NEW FREEDOM

You are slow to recall recent events and details. Your aging brain seems to be collapsing in on itself. Its once-bright, intense flame is gently flickering. Thought processes are fleeting, staggering, discontinuous.

Yours is popularly termed age-related cognitive decline.

Your increasing forgetfulness is simply an uncluttering: the letting-go of irrelevant detail. You no longer recall precise elements, but use a canvas of broad, general awarenesses and concepts: you see the big picture. Your recall is undergoing an adaptive process: the expansion of your mind. As irrelevant facts and memories have faded, you’ve acquired “wisdom.” Your memory loss is not a descent into chaos, but an ascent into freedom.

Your imagination, intellect, insights, logic, and vocabulary have served you well through the years. But you have new resources for accessing data, details and history. You have resources for seeking answers, direction, clarification, hope, awareness, and purpose. You no longer need to store cherished memories in fading, distant, dusty corners of your mind.  Trust, rely on, and be comfortable with new technology, and embrace guidance from loved ones.

You have run burning through gauntlets of war and pain. You have experienced enlightenment, epiphany, noesis, and transcendence. You’ve released control and resentment. You prize the universal. You cherish slowness and stillness. You now glide serenely through benign realms. You have time and freedom to meditate uncritically upon sunrises, sunsets, myriad beauties, and infinite possibilities for peace across our world. You have found the merging of perfect harmony with calm.

—Will Walsh