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As the New Year, 2022,  is on the cusp of being born, it's a good time to reflect and think about the year past.  There have been challenges for all of us on the planet above and beyond the usual.  This has, of course, been due to dealing with the Coronavirus at each and every stage since it first manifested itself.  Are you anxious, afraid, hopeful, thankful, or in some other emotional state as 2022 begins?  

Is death anyone's favourite topic?  Death has always been a heavy topic for me and most people I know shy away from any discussion around the topic whenever it comes up.  It's as though not talking about it will make it go away.  I'm talking here about physical death - that of a loved one or beloved pet.  There's no impermanence about physical death.  We never get to see our loved one again in this life. This kind of death wrenches ever fibre of our being - body, mind, soul and spirit.  Even when someone has been very ill and suffering, it's still hard to let go.  It's not just me that's experienced agonizing loss.  As long as we're alive, it's something we all get to experience at one time or other, in one way or another.  It's the great equalizer.  We wallow in grief and are inconsolable.

“As I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray." ~ Stanley Kunitz.

 It's hard to believe that so many years of my life have gone by and I'm at the ripe old age of seventy-two.  When I was sixty-five, I remember thinking what a long life that was.  Of course, when I turned seventy, that feeling was even more pronounced.  What do I have to say at seventy-two? My life has been a mixed bag.  Although I'm very grateful to have reached this age, I have to say that it hasn't always been a bed of roses.  I didn't arrive here with the questions or the answers to the challenges of life.  My parents and other caregivers along the way didn't have the answers either.  They were all making the journey that I've been making these past 72 years.  It's a learning from life and about life as we go along - a kind of growing-up that we do day after day, year after year.

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” ~ Rumi