Intensity, Presence, Joy.

One day, you roll out of bed and move through your routine. You make coffee, feed the cats, check email, shower, look at yourself in the mirror.  There is something about this morning that feels different and you realize with a jolt that you are rapidly heading towards your mid-40s.  Your hair is becoming gray and you see wrinkles.  But it’s not the physical changes that disturb you so much as the sensation that life is speeding up.  And, that so much of life is mundane, where the “what must done to become” portions have a spiraled into a list of increasing obligations.  Energy goes towards maintaining your life, as it is, instead of towards contemplating what you truly need and how to get it.

And you crave intensity.  The being-aliveness that you felt in your youth.  The feeling you could conquer the world by achieving whatever you truly wanted.  Life has shown you that you don’t always get what you desperately want.  You’ve grieved losses and learned radical acceptance and compassion for the self and others.  Important knowledge for the journey.

And yet in the prison of routine, intensity has gradually been placed in a cage, built bar by bar.  Suffocating.  Withering.  And still pulsing somewhere deep in your core.

You consider what you’ve learned about presence and how being completely in a moment can free this colorful bird.

You recommit to be fully engaged and exquisitely present for every moment you can.  What is there but the present?  You feel that alertness of the moment calling to intensity, to the vastness in the universe of your heart, to the meadow of your soul.  You feel expansive again, eagerly seeking out the morsels of joy that surround you in music, art, taste, connection, love, lust.

You refuse to settle for less than this.  You have accepted that we will all die.  And you intend to soar, to sing, and to seek intensity, presence and joy.  Until the very end.