I Am No Longer Old Enough To Be Left With The Desire
In the end, almost without knowing how, that day arrives. Something in us awakens to tell us that we are no longer old enough to feel like it, that half hugs, half attempts and moonless nights are not worth us. In the end, that stage comes when fears fall and limits cease to have abysses to rise in opportunities.
Jorge Luis Borges said in the epilogue of his “Complete Works” that people are our pasts, our blood, all the books read and all the people we have met. However, to this list we would have to add something else: we are also what we could not do at the time. We are those gaps, those failed attempts where the desire remained … those that weigh much more than the mistakes made.
Convincing ourselves that trains always pass for those who know how to wait is little more than a sad mirage, an overly hackneyed phrase in self-help manuals. There are events that had their precise moment, their magical opportunity, which was vanished like smoke escaping through an open window. They will never happen again. However, at each new dawn, new doors are opened through which cooler winds and clearer spaces are sensed where we can approach with renewed attitudes.
Before saying to ourselves that of “at my age it doesn’t play anymore” or “those things are not for me” we have to be able to detach ourselves from this sad melancholy to regain hunger, to combine the desire and pleasure of living at hands full and heart on fire.
The desire drives us to leave our comfort zones
We are no longer here to stay alone with the desire or to show the beautiful sea that we carry inside to people who cannot swim, who do not understand the language of our waves. There comes a time when we detest the rumor of routine, because far from conferring security it already seems to us like a sad winter where spring never arrives, and even less the evocative summer nights.
It does not matter how old our identity card marks because it is the heart itself that threads authentic youth, that which still yearns for new experiences, new flavors. We want something, but … how to give shape to this vital need? How to cross the borders of our routine? It may sound contradictory, but sometimes we can turn our discomfort or concern into our true allies to go beyond our safe areas.
Many of us still think of the term “comfort zone” as that relic of motivational psychology from the 1980s that so much literature has created. However, that theory that started at the beginning to find out what was the range of environmental temperature in which a person feels comfortable, showed something even more interesting: human beings are programmed to look for neutral spaces where they feel safe.
Perceiving that our comfort areas have become small, undoubtedly prompts us to cross the barbed wire of our fears in search of new opportunities. Because sometimes embracing our concerns and discomforts is the only way to secure the foundations of progress.
The first idea that we must deduce from this proposal is that yesterday’s missed opportunities, past mistakes or failed attempts are part of a cycle that has already ended. Seeing that there is a beginning and an end in this cycle undoubtedly invites us to start a new one with greater solidity, wisdom and hope.
In this stage that you are now, anything is possible: it is an open circle where you become receptive to everything that surrounds you. Everything you have experienced in your past is not behind your back, it surrounds you to serve as a reference, to remember which doors do not deserve to be crossed and which thresholds you must pass safely.
Living is after all building a beautiful mandala where everything is in motion. Now you choose the colors, you the one who is no longer going to stay with the desire to build the happiness you want and dream of.
