55 and counting Five days ago, I turned 55 years old. It's kind of a milestone -- in 10 years I will be forced into retirement at my workplace. But I see myself as being in the most productive stage of my life. My childhood was sheltered. My youth was the normal anguished torture of most teenagers. My twenties and thirties were filled with the rewards of love and family, but professionally I was winging it and riding on the edge of burnout. When I turned 40, I told myself that the best was yet to come because I had gotten through the learning phase and ego trips and reached maturity. Little did I know that would go through 10 years of frustration and rootlessness as I swung between the States and Peru, job to job, trying to find a sustainable career.

My point being, in the past nine months, I have finally chanced across the personal tools -- yoga, pranayama, meditation and self-inquiry, combined with the expansive horizons of the Internet -- that allow me to steer my life and emotions. I wish I had these practices when I was a teenager or a young adventurer going off to South America to experience life or an adult husband and father who did not comprehend why he had to harbor a core of unhappiness.

I am not saying that I have suddenly become brilliant or more accomplished -- I've just found the means to live within myself while still stretch my boundaries.

  ¶ 11:35 PM