can you feel the ages?

Can you feel the ages within you? 

I'm in the countryside, and every now and then I hear a sheep bleating. And for some reason this sound it takes me back not to a few years ago or even a few decades ago. It takes me back hundreds of years, perhaps thousands. It's one of those sounds that has been accompanying humanity for a very long time, since we started breeding sheep. I don't know how long ago that was but I suspect thousands of years.

And this is one of the curious things about our existence. We don't just have memories of our own lifetime. There's also something that resonates in us from much earlier times, simpler times, more peaceful times. When I say peaceful, I don't mean that we were less at war with each other. Probably that has been going on for a very long time too. But our day to day rhythm would have been so much more peaceful, without the noise and speed that machines have brought into our life. And all of that is still within us. It's rather at odds with the modern lifestyle, so it has been buried and largely forgotten. And that's why today I'm asking can you feel that within you? Can you feel the ages within you?

It might sound strange, but to me, if I hear about something that happened a hundred years ago, 200 years ago, 300 years ago, it feels recent, feels like yesterday really. What's a few hundred years compared to the whole of evolutionary time? It's nothing. It's barely a tick of the clock.

We are ancient beings. There's something in us that knows that. There's something in us that can remember that at any moment. Life is flowing in us, and this same life flows in all beings. And it has been flowing as a steady stream for millions of years, billions of years. That's how old we are really. Forget your birthday, forget worrying about your age as it is usually measured by us humans. Each of us is more ancient than we can comprehend. And in quiet moments, in moments of stillness, sitting alone in nature, every now and again it is possible to feel this, to feel the ages within us. And you might think that would depress one, getting old, but no, this timelessness does not age in that sense. And so feeling this, feeling our true age, is paradoxically a rejuvenation. It makes us realise that in one sense we are not aging at all. We are not becoming more decrepit. We are not nearing an end.

Life itself will flow on, eternally youthful, down through the ages.