Age Does Not Matter
2007-05-16 05:14 PM | Posted by Sumangali Morhall | Permanent Link | Sri Chinmoy
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“You wasn't born in seventy.”
He was huge. Even his shining shaven head seemed muscular, his eyes steady and piercing like an archer's. I was dried up and dizzy from flying all day, and then even my breath stopped. The hall echoed with an unreal uncomfortable sterility. His huge hand was on the precious little red book that has let me travel everywhere. The stare did not break. How would I prove that I am in that photo booth snap? It was all I had to show that I am me.
CHUG. The rubber stamp came down. He did not betray an ounce of mirth. But after half an instant, in which my world dissolved and hurriedly reconstituted itself, I realised he was making a joke for us both... and paying me a large compliment into the bargain. A joke and a compliment were yet more welcome in that lonely sterile world than they could have been in any other place, made funnier and kinder still by the deadpan delivery.
I yelped a strange laugh with what breath I could draw, and felt the immigration hall at JFK turn to look. Sudden sounds, especially merry ones, are not so common there. I stopped short of skipping my way to Baggage Claim.
If I don't seem like I'm nearly thirty-seven, that is a victory for my meditation teacher, Sri Chinmoy.
Thirty-seven. I have to laugh. Other people laugh too, when I can remember (or work out) how old I really am.
Yesterday I was remembering some of the “records” I used to listen to in my teens. Sometimes I do things like that just to amuse myself; it's so staggeringly long ago it's almost as if it must have happened to someone else. I daren't show you a picture of me then, that would be too staggering. I look older than I do now, in fact I look older than I am now. I carried the weight of so many imagined worries.
Me about 30 years ago
It's not that I don't worry now, I do, but nowhere near as much. As the saying goes: You can't push the river, it flows by itself. Meditating every day shows me that is so. I don't care less; in fact by worrying less I have more with which to care.
Age does not matter. At seventy-five Sri Chinmoy is proving that to me. Through his life of meditation and self-transcendence he shows me that perhaps I am not as limited as I think. I hope to continue forgetting how old I really am. I hope to feel amused, rather than bound, if I do happen to remember, and grateful to Sri Chinmoy, especially if others find it funny too.
