Mellowing With Age

When Buddha was old and he realised that the time was ripe to leave the world, he called his two favourite disciples and said, “Soon, I won’t be with you. I’ve nothing to offer and nothing to preach; nothing to accept nor expect. All I’ve is the body, which is tattered because of old age. I know nothing of enlightenment.” Youthful arrogance mellows into affable modesty as one grows old and it finally sublimates into selfeffacing humility. The vicissitudes in every individual’s life leave their impressions, but we start feeling their impact and ramifications only with advancing age. Harivansh Rai Bachchan wrote, “Now with age, sitting against the silhouette of a setting sun, I ruminate and introspect. I look at my whole life from a deeper perspective.” Life can only be judged in its totality when it reaches its logical end. During one’s youth, there’s often an irrational and romantic fascination for cutting short one’s life, which is called ‘intellectual hara-kiri’ or ‘James Dean Syndrome’, after the Hollywood heart-throb, who acted in the cult movie, ‘Rebel Without a Cause’, and died very young. Rabindranath Tagore took to painting at the ripe age of 65 and Nirad C Chaudhuri kept writing till he breathed his last at the age of 99. It’s been found in a number of cases that the human body can generate new cells, especially glial brain cells, responsible for higher level of thinking and cognition. This explains why very many greats have been ‘late bloomers’. A new awakening awaits you.

Source: Economic Times, 14/08/2019