50/50 Exercise #8: Three Wishes

To be honest with you, I don’t make a lot of wishes. Somewhere near the age of seven centuries, I realized that I already had the power to bring into existence anything I desired. Don’t get me wrong…I’m not saying I can defy the physical laws of the universe to make the impossible possible. But around that time, I began to realize that I could mold my own desires to conform near-perfectly to everything that could be. And remember: the limits on what’s possible aren’t what they used to be.

But you asked me to make three wishes, so here goes.

Number one, I wish I could forget the wrongs that I never had an opportunity to make right. There aren’t many of them. When you live as long as I have, you develop a sense of when to remain silent; you spend a lot of time in silence. And you get a lot of chances to apologize, to offer repayment, to make things right. A funny thing—even though you have a lot more time to hold a grudge, you feel less and less inclined to do so. But there is an apology I never had a chance to offer, one forgiveness for which I never had the opportunity to ask, and I wish it weren’t so often on my mind.

Would I call this emotion regret? Not exactly. The sensation is more like the hunger you sometimes feel early in the morning, when it’s still too early to get out of bed. You ignore it, you go back to sleep, and it’s gone when you awaken again.

Two: I wish that I could share my contentment more generously with people who haven’t learned to be deeply happy yet. I understand the operation of happiness, the biochemical reactions, the hormonal responses, and the subtle connections from mind to mind and body to body. I know that joy can be shared, that it can be taught, but only to the extent that the student is prepared to receive the lesson. Each of us is a vessel for happiness, but a small vessel cannot be made large overnight, and I cannot pour my abundance into a heart that already bears as much as it can hold. I have learned a lot of things, but never to accept this cruel limitation on our existence.

When I was young—really young: 30, 35, 40 years old—I used to say, “I wish I had known when I was 18 what I know now.” And then came the quantum leaps of progress that are responsible for my longevity, and suddenly, it was possible to have the strength and vitality of youth along with what we used to call the wisdom of age. And those of us who took the treatment could experience “knowing then what we know now.” We could savor our second youth, taking the chances we’d passed up the first time, making sure that youth wasn’t wasted on the young yet again.

My second young adulthood was a lot of fun, and it went on for a couple of hundred years. It was followed by my second coming of age, which was more satisfying than the first, more real in every way. I have never questioned that knowledge and understanding are always and everywhere to be sought, savored, cherished, and retained. There are new dimensions that we cannot explore until we are fully present in the one that comes before.

And yet, I wonder sometimes if life might somehow be circular in shape, and if there might come a time when I approach the ignorance, the innocence of youth as a new frontier to be crossed, a dimension beyond some final, absolute presence. So my third wish is that some day, if I live long enough, I might come to not know then what I know now.