These are the conditions of everyone’s life:

There is always too much to do.

We are prisoners of what is happening to us, who we’re surrounded by, our health or sickness, wealth or poverty, family traits and emotions and conditions.

We are prisoners of our era, of what is known so far, of what is accepted as truth, of what is happening in the world and in the place where we live.

We’re prisoners of our flaws.

We’re prisoners of our bodies, their needs and demands and limitations.

And the same with our brains and traits and all that has influenced them, our superstitions, our self-concepts. What chance remark fixed a certain aphorism in our thinking so that we live by it from then on? What insult cracked our confidence forever?

We’re prisoners of everything we have done in the past, everything that’s happened to us, that has brought us to where we are at this moment.

But we who have lived a very long time are now looking back and seeing where we have been. We are set free in a new way, beginning to see new patterns and new truths that we couldn’t have seen before.

Old old age. What an adventure! What a gift!