Imagination & old age

Something strange happened to me when I turned 65. I began to feel old. When I got out of bed in the morning, my knees would hurt. It was difficult to stand up when I was sitting down and difficult to stoop and expect that I would straighten up effortlessly, without getting stuck or falling face first into something.

I thought — how strange. When I turned 64, I did not feel so old but just a quick year later, here I was feeling old and creaky. One of my younger cousins passed me a trick from her older sister. Sleep with soap, she said. Take a box of bath soap, unwrap it and sleep with it on your bed. It should take care of your little aches and pains. I tried it and in three days I began to feel better. Now I have a cake of soap on my bed permanently. It comforts me. Sometimes at night I hold it in my hand and feel friendly. Remember, I live alone. I have no live-in maids or drivers. Nobody sleeps with me except my bar of soap.

Maybe because I live alone I have a very active imagination. Sometimes I think I see things. Okay, I don’t see them in the outside world. I see them with my inner eye. Since I turned 65 I’ve been seeing snakes. I know there are no snakes in my apartment and it’s too high anyway but sometimes I imagine there’s an anaconda in my room — huge, coiled and asleep during the day but slithering around at night. I look at it and say, “Don’t you dare come near me. What do you intend to do? Are you here to kill me?” The anaconda disappears. I know that’s only my imagination. What piques me is why is my imagination choosing a huge, ugly snake?

On a trip to my house in Calamba I came across a book I once bought, Coming to Age, The Croning Years and Late-Life Transformation, written by Jane Pretat, a Jungian analyst. I decided to take it home and read it. It was a thin book so it should have been easy to read. It wasn’t and it had me sometimes somewhat lost but here is what I understood: That the dragon or the snake — a huge serpent like the anaconda — represents our fear of being swallowed by the unconscious. In my case I think it represents my fear of getting old and being crushed by Alzheimer’s Disease like my mother was. That’s why I see an anaconda because they coil around you and crush you. They make you helpless first, a big fear I have. That is what it means when I imagine a huge black-and-gray anaconda looking at me in my apartment. It doesn’t scare me because I know it isn’t real but sometimes it fills me with trepidation, a fear of what the future might hold as I grow older. Reading this book has made me understand. It is just my inner self sending me symbols. I am somewhat afraid of growing old.

The other figure I see is a character in a Mythic Tarot Deck that I bought a long time ago. This figure is tall, faceless, hooded, and carries a lamp. Sometimes when I watch TV at night I sort of see him or her. I always make a note that I should look up who s/he is. The other morning I was fixing my room and came across the Mythic Tarot Deck, which uses Greek mythology as its basis for metaphors. It is the card of The Hermit. The Hermit card is Cronos, the father of Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, among others. In other words, the Hermit is really and truly old. Cronos represents time and rebels against it. He faces solitude, a state that everybody must face especially as one grows older. Solitude gives us patience, stillness and serenity. Those three traits are what I love about living alone.

Okay, I say, I understand now. I get all these images because I am afraid of getting old. The minute I understood what I thought they were trying to say, they did not recur any more. I guess because I got the message. So you see, there is a way of understanding those bizarre little or big figures your imagination coughs up once in a while. You just need to know where to look for the answers, think about the answers a lot, and see if you get the point. If you don’t get the point, you have to turn the picture around until it becomes clear to you. If you use the images you imagine, life can turn almost magical.

Anyway, my life is changing. I can feel it in my bones. When it finally does, I will let you know. Until then hold on, those who want to enroll in my classes. They are temporarily on hold. I am sorting my life out. Sometimes strange things happen.

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