half-birthday

Would not any decision that one had on a 90th birthday be a fabulous one? The yogis are said to simply leave their bodies when they become too much of an obstacle to their teaching, and they have to have a practice for doing so. Running a marathon could be an effective and ecstatic one!

And you are right to notice that metric time quantified in terms of numbers can't provide us with an actual measure of our lives. Passages around the sun are a pretty good cycle to pay heed to, though, even if it does not always correspond with our experience of time. Anything that reminds of our cosmic location is probably worth doing once in a while. The question these passages in objective time can raise, though, are good ones: How alive am I? Is it possible for me to become more so? Might I treat my current status as something to be both affirmed and overcome? Can I grow and transform, even becoming senescent, as an act of being alive and conscious? Can I become more capable of helping others in their suffering and discovering new forms of joy? In short these markers can be used as occasions for creativity that are indeed likely to induce some of the effects asked by the questions. William James and Charles Darwin both noted that smiling tends to induce a feeling of joy, and these sorts of feedback loops seem to abound in nature. Metaprogramming makes use of these loops by amplifying and growing them, browsing for new forms of experience far from equilibrium...mobius