Читать книгу The Woman's Book of Hope - Eileen Campbell - Страница 21

Hope becomes crucial as we begin to age, and above all, we hope we will be blessed with good health and will achieve a measure of serenity. When we're young, we don't much think about it and assume we will live beyond the biblical three-score years and ten, yet the reality is that we don't know what may befall us, and at any point our life could come to an end.

As children, we can't wait to grow up, yet as time passes, we often wish we were younger, particularly in our youth-obsessed culture. We have to face the fact that energy begins to decline, we start to creak, we face a continuing series of losses, and generally we become frailer with old age, even though we still feel young inside.

Hope lies in having a spiritual perspective, recognizing that we are not merely the physical body, but something else altogether—a divine spark that exists beyond time. This part of us never ages.

Alice Herz-Sommer was sustained by hope and made the best of everything that happened to her during the course of her life. She was Jewish, born in Prague, and became a music teacher. She survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp, playing in concerts, along with other musicians, for the prisoners and guards. She said:

Music is magic. We performed in the council hall before an audience of 150 old, hopeless, sick and hungry people. They lived for the music. It was like food to them. If they hadn't come (to hear us), they would have died long before. As we would have.

Alice's husband died in Dachau. Her son survived, and after the war, she lived for forty years in Israel, where she taught at the Jerusalem Academy of Music. In 1986 she moved to London, close to some of her family. She practiced the piano three hours a day until the end of her life at the age of 110.

Alice knew that holding on to hope was vital. In A Century of Wisdom: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, she states:

I look at the good. When you are relaxed, your body is always relaxed. When you are pessimistic, your body behaves in an unnatural way.

It is up to us whether we look at the good or the bad.

When we can exist without any anxiety about the future or brooding upon the past, age no longer matters. We live as fully as possible, in the present moment, whatever point we're at on our life's journey.

I know that I am much more than my physical body.

I am making the best of everything that happens to me in life.

I am free from anxiety about the future.