I use to think of my getting older as a time to learn new things. I’m finding out that it is also a time to unlearn many of the lessons of my past life.
For starters, the way I have learned to see the world has been horribly inadequate, even wrong. Reality is not what I have been taught. Newtonian physics doesn’t quite explain what my eyes see and what my hands touch. I have learned to live in an illusion, and it is so freeing to begin to shatter that learned illusion.
The new experience of unlearning illusion goes further into my cultural and religious mythology. So much of what I have considered the natural order of things has been a fabrication created by humans who are around me or lived in my past.
I find it interesting that I have spent so much time and energy sorting through the mythology of religion, trying to understand better how religion made sense. I might as well have been playing a game of Skyrim or Civilization on my computer. It has had about as much relationship to reality. I am happy to at last uncloak the myths of religion and see them for what they are.
Cultural myths have been no less illusory. The roles of men and women. The nature of marriage. The restrictions on loving one another. The role of economics and ownership. I have pushed back against all of these as I have come to see how they are constructs of society, and have very limited basis in reality. They certainly are not going to be a large part of my future.
So many of the habits of nutrition, my learned likes and dislikes about food, are all lessons out of my past. Putting these illusory principles aside is not easy, and they seem to be a daily challenge. I know I am unlearning, as I must, my old way of eating.
Above all, I am unlearning what I have been taught to expect about getting older. Old age is a time of improved mental awareness as I learn the new ways of mindfulness. It is a time of mental sky-diving. This is a time to learn more about gardening and geology. It is a time to look deeply into what others can tell me about the nature of reality. It is a time to free up my interest in writing.
The list could go on, but I know that old age is not the myth told to me by my society. Old age is a good time to unlearn and shovel out all the junk teachings of my past.