Imagining Old Age

I have been meditating about another way to think about aging, a new paradigm. And my heart is stirred this morning by reading in the NY Times "Metropolitan Diary" about a woman whose sister created suicide because "she couldn't face being sixty."  How very sad.  But very American.

The way we think here is that life is a bell-shaped curve, up from being useless to becoming an energetic adult and working and being productive and active and always youthful and energetic, then aging, a steep downhill fall to being useless again.

[Here, picture that curve in red.]

We may not be aware of this picture in our minds, but we do, as a culture, think that way.  It is a way that emphasizes "productivity," in terms of earning money and other benefits, like fame and power, which are seen as good, rather than something to be avoided.

But you can imagine the course of a human life differently.  You can see life as a slow, gradual climb into wisdom and spiritual depth.
[Imagine that line as a pilgrimage, going gradually up toward light.]

You can think that at the same time as we grow in compassion and wisdom, our life unfolds into the world.

[Like so many colored strands of thread moving into the world like rivers, curling around, embracing it.]

That is a life of connecting and giving that can become richer in a peaceful old age.

Offering birds bits of yarn in a suet feeder for their nests

Have some joy, for God's sake

This video is flying around the net, and it deserves to. So charming.
So tomorrow I promise to write more about the umm, edifying spiritual challenges of old age.  (See what a good mood this video put me in?)

Gaining wisdom with every breath

A busy day ahead, and I might not have energy to write, so I am copying below an article I received recently that speaks to me.  I suppose I started worrying about aging when I was about 25.  So, though it seems that most of my readers are younger than me, I thought you might like this article.  Lew has a website, too.

We Age From Our First Breath
By Lewis Richmond
Author of Aging as a Spiritual Practice: A Contemplative Guide to Growing Older and Wiser

The emotional undertow of aging, I think, is a feeling of loss -- Loss of youth, loss of dreams, loss of possibility.This quality is what used to be referred to as mid-life crisis. Other phrases have come into vogue now -- such as the cheery "60 is the new 40" -- but the undertow of such homilies is still loss. Is there some way out of this sense of loss, some fresh point of view that assuages the pain of it? Actually, there is. Aging is not a matter of years -- forty, sixty, eighty -- but of life process. Everything is aging, all the time. We age from our first breath. The problem is not aging per se, but our view of it.

It is natural to want to avoid pain and abide with pleasure. Even a sunflower wants to turn to the sun as much as possible. Why should it be otherwise? And yet this pleasure bias does not really maximize our pleasure. Even pleasure turns to pain as it fades. Though we want to maximize gain and minimize loss, gain and loss are actually interwoven in each moment.

In teaching Zen meditation, I sometimes talk about breathing in terms of gain and loss. We breathe in and gain a new moment of life; we breath out and that moment is gone, never to return. This is how our life is.

Or rather it is how our life actually is. How we want it to be is heavily weighted toward the in and not the out -- we want more new moments, less old moments, more sun and less cloud. This is our bias, and yet there is something powerfully liberating to return to the actuality of just breathing in and breathing out. We imagine that there is joy in minimizing loss, of staying with gain. But strangely enough, when we just rest in the equality of gain and loss, of every cycle of time containing both in equal measure, there is a different kind of joy -- fundamental joy, we might say.

The way Buddhism has often been taught in the West, it appears to many as a rather "down" or even depressing world-view. Friends of my son who know about his being raised a Buddhist say to him, "Oh, I could never get into that life is suffering Buddhist thing." Well, they might be surprised to know that the Buddha never taught that life is suffering, only that it seems that way from a self-centered point of view. What he actually taught is that it is possible to transform and transcend both our moments of suffering and joy.

Loss is not really loss if we don’t hold onto it. Gain is not ephemeral if we do not continually invent strategies to make it permanent. Fundamental joy is somewhere outside of this loss/gain calculus. I think that the natural process of aging is also the natural process of wisdom about all of this. It is those of us who are older -- who have, if you will, experienced many more cycles of breath than the young -- who are the natural experiencers and teachers of joy.

This is our birthright.

© 2011 Lewis Richmond, Author of Aging as a Spiritual Practice: A Contemplative Guide to Growing Older and Wiser

"Every day's a good day."

Grailville meadows at sunset

Well, just briefly before I go pick up my thyroid med and get a blood draw and do some banking and drop off overdue library books - we got back home from retreat Friday afternoon, feeling very well, the soft stream of emptiness still around my ankles.  We went to Zen Sat. morning and so loved the deep silence - there are a number of dedicated practitioners there, and everyone sat quietly.  Then we heard a talk by Lew Richmond on the spiritual opportunities, you could say, of aging.

Sheba had been wonderfully cared for by my neighbors, Cindy and Lauren, and all was well.  This was one time Ama Samy did not quote the visionary, Hildegard, but we remembered her most-quoted vision -

And all shall be well.
And all shall be well.
And all manner of things shall be well.

As I corresponded just now with my friends on the transplant e-list, I noted that of course I am praying that everything goes well these next weeks for both me and Laura.  And of course that the surgeries go well.  They should; OSU is very experienced.  But on a deeper level I want to accept whatever comes.  Inscribing his latest book for us, Ama Samy wrote for me - "Every day's a good day."  In this situation, that will do as the koan of your life - that no matter what transpires, it is the way it is and has to be, and it is good to be alive.

Love to all, especially to those I sat with on the retreat.