“I am ok; I’ve got myself…”

… She had said silently, yet the echo was resounding, the inaudible intonation of those words somehow choked and guttural, revealing sentiments that fluctuated wildly from being lonely and self-pitying to belligerent and combative, and then at last they steadied and became fortifying, as if she had finally permitted herself to exhale …

… Sitting cross-legged and almost perfectly still at the summit of Vulture peak, Rajgir, located in the state of Bihar in India, she had unwittingly embarked on the kind of existential rollercoaster ride that is habitually set in motion by the field of energy belonging to spiritual places, making way for the expression of a combined sense of deep insecurity and dizzying disorientation, for which she suddenly realized that no matter what the provenance, there could be no safer asylum than the one invoked by those six plain and simple words, in a world ravaged by the everyday petty crime and bloodless murder committed by oneself and one’s fellow human beings, those that do not receive the same attention as communal, national and global conflicts and yet are their principal components, as each one invariably struggles, in some way, shape or form, to navigate the slippery slope of personal karma, and irregular rhythm of life.

Six plain and simple words, which people rarely articulate with any semblance of sincerity, in their relentless quest for that elusive sense of safety and solace outside themselves, in meaningless numbers, shallow similarities and the pretense of equality, the very bedrock of these ecosystems a contaminated co-dependence that both advances and sustains an even greater estrangement from the self, all in the name of ‘community/family/friends/couple, but essentially “mine” first’.

In contrast, but equally counter-productive to a steadfast and salubrious relationship with the self – that which fosters autonomy and thereby personal tranquility and empathy towards others – are those remedies prescribed by new age spiritual and psychiatric practices that claim to help people forge or restore that relationship, whereas their very survival depends on failure, and thus they breed a type of self-love that is intrinsically selfish, narcissistic and ultimately impotent; she had, over the course of the years, encountered a large number and variety of spiritual & psychiatric therapies and could thus allow herself to allude to their shortcomings from experience rather than conjecture.

But the most pernicious of all, which bears testimony to the three greatest fears that have made the human being vulnerable to all types of manipulation and exploitation, i.e. loneliness, aging and death, is the increase in life span, the relationship with the self, by consequence, more and more centered around the body at the expense of an allegiance to the soul, the overvaluation of youth and youthfulness cause for unprecedented levels of anxiety amongst those on the threshold of mid-life, which for all intents and purposes, marks the beginning of an endless and futile old age ahead; upon close scrutiny, one begins to realize that it is not youth that has been protracted, but old age, its defiance both metaphorically and literally not only skin deep, but also deeply disfiguring.

If anything, the use-by-date of the majority of human beings is brought forward each and every day, in consort with the mighty rise and unstoppable march of technology and artificial intelligence, the threat of obsolescence giving rise to an even greater degree of insecurity in addition to a mushrooming of petty crimes, those that quite simply involve each one shaking the other’s self-confidence in an effort to usurp their place in a viciously competitive world, where supply outweighs demand.

She had recently turned 50, which in the 1950’s surpassed average life expectancy by a couple of years, but by the year 2025, leaves a minimum of another 24 years of life, the devaluation of the human currency, by all appearances, in direct proportion to the ‘inflation’ of both the world population & human life span. Fortunately, she had been forewarned and forearmed against the potentially deforming effects of the transition, by the contents of a book she had started reading some months prior, titled ‘The Coming of the Body,’ written in French and published two decades earlier, in which she found a coherent interpretation of many of her thoughts and sentiments, of which she had not only been suspicious, by virtue of the fact that they had been precipitated by a mind altering period of grief following the first major loss of her life, the death of her father, but also unable to define …

… Until the day she realized that the only real antidote to the aforementioned ‘tripartite’ Achilles heel of the human species, from which the all-too-common escape routes not only de-humanize but also undermine individual sovereignty, is to summon the solitude one so fears, in which self-reliance may be born and the only lasting form of companionship cemented, rendering the passage of old age and culmination of death with far more virtue than vice …

… How wonderful to be able to say ‘I am dying to die,’ with a smile on one’s face and spring in the heart, just as if one were expressing a yearning to travel to Paris and dine at ‘La Tour D’Argent’ …

… In the words of Roman Emperor and Stoic Philosopher, Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD),

“Death smiles at us all; all we can do is smile back.”