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Expanding and contracting

These words have been in my head for a while, but a helpful conversation today gave me the energy to write them.

Expanding

For a long while, my life shrank. I stabilized, but my only desire was to go with the flow of life around me.

Now, when I am chanting at night, I pray to expand my life. To me, this means:

I want my extended family to find a new way of being together. It used to be a habit for us to all gather together, but that has eroded since my grandmother passed over a decade ago.
I want to be a meaningful part of the lives of my nieces and nephews, on both sides.
I want the young people in my family to flourish.
I want to Turkish get-up a 32kg kettlebell.
I want to move away from single-employer work. I'm not picky about what form this takes.

There are other things that are naturally expanding, which I am happy to let grow on their own. My faith practice continues to grow a lot, for example, and I don't feel the need to push that harder.

These are the things I want. If they don't happen, it's OK.

Contracting

The other day, I told my partner that I want my life to shrink as I age. This means that I want my material footprint to grow smaller and smaller, such that my passing is like a candle going out, rather than an old building being left to decay.

This naturally means my desires will move more towards the immaterial; things that don't leave much physical imprint on the Earth.

It means that I want to give away wealth and physical possessions before my time is up, if I have the luxury of that much life.

This is important to me. I do not think it is right for me to take up space as I age. I want to make room for youth to expand their lives in the ways that are important to them.

My faith practice has encouraged me to think a lot more about the specific roles of youth and the elderly in society, and my feelings about these things are getting stronger. But, I'll write about that some other time.

I'm happy to hear from you