Every change of season evokes emotions, but spring, charging out of winter's cold dark with renewed life and brighter days, seems our most beloved. New hopes bloom like flowers springing back from roots we feared lost to numbing ice.

The fall of man will not come full circle from Eden's flame of fire, at least not by any familiar method. The shift we seek has already begun, within each of us, reinforced by this present anxiety, filtered through art, conflict and desire. Consider how we've lost faith in our institutions.

To the extent that I identify with whatever impersonal energy, force, or intelligence it is that animates not only our bodies but also the entire world that they inhabit, a midlife crisis is no more or less than an invitation to awaken to our true spiritual identity.

But then I thought, even if "Call Me Maybe" was my favorite song ever, and even if I believed that I would never tire of it, there would eventually come a point where I could no longer tolerate it. Then I started thinking about death.

Reality is observer-determined -- it's a spatio-temporal process, which fortunately, means that things must change.

We are fragile corporal fragments. We bleed, we breathe. When we are pulled into the theater of illness we suddenly, simultaneously, feel our ephemeral immortal pulse. One we measure, the other we sense.