you can be a child prodigy at things. I’ve known a lot of people who were prodigiously good at things as a child, and that’s considered really remarkable and wonderful. And it’s all about doing things that impress other people in the physical world.

And then there are people who I think of as prodigies of aging. Obviously one of those people, if you know me at all, I’m going to say Byron Katie, wonderful, wonderful spiritual teacher. I love what she said when she was 60. That’s another thing, I underlined in one of her books when she was 63 and I was much, much younger. She said, “I’m 63 and unlimited.” I like that.

So one day, I was visiting Katie and her wonderful, wonderful husband, Steven Mitchell. I love them both dearly. And Katie went in the other room to get something. And I said to Steven, “It’s very strange. Katie keeps getting more beautiful.” She was always super beautiful. She was just born beautiful, physically. And spiritually, but she had a rough time for the first few decades. Read about it. Anyway, I said, “I’m not saying she’s getting more luminous in a grandmotherly sort of way. She’s actually physically more beautiful by any standard every time I see her.” 

And from the other room, Katie’s voice said, “I know, isn’t it weird?” But just like, how can you not love this person? And it’s because she’s so completely without artifice and without effort and without attachment to her body at all, without attachment to any of the standards that humans use to judge themselves in one another—it’s because of that, that it happens like that to her. And it’s a weird thing because it was a physical reality. It wasn’t just that she was, I said this before. It wasn’t just that she was luminous, there was an actual physical beauty.

And I’ve seen that in a few other people as well. Some of those people were actually not that exceptional-looking when they were young. And then as they aged, they just lit up, and it was always because they saw full arrival in the body as the opportunity to begin harvesting the fruits of this emotional life in this human self for the purposes of the soul.

So I’ve said this before, we’re in here, it’s like a diamond mine, and the diamonds are all made of experience. And the experiences are the things that impact us emotionally, intellectually, even, and spiritually as well as physically. And every intense experience has its own beauty, even pain, because—and I will say this over and over again too—the reason there is suffering in human life, even though the universe is loving, is that the soul loves experience and is not afraid to suffer.

I talked a few weeks ago about the life and death of Andrea Gibson, the former Poet Laureate of Colorado. They use they/them pronouns. And there’s a movie called Come See Me in the Good Light that is about Andrea going through part of her life after being diagnosed with—they, sorry—going through their life after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, and the absolute deliciousness of every aspect of experience that emerged into their experience the second they learned they were dying.

And I’d like to watch that movie over and over and over again because we don’t have to be dying to do it, but we are all getting closer to death. And the whole point of having, as one of my friends says, a short runway, she just had her 70th birthday and she’s like, “I can’t really fake it anymore. It’s a short runway.” So you’ve got to use every single inch of the runway and experience every single inch of the runway, including things like embarrassment and ill health and failure and all those things. You’re seated in a body now. You’re seated in a set of emotions. It is time now—you’re able to become wise.

And I actually believe you can start it at any age. There is the push that comes when you’re looking at a short runway. But anybody out there, if you’re listening to this right now, anywhere you are, think about the fact, think deeply about the fact that life is hard and you’re here for a reason and it’s not going to be very long. Five years, 50 years, it’s not very long. And with that in mind, instead of capitulating to the cultural idea that this is bad, see if you can become delighted with the anticipation of the capacities that come when the body starts to get older because it slows down, it gets sensitive and creaky. It is an old animal that has lots of instincts, that knows how to find its way home now. And its instincts get sharper and sharper about going home, the more the body seems to be declining. That’s just the state of a body absorbing light and learning to go home, home, home with all the diamonds you’ve gathered in this life.

So I just wanted to invite us all to do that. And I’m recording this during the holiday season, and everybody waits for the darkest night in the Northern Hemisphere. Waiting for it, why? Because it’s terrifying and horrible? It kind of is if you’re far enough north I am cold today. But that’s when the lights go on. That’s when you get together with your friends. That’s when you start trading the things you’ve made and the things you’ve found. That’s when you stop doing all of the work that you have to do most of the time and you just celebrate together.

As we go to the short runway, as we go to the short days and the long nights, turn on the lights, turn on the lights in your soul, invite your friends in. Do something. Take off time from work because you can do it for an afternoon and watch a movie with people you love. Adopt a damn puppy or a baby or whatever it is. Use the runway you’ve got because this is the fun time. That is what I have to say about that. We go out—we go into physical and our physical self that is then a receptacle, and as the capacity to live as human becomes smaller, the light comes in.

That means by the time you actually do die—say you get to be old and you die—if you’ve been on that path, you shine and shine and shine more brightly as you get close to the doorway. And as Mary Oliver, another poet who passed away not too long ago, said, “I’m going to come in from the universe stamping my feet and clapping my hands, my shoulders covered with stars.” For those of you who’ve lived in snowy places, you know how that looks when someone comes in covered with snow, stamping and clapping, shoulders covered with stars.

So that’s what I have to say about that. And if you heard this when you’re young, maybe someday you’ll hear it again and go, “Oh, now I’m old, it makes sense.” Or if you heard it when you were old, you might be going, “Huh. That could work.” So my love to you as you get older, because that’s one thing I’m sure we’re all going to do.

Let’s go to the questions—and hm, I was thinking of doing the meditation at the end, but let’s do it now. This is a good time. And if you want to look back in your history at a time when you were sort of learning to be human and you were struggling with it and now you’ve mastered that, and let that create a sort of spaciousness inside you, that experience, and then let it go. Like the experience of creating a relationship or creating a baby or creating a career. That experience you have, but you’re not going to have it again, but you’ve learned it, and now there’s a space to hold it because you’ve learned it. And that space will not be wasted. That space will be filled with the soul’s diamonds. So think about that, something you’ll never do again, but now you have a space for the diamonds, for the light. And just hold that image for a bit in your mind, and then you can drop it. And let’s go into our Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation, which is, I think, kind of what it must be like when you finally cross, is this.

All right. First of all, the strange question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Ask yourself that question. Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Knowing that most of the distance between your eyes is filled with just space because all atoms are. Can I imagine the distance between the tip of my nose and the back of my head? Can I imagine the distance between the crown of my head and my knees? Can I imagine the space within that? Can I imagine the distance between the bottoms of my feet and my heart? Can I imagine the space inside my heart?

Can I imagine the stillness in which my heart beats, an absolute stillness that is surrounding and permeating my heart in this moment and has always been there and will always be there after my heart stops beating? Can I imagine the distance between my heart and the hearts of everyone else listening to this broadcast, to this podcast? Can I imagine the stillness holding us all? And can I imagine the silence beneath all the sounds that distract us and make us forget that we are not only part of this world, but of something far greater? Can I imagine that all of it is love? Feel how loved you are by the silence, the space, and the stillness, which is so aware and so absolutely in love with you. I promise you it is. So let’s answer some questions now. Thank you for going into the stillness with me.

Okay, question: “I’m 52, but I’m still crippled by self-doubt. I regularly doubt my decisions—from how much I paid for my apartment to which tote bag I asked a friend to get me from New York City. How do I stop tormenting myself?”

I would suggest that you make stuff. If you read my last book, [Beyond Anxiety], you know that I consider creativity to be a kind of antidote to anxiety. And this doubt is a manifestation—this crippling self-doubt—is a manifestation of anxiety. So if I asked you to look up a thing online called Zentangle—which is, it’s kind of like creative doodling to make really beautiful things—and said, “Go make a Zentangle.” Or if I said, “Go make a really good stew,” or “Go learn how to carve rose shapes out of radishes,” or anything. 

Anything that involves actually working with matter and creativity and learning. Fill your mind with the things you can still learn. That is actually what makes an old body, even an old brain, much, much more receptive to the light. If you’re continuously in the space of creativity, you’re aligning yourself with the forces of creation, which is another word in most religious language for the Divine, for God. So as you start making things, you’re moving away from the fretfulness of dealing with physical objects that are always decaying and always declining because of entropy. You move away from that to the part of you that’s always creating and always generating.

And I know it seems odd to say, “I’m crippled by self-doubt.” And I say, “Make a rose out of a radish.” Try it. Try it. Watch. That is all I ask. Give it a whirl. Or if you don’t want to make roses out of radishes, think of something you always did want to learn to make or do and learn it. Learn it for the fun of it. Learn it because you’ve always wanted to, not because you’re trying to show it to anyone or prove anything. Learn it, even though you think you’re too old to learn it. Thinking you’re too old to learn it means you shut down learning, which shuts down fluid intelligence, which makes you feel old. So even if you are 52, even if you’re 32. I’ve met people who feel old at 32 because they’ve stopped challenging themselves to learn and to create. So I know it may be, “But I want to be sure of myself before I make a radish rose.” Yeah, that’s what—we all do. Make it anyway. That’s what works. Making it when you don’t know how.

All right, question: “How do you embrace your current stage of life when you feel behind your peers and are struggling with severe financial hardship? Any tips and prompts?”

Oh, that’s hard. There’s two separate issues. Feeling behind your peers is purely human socialization, thinking like a hierarchical ape, essentially. It’s simply meaningless when you look at life from the perspective of eternity. You can’t be behind anybody. You’re learning what you came to learn on this planet from the unique experience patterns that are affecting only you. You can’t fall behind. You are experiencing, every day, and that’s all you’re here for.

Now if you think you’re here to get a certain job title or have grandchildren who are doing fancy things or whatever, yeah, you’re going to suffer. And that suffering is there to tell you to stop thinking that way and just start to marvel at the fact that you’re experiencing so much and that you have experienced so much. Watch Come See Me in the Good Light. It is just this constant amazement at every experience a human being can go through in this life. Keep reminding yourself to go to that space when you feel like you’re behind someone. 

Now, the severe financial hardship is a whole different question. It’s very real right now. And so many people, the wealth disparity in our culture, in our society has gotten so extreme, and it’s still growing and it’s horrifying. And those of us who have privilege, I hope we’re all trying to ameliorate the pain of people who are in financial hardships. But you are right now, and no one’s ameliorated it yet. And this is a place where I think you can really master one of the deepest skills that we come here for, which is to trust, even in the face of physical limitation. So even if you’re ill, even if you don’t have enough, to say, “I am here for a reason. I am equal to every other human being who’s ever lived or whoever will. I can learn things from this experience that number one, will make me vast in my capacity for love, for enlightenment, for joy. And number two, I can invite trust to help me learn how to get out of this situation.”

So I often feel, from my perspective, pushed toward helping specific people. And it’s really interesting, Ro and I were talking about this yesterday, how there’s somebody we know who’s suffering and we both want to help and we know we could and they won’t—there’s nothing we can do. We just pray and wait. Believe—I’ve been on that side of it, I’ve been on the other side too, but not for a long time. So I’ve been on the side of wanting to be the agent of help for people in all kinds of ways: financially, emotionally, physically. And if they don’t have at least a grain of trust, a grain of acceptance, that they are loved and they are worthy, it’s hard for the help to get to them. And that’s from their own, by their own devices or by other people. So it’s very hard to come up with a solution. As Einstein said, “It’s impossible to come up with a solution from the same pattern of thinking that created the problem.”

I’m not saying that you created your own difficulties, but it’s almost impossible not to start imprinting them when you’re experiencing them. And to say, “I am going to hope. I am going to believe. I am going to anticipate goodness. I am going to expect things to get better, and I’m going to be on the alert because I know that the Universe is trying to help.” I know it doesn’t feel that way. That’s the thing. The trust comes before the proof in my own experience. And as I said, I’ve been on the other side where I feel what I believe that the Creator feels, which is I desperately want to get through to you and you’re blocking me because you just, you’re not anticipating the sweetness that people really and the force really has inside it that wants to direct itself into your life.

So I hope that doesn’t sound like a “Just turn that frown upside down and take your lemon life and make lemonade.” It’s not that at all. It’s “Dare to trust, against all logic, that your physical circumstances are not necessarily as negative as they appear.” That’s the point of looking at aging as a spiritual maturation. Physically, you can see yourself deteriorating, but if you trust that what that really is is an unfolding of something more beautiful than you’ve ever experienced, suddenly things start to look different. (And in Byron Katie’s case, they look different even on your face.) So it’s so hard, and there’s so many people struggling, and all my love goes out to you, and I know there are people listening to this who also want you to be happy. So many people want you to be happy.

Question: “How can I stop stressing out about being stressed out?”

It reminds me of a line in One Hundred Years of Solitude, that great book, where this doctor takes all these pills for all these conditions and all these anxieties, and then he takes another pill for the anxiety created by being on so many pills. And that little bit of paradoxical humor is familiar to a lot of us.

So again, what I would say: Make something. It’s the furthest thing from resolving your stress by keep staying in it. If you make something, make for someone who needs something. Be the agent of healing and help for somebody who doesn’t have enough money or doesn’t have healthcare, whatever it is, like find a way to make something beautiful and the stressed out? You forget. You forget to stress. I’m going to answer a few more of these because I started a couple minutes late and I like these questions.

Question: “If coming to a career-purpose crossroads and having to start again, would you go straight for the ‘What would you choose if money were no option?’ or compromise a little first?”

Day by day it’s different. Make slight compromises if it feels right. If it’s wrong for you, you’ll feel it. And as you get older, it’s going to be clearer, faster. You’re going to start getting the negative signals sooner, and they’ll help you pull back and not make compromises that would destroy you. And you’ll also not get concretized in, “Oh, I have my religion now and I’m never going to do anything for the money.” You know, I’ve done it wrong both ways, and it’s all about being sensitive to what your spider senses are telling you. And the more experience you have, the more accurately you can read them. That’s pretty much the whole point of what I’m saying. So good luck with that.

Question: “How can I embrace or accept chronic fatigue? I feel too tired to live.”

Oh Lord, have I been there. Whoa. When you’re actually too tired to lie down, like you can’t rest enough. And often depression goes with that because deep rest is the way you’re feeling. But I will tell you something, it is by letting go of the push, push, push of our culture and being unable to function at all because of fatigue and pain, that I began to discover the source of my own joy. I would’ve followed every little red herring in the world if I could have. And I was given this gift of utter and absolute physical immobility for years because it forced me not to—I would’ve been working out. It made me work in. And down, down, down at the center of my being, I found everything. Everything. I’m sorry you’re going through this, and I think it’s a wonderful thing. Good luck as well.

Okay, two more questions: “What’s your advice when you’re super sick in your mid-thirties and drowning with work and parenting while being super sick?”

Been there, done that. Yeah. Minimum days. I used to call them “minimum days.” You crawl through the absolute minimum you can do to keep your family together. And then when you can’t do any more, you forgive yourself. You forgive, you forgive, you forgive. You forgive the Universe for making it this way. You forgive everyone around you for being part of the cultural conspiracy to make us all feel like we have to work all the time. Again, exhaustion can—in our culture it’s like aging, there’s nothing good about it. But actually it can be the soul reaching out for God by quieting the activity of the body. So let’s take advantage of these things.

One more: “I look back at the highs in life from a low point and wonder if there was any really truth or reality to the highs. How do I reconcile the contrast between both?”

I don’t think you have to. Nisargadatta Maharaj said, “What we call pleasure is just the space between two pains.” So we are having pain and pleasure, pain and pleasure. And when you’re in a happy place, you almost can’t remember being sad, and vice versa—when you’re sad, you can’t remember being happy. It’s very fickle. And as you get older, you see it’s always been fickle. It’s always been vacillating. And you also see that through it all, there was a constant. The constant is space, silence, and stillness. 

That’s why I did that meditation a couple of times and then several people on The Gathering Room said, “Do it every single Gathering Room.” I’m like, “Really? It’s not very fancy. It’s weird, and people might not like it.” And y’all were like, “No, no, we like it.” Why do you think we like that? It’s the ground to stand on, where we can look at human life, the ups and downs, the love and hate, the anguish and the joy, and say, “Oh yeah, this is a beautiful thing I’m watching. This is a beautiful thing I’m making with this particular human body.” Now look, it is learning how to be itself. Now look, it feels mature. Now look, I am pulling back on its energy, on its ability to please others. And I’m saying come home. Fill yourself with God before you die. I think that’s the most fun we can have. I really do.

So thank you for sticking with me through this slightly over time Gathering Room. Turn on the lights, wherever you are in the world, at the darkest times and just see how only against a background of darkness can we notice that our shoulders are covered with stars. I love you. I will see you again. Thanks for being with me here. Until the next time!