One of the hardest things to deal with as you get older isn’t the face in the mirror changing shape and becoming more lined, more experienced. At least, changes in size, shape and appearance aren’t the hardest things for me, not yet. No, the hardest thing for me to to deal with, to come to terms with, is recognising and accepting impermanence. Nothing lasts. Not me, not you, not family, not friends… and most certainly not material things.

Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes. We all know the words but we rarely meditate on what they mean. We read of dinosaurs and other long-extinct creatures, never once acknowledging that we, like they, are destined to be represented by a few fossils trapped between layers of rock. Does this mean our lives are pointless? No, of course not. You might choose to think that, but life is all we have and it’s what we do with it that counts.

We don’t have to leave a legacy of books like Charles Dickens or some great medical discovery or hit song. We don’t even need to be remembered at all, save by our children and loved ones for a time before they, too, inevitably pass away and take their memories of us with them. We just need to have had some degree of positive impact on the world around us. We need to have engaged with it, shared experiences with others, taken the risk of love and journeyed through pain and sorrow as well as joy. All we have to be is human, to recognise the mystery of substance and spirit and accept we are all part of something greater than the individual I. It’s increasingly difficult for people to do in a consumerist society that preaches the primary importance of the self, the ego, and at the same time denigrates spirituality as something for the foolishly superstitious.

Yet if we don’t accept our place, instead choosing not to be confined but liberated by the awareness that we are, physically at least, finite, then our only option as we get older is to grow ever more fearful of death, darkness and closure.

Animals can teach us something about this. They do not fear death, they do not contemplate death until they are near to it, but they do want to live and hunt and experience. Without monetary and economic systems, without art and culture, they have nothing to distract them from the fundamentals of life and those we keep as companions show us that, to them, love and kindness are incredibly important.

We might all end our days drooling and staring at nothing out of an old folks’ home window—but that fearful situation isn’t what, in the end, defines us. What makes us who we are is the heart we have shared with others and the hearts we have invited into our own. A big heart is its own reward, in this life—and maybe in the next…

I’m proud of my big heart. Be proud of yours, too. It might not feel like it at times, but it will stand you in good stead.