Familiarity breeds ..... ?

It’s easy, driving in familiar city streets, to estimate when one is doing 30mph. Something about the flow of familiar sights past the windscreen enables us to know without checking the speedometer. Routine is helpful and comforting even for the most adventurous of us. Every sadistic interrogator knows that: first get the prisoner disorientated. That’s why, also, it is usually fatal to move an elderly person out of familiar surroundings unless it’s medically imperative.

After three difficult disruptive days I end up feeling a complete failure, teetering on the brink of that helpless, zombie-like old age that I see in care homes. I open Helen Luke’s ‘Old Age’ and find (‘chance upon’!) a passage from Jung’s ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’:

“The older I have become, the less I have understood or had insight into or known about myself....When Lao-tzu says:”All are clear, I alone am clouded”, he is expressing what I now feel in advanced old age.”

And Helen Luke comments (page 77):

“This is the archetype of the old man who at the end faces the growing realisation that he knows nothing. Then comes the moment when he either succumbs to the despair which threatened Prospero – or passes beyond all meaning and meaninglessness to that “something else” which is, in Jung’s words, the eternal in man and kinship with all things......
Prayer, Forgiveness, Exchange, Mercy and Freedom – these five are brought together here, and if we penetrate to their meaning for every human being we find light in the darkness of increasing age.”

It’s no use trying to outstrip my spiritual and physical capacity thinking, ‘at my age I ought to be able to cope with this’ (whatever ‘this’ might be). The most helpful thing I can do, for myself and others, is find the place within myself where there is “light in the darkness of increasing age”. For me that means keeping, as far as possible, to a daily routine of prayer and study and simple ‘being there in the Presence’ amongst my familiar surroundings.