Hour of the Wolf

No day is ever wasted that can be lived consciously and to the full.

2 a.m. The hour of the wolf. You wake up filled with regrets, and haunted by dashed dreams, wondering what went wrong.

For Paul Lipton, a successful lawyer in his sixties, his mind's howling in the darkness reminded him that time was slipping away. Perhaps partly because both his parents had died when they were young, and because he had already experienced his own serious health crisis, he wanted to be sure to live each day to the fullest. He decided he would start viewing each day afresh and in the now as a do-over, each night dying and each morning being reborn. His philosophy was to say, "I am me today," and ask, "How do I choose to live in the now?"

His solution to these sleepless nights became an adventure, and an experiment in ageless living.

To silence the howls of the wolf, Lipton took off in the footsteps of his fictional hero, Larry Darrell in W. Somerset Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge. His journey took him first to the Himalayas. He then continued his external and internal travels that included crossing the ice fields of Mont Blanc, a shamanic retreat at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and motorcycle adventures across Florida's Alligator Alley, the Rocky Mountains, and the back roads of North Carolina. In the process, he discovered he was not a prisoner of the past. His changed perspective had given him a new lease on life.