By Dr. Dina Evan

I have had an amazing life! I survived a childhood without parents and discovered the strength I have inside. I raised four kids without support or partners and discovered what is really important in life. I’ve marched for AIDS funding with Whoopi, fasted 37 days on water for the ERA with six other women warriors including the help of Gloria Steinem, Sally Field and Dick Gregory. I’ve taught more than a thousand people how to create conscious relationships and walked beside hundreds of people on a path to healing…and then, unexpectedly, OLD arrived with the rude and cruel reality I was not wonder woman and not impervious to falling apart, limb by limb or organ by organ. Who knew? I didn’t!

Life for me, as I have shared with so many of you, is filled with holy moments, the kind that take your breath away and bring some new lesson your spirit has decided you are ready to learn. I adamantly deny that I was ready for this one. However, just as every new lesson in my life has done, this one brings new awareness’ and new gifts, damn it. My mother died when I was young, as did my grandparents, so I never knew what aging and being old felt like to them. I know now, and a truth often said with flippant offhandedness, that aging is not for sissies is a bold truth that can come with a sledge hammer.

When you are old….

You can’t move fast in a world that goes 90 mph. You require extra equipment, walkers, oxygen, canes and other things that require loading and unloading. You can’t grocery shop and getting things delivered is often fraught with difficulty because of added expense or careless shoppers. So you eat more frozen, easier to fix food, other than fresh and loved filled nutritious dinners. You may need to be near restrooms more frequently and what is most disturbing is that all those precious lessons you learned as you inched toward old, become irrelevant to those around you and so do you and what you know. They simply have no desire to hear it, so people visit less, call less, and value you less. They don’t mean too. It’s just that the burdens of this era, and perhaps those of the past, are horrendous and so we seek to spend any free time we can eke out just having fun. We have been taught that joy and fulfillment come from what we can acquire and what toys we have rather than what we feel and share. Older people are perceived as just not that much fun.

However, this too is a I’ll be 79 this month holy moment so what is this kind of holy moment here to teach me, us? Well, I now understand that what I missed with not being near my grandparents can never be retrieved and I regret that so much. I don’t know how they felt or what great lessons and knowledge they could have shared with me. I also have learned that no matter what the majority of the world may think, what I know is important and my job is to share it no matter who might, or might not, listen.

I am starting podcasts and I will keep sharing. I also am having to look death in the face, hopefully not too soon, but clearly sometime not too far off, so I am thankful for these awareness’ because I still have time to ask myself,     “Have I done everything I came here to do? What is still not done?  Who do I need to reach out to and help? What do I need to give myself in the way of peace in this process?”

I am not afraid because my belief is that we never actually die. Our spirits simply go to place where we review the lessons we have learned in each incarnation, and then we decide when we are ready to return to earth —which is our soul school — we choose what we wish to learn next and we return. The process does not stop until we reach a state of enlightenment and no longer need this school. The bottom line is, every moment and holy moment in life is rich with learning and possibility….and who knew? Now you do.

Dr. Evan is a marriage, family, child therapist and consciousness counselor. She has presented nationwide seminars and workshops, written several books and created meditation CDs for couples, individual and mental health professionals. She has also won national acclaim as a human rights advocate. Visit www.drdinaevan.com or call 602-571-8228.