By the time you get sixty (I think) the brain is a place of incredible resonances. It's packed full of life, histories, processes, patterns, half-glimpsed analogies between a myriad levels -- a Ballard crystal world place. One reason old people reply slowly is because every word and cue wakes a thousand reference.
What if you could free that, open it? Let go of ego and status, let everything go and smell the wind, feel with your dimming senses for what's out there, growing. Let your resonances merge and play and come back changed ... telling you new things. Maybe you could find a way to grow, to change once more inside ... even if the outside of you is saying, "What, what?" and your teeth smell.
But to do it you have to get ready, years ahead. Get ready to let go and migrate in and up into your strongest keep, your last window out. Pack for your magic terminal trip, pack your brain, ready it. Fear no truth. Load up like a river steamboat for the big last race when you go downriver burning it all up, not caring, throwing in the furniture, the cabin, the decks right down to the water line, caring only for that fire carrying you where you've never been before.
Maybe ... somehow ... one could.
from "Going gently down, or, in every young person there is an old person screeming to get out" by James Tiptree Jr.
