Osho says: Everybody here is sooner or later bound to become old. We have to understand the beauty of old age, and we have to understand the freedom of old age. We have to understand the wisdom of old age; we have to understand its tremendous detachment from all foolish things that go on in lives of people who are still young.
Old age gives you a height. If this height can be joined with meditation, you will rather feel miserable – why did you waste your youth? Why have your parents destroyed your childhood? Why was meditation not given to you as the first gift the day you were born?
But whenever you get it, it is still not too late. Even just a few moments before your death, if you can get the meaning of your being, your life has not been a wastage.
Unless you can accept everything that life brings you with gratefulness, you are missing the point. Childhood was beautiful; youth has its own flowers, old age has its own peaks of consciousness. But the trouble is that childhood comes on its own, youth comes on its own; for old age you have to be very creative. Old age is your own creation: it can be misery, it can be a celebration; it can be simply a despair, and it can also be a dance. It all depends how deeply ready you are to accept existence, whatsoever it brings. One day it will bring death too – accept it with gratitude.
This gratitude I call religious. This deep acceptance of everything with no complaint, with no desire for it to be otherwise, is the only religion there is.
