I imagine someone is bound to ask me that now that I am officially a score shy of being half a millennium old. Well, in those 480-years, you might think I've seen it all. Dozens of wars, old squabbles, all those human foibles and vanities, pride and vainglory. I've seen many nations rise and fall, great men, infamous men, they all form like a Good Friday procession, very colourful and vivid, yet all past and gone and I am still here, standing, ruminating on history passing by, seeing it happen as if in one single instant.
480-years, time that passed by, doesn't really count up to much, humanity is still caught in the same struggles, fighting the same oppressions of hunger, pain, illness, injustice and want of love - from a lack of supernatural outlook. I've seen revolutions, political and technological ones too, all promising a better life and I've seen how each of them have failed. No sooner than one revolution succeeding, a host of new problems arise, a band of malcontents come and that's all it takes to undo what had just been achieved at a terrible price.
My struggle these days is to treat everyone still like the first time I have made friends and acquaintances. As years catch up with me, all 480 of them, humanity has become increasingly predictable with characters simply multiplying but all caught up in the same web of deceits, lusting for the same fleeting pleasures of money, power and flesh.
But no, the real joy in having had 480 years behind you, is not being able to ludicrously loose hope in humanity! Rather it lies in the amazing capacity of men to still surprise anyone, in the uncanny ability of men to change, to actually strive for what is good, beautiful and true, the ability to form relationships and to love and be loved. 480 years of being in the sea of humanity only becomes contemptuously suffocating when one begins to box people into character-types, when one begins to classify people into what they seem to be, not who they really are. But if one just peers into each and every person they meet and drive at the very core of their being, one will find that even eternity is not enough to delight in the soul met; and which only points to the reality that in each person is a spark of the divine - of that infinite being.
What about death, does the thought of the great inevitable bother me still? I believe death is a painful experience, but like pain, it is felt the most at the first few instances, and then our body and mind becomes numbed to it, getting less affected at each new time, and then wearied, eventually yearn for it to come upon ourselves too. Death, as is correctly called, is the great inevitable, no one can be spared of so it should not be a cause of so much worry. What is more worrisome is to see people loosing a taste for life because of an excessive preoccupation of death. Come to think of it, what can you really do after the time of your passing? Seriously, there is none! But, what can you do when you are still alive? Ah...so much. There is much good to be done and the time to do it is now!
So what difference does 480 years make against 30, nothing really, because what matters is not the number of years one has had, take it from some who has had centuries. No, what matters is how one is able to penetrate into the existence of another and allow that other to touch ones existence as well; or to put it in more poetic terms, to make our "I" correspond to a "you" and together forming a "we".
Cheers to the next 20 years and completing my half a millennia of existence!
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The author by official documents was born in the 2nd of April 1535, he has just celebrated his 480th birthday and is looking forward to celebrate his fifth centenary 20 years from now.
