Are we there yet?

I realize I like this thing, this thing called going older. I don't know how many of us have this experience. No, not of getting older, I am sure the entire human race has this experience, where they watch their mortal body reach its peak and then start to decay. It is a sad thing to watch, because it is very human, this penchant for not noticing the reaching of the peak and being at the peak, it is when the body starts dropping away from the peak, that one thinks of it, and then the mourning sets in.
The experience I spoke of earlier is not that of noticing or mourning the body’s decay. It is the experience of knowing myself, I find myself noticing my reactions. Most of these reactions accompany a feeling of Deja Vu, especially the strongest ones. When I say reaction, I am talking of a response that occurs without you thinking about it. The flush of anger, the sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, butterflies too. As my senses react to someone, some incident and my thinking mind says,
"Ah ha- caught you!"
And then they both proceed to laugh.

As I attempt to describe what happens inside me, I find myself personifying these thinking and feeling parts of my being. Sometimes I like to think of them as my conscious and subconscious, one thinks and the other reacts because it feels. With every attempt to explain what I mean, the feeblity of this language drives home. But for now, this will have to do.
Back to the two parts of the being, they drive each other, argue sometimes over who gets to dictate my reaction, but as I get older, I find them more in accord, as though they signed a peace treaty.

Thinking back on my late teens, and early to mid -twenties, I passed years in a funk! A funk introduced by a series of reactions - enamored by a concept, or a person, crushing mind and body to achieve a principle. I operated out of the subconscious, feeling, experiencing, part of my being. Everything, well almost everything was a reaction. Very little was understood, everything was experienced. I guess you need to be young to take on that mode of being; you are always out of balance. But, by golly, you are alive!

It is different now, I react, and participate and live, but my thinking mind is ever present, part of me is always centered.
It is amusing to watch yourself get off kilter and then recover, the recovery gets faster and faster as I get older, and a sometimes, I can actually watch the stimulus, and smile without reacting to it. It is like my unconscious and conscious mind are stand facing the situation like co-conspirators. It is an epiphany , every single time it happens!
Sometime I ponder, what has this self knowledge brought me, do I live better by standing at the edge of the precipice and not jumping in? Where is the experience, what happened to being alive, to living? You can theorize all you want but until you jump, you never know what joy or terror is…
This is when I get a peak at the answer; the next step to self knowledge is to reacting with knowledge. To jump from the precipice with full knowledge. Choosing when you jump, choosing the experience because you want to, rather than being thrown into it willy nilly by a herd of stampeding hormones or fears or hopes and dreams.
And I do jump. And it is so much better than being thrown in …
They say life is a journey, a journey whose purpose is not the destination, but the journey itself. Anyday now, I will understand that and stop saying, Are we there yet?
Till then, I will continue my walk towards the horizon.