Tapping Insight (5)
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Listen to Greg’s story as you read it (below).
Greg, 87, felt the familiar, creeping anxiety of being frail and obsolete.
He shifted his weight on the wooden deck chair, the thin cushion offering minimal defense against the chill of the late October night. Beside him, his grandson, Miles, fiddled with the adjustment knobs on the heavy, black telescope. It was a serious, intimidating piece of equipment.
“Hold still, Gramps,” Miles murmured, his left eye pressed to the viewfinder. “Any vibration throws the focus way off.”
Greg obeyed, but the physical strain of holding his posture — a slight tremor in his right leg, a nagging pain in his hip — was a constant reminder of the rapid entropy of his own body. He had spent the last two years thinking of little else, measuring his remaining time in appointments and pillboxes.
The vastness of the cosmos was meant to be a distraction, but tonight it felt more like an indictment.
“I can’t find it,” Miles finally admitted, pulling back. “The coordinates are right, but it’s just a blur.”
Greg carefully stood up, ignoring the protest from his knee. He pushed Miles aside and lowered his own eye to the rubber ring. Thirty minutes of frustrating, incremental adjustments followed.
He moved the large barrel, adjusted the fine tuner, and cursed the stiffness in his neck. The galaxy they sought, Andromeda (M31), was supposed to be a magnificent, distinct spiral.
Finally, the blur sharpened.
It wasn’t a magnificent spiral. It was a faint, hazy smudge of light, like a wisp of smoke caught behind a dusty pane of glass.
“There,” Greg whispered.
Miles took his turn, peering into the eyepiece. “Oh. That’s ... underwhelming.”
Greg took back the chair. “No. No, it isn’t,” he said, the words falling flat in the cool air. He dismissed Miles with a wave, needing the silence for his own internal monologue.
He stared into the smudge. That light, he knew, was the single most ancient thing he had ever directly experienced. It was 2.5 million years old.
Two and a half million years.
The thought didn’t just humble him; it obliterated the context of his own life. Everything Greg had ever worried about — the mortgage he paid off, the market crash he survived, the argument he had with his son 20 years ago — was less than the blink of a cosmic eye. His entire life, his 87 years, represented a zero in the face of that light’s journey.
He wasn’t looking at a galaxy. He was looking into deep, incompressible time. When that light left its source, no human on Earth had learned to farm, no city had been built, and no language he recognized had been invented. It predated his entire civilization.
Greg’s initial fear and the physical strain vanished. The fact of his rapidly approaching mortality, which had been pressing on his chest like a lead weight, was suddenly lifted. His individual story, his personal griefs, and his anxieties about his own legacy were entirely insignificant to the great engine of the universe.
And in that vast, beautiful indifference, he found profound solace.
His life wasn’t a failure, a triumph, or a tragedy; it was merely a short, vibrant flicker within a timeline that contained the entire, enormous, still-unfolding story. The universe did not depend on him, did not mourn him, and did not notice him. It simply continued.
That indifference was the most calming thought he’d had in a decade.
Greg closed his eyes, no longer feeling small but feeling connected to the immense rhythm of everything. When he opened the smudge of M31, it was still there, quietly traveling toward him. He felt an overwhelming sense of awe and a quiet, intellectual submission to the unfathomable scale of the cosmos.
“It’s beautiful,” Greg murmured, nodding slowly. “It’s beautiful because it shows order – not chaos.”
“It shows how myopic we can be in focusing on our individual concerns,” he added. “We are all part of a much larger picture. I’m not the most important thing in the world, but I’m connected. I feel connected.”
Age: Our greatest asset!
Jim Hasse, ABC, GCDF retired, author of “52 Shades of Graying”
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Is Will Lacey trying to tell me something?
Will was a carefree, accepting, larger-than-life man who had charisma. My cerebral palsy didn’t matter to him. He was my condo neighbor from 2003 to 2007 in Madison, WI., where he brought our whole condo community to celebrate life and its ups and downs. From rural Indiana, he loved learning how to “beat the system.”
He and his wife, Val, moved to Ecuador for cheaper retirement, and he ended up a developer for the residents of his newly adopted town before he died from complications he long expected would come from his years of working in a steel mill.
One morning, about a year after he died, Val, still in Ecuador, found a plastic comb in her bed one morning. It was a promotional piece from the Wisconsin funeral home he and Val had visited during my dad’s funeral about two years before they moved to Ecuador.
Fast forward about 13 years. In 2022, a man with Will Lacey’s same initials and last name, moves into the apartment across the hall from me in a Minneapolis senior living community. His name is Warren Lacey from St. Louis.
Warren becomes a social magnet for our community – and the only neighbor who enjoys riding my spare mobility scooter throughout the Minnesota State Fair and the downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul, using the light rail system as a lift for longer distances.
No one, except me, knows Warren has cancer. He has one living family member, a niece who hasn’t been in contact with him. He’s had a tough life growing up as a gay man in rural Minnesota. But he has a terrific time going to the 2023 Minnesota State Fair daily to visit the show animals and watch people.
Warren suddenly dies a year after becoming my neighbor.
* When, in your life, have you felt “connected” to something larger than yourself?