The Problem of Aging

Escaping the frame

I was struck by this thought yesterday, and rushed to put it in a box on this blog:

 Being old is not necessarily a problem.  

It wasn't actually that striking, more like interesting in a quiet way.  So I've been thinking about problems in general and aging in particular.

Aging, being old, is a fact, a condition created by a series of experiences, of changes.  Problems themselves do not exist in reality.  The word problem is abstract, a concept in my head tied up with a judgement that it is difficult and I don't like it.  These thoughts made me remember Joan Halifax's story about when Issan was dying, and she was crying at his bedside.  He said to her, "That isn't necessary, you know."  He was a Zen master (so is she), so I thought seriously about that.  Not necessary to be sorry your friend is dying?  How about yourself - does your death have to be a problem?  Is sickness necessarily a problem?  Is pain?

Using the word problem is a way of framing a large issue.  You could say the real problem is not aging, but that we resist its reality instead of  flowing with it.  It's like "difficult emotions" in that way.

Framing a couple of issues

It's funny how we welcome risk and surprise when we pay for it.  People go to theme parks, travel uncomfortably on planes and go more uncomfortably through airports, which have become fun houses, delays popping up like monsters in the corner.  We deliberately meet fear on roller coasters, we pay to be thrown around on those teacup rides. But when life throws us around, we hate it.

These thoughts must be growing out of my current interest in softening to difficult feelings (discussed a little in the previous post).  My own "difficult" feelings arise when I don't like what's happening.  Depression. Pain.  People who don't do what they said they would (had to throw in something trivial). 

I couldn't explain why, but this is making me visualize making a not-too complicated mandala.  Reds for desire.  Some black strokes for judgement.  Here and there beautiful greens, restful lavender......What would be at its center?  Maybe a nice peaceful white, or a blue sky with puffy high clouds passing over.  Maybe some glitter.  

Staying Out of the Rain

Video:  Random International, Rain Room, 2012.  Here is Artfinder's description:

The Barbican Centre's 'Rain Room' offers us the chance to stand beneath a man-made raincloud, bucketing it down in true British style. The twist? 3D sensors controlling the valves ensure that, even after being engulfed in the 100 metre square torrent, visitors emerge bone dry.

Better, I think, than being engulfed in flames [link here to another post].

And - this is art.  Not life.  I like a lot of things about art, like color and rhythm.  And that it takes me closer to the heart of life; and that it is not life.  If I wanted reality, I'd stay in it.  Life is a mess.  Dukkha is the broad, resonant Buddhist term for the way life is generally painful, unsatisfactory, uncertain.  In life you don't know when you're going to be swiped by a semi and sent hurtling to another world without a chance to say goodbye.  As a Buddhist, I don't need art to remind me of things like that, to float sharks in tanks of formaldehyde.  I know the sharks are there. 

Along these lines, I have been enjoying some short videos by Phillip Moffitt, a Spirit Rock teacher.  So here is one of them well worth watching if you ever have emotions you don't care for.

The Truest Thing I Know

I know lots of important things, like Do the most important thing first  and There's always time for what's really important.  But the most important thing I've learned this last decade or so can be phrased in a piece of common folk wisdom:

It's always something.

Therefore, I make a point of enjoying the gaps between those somethings.

Buddhists may be noting already that this is a rephrase of what is called The First Noble Truth that Shakyamuni Buddha realized as he sat under the evening star:  Life is hard.  The word is dukkha, and I've most often seen it translated as suffering, anxiety, stress.  There are good reasons human life is hard.  All good things pass.  We pass, and we know we will.  We lose loved ones, friends, beloved pets, our health and vitality, our able-bodiedness, even our ability to think and recognize our world - and we know we might.  I know I probably haven't touched on the problems you and I have seen in our lives, and that you may be experiencing right now.

When I'm in a balanced mood I accept all that with the sort of equanimity with which we grandmothers sometimes say,  It's always something. (sigh)  If you can't accept this fact of life's difficulty emotionally, you can work on understanding that it is true.  Whether you like it or not.  And yet, this moment is safe.

Here I'd like to mention that these thoughts are growing out of me having a very good day.  A nice, quiet day following a lot of work yesterday, and some real visible progress on the major clean-this-house project, working right along with Tom, no conflicts.  I have seen enough suffering in life to realize the abiding pleasure of an agreeable relationship.  Today it is hot outside and the air quality bad, but we have electricity back, and our air-conditioner and Hepa filter are doing a good job in here.  My back doesn't hurt too much, and in a minute I'm going to prop up on a heating pad that works wonders for me.

I do live in an emotional hurricane zone, as Readers know.  I have a bipolar-ordered mind.  Right now I am neither depressed nor anxious-angry-manic, just right in that lovely middle.  Creative but not driven.  Not sick; maybe I've found the key steps to avoiding UTIs, maybe I can keep avoiding them. My history tells me those unlovely mood states will return and everything turn sludgy and gray, though I don't want to believe it.  I know it is my nature to get sick this way, that way; illness cannot be avoided (I know The Five Remembrances. which are at the bottom of this blog, by heart).

But today I can look around and run the mental gratitude journal.  And am not even arguing with the koan I have found most difficult of all:  Every day's a good day.  There it is, on the right, in calligraphy.  I am working on accepting that, preparing to see the shades of gray on those not-so-easy days.

Goodbye to All That

For some time I have been thinking about starting another blog, one that will be about sickness, old age, and death. I have the qualifications, plenty of material in my life, and I see the need, but is there an audience?

In America, we don't believe in the inevitability of the big three. I had to learn that from Buddhism, which begins with the first premise, "Life is hard." Dukkha is the word, often translated to mean "suffering" or "unsatisfactory." Ahh. That was a help to me. It's not that there's something wrong with me; life is like this.

Sickness is very unpopular in America. We see posters of very old men and women with wierdly muscular bodies and fierce expressions, posing in bathing suits: Old age is not for sissies! they proclaim. We spend, spend on things that promise to restore a semblance of youth, from face creams worth more per ounce than gold, to Viagra. We buy books that tell us we can think ourselves young. Outwit the laws of the universe. We admire people who begin a second career at 65 and go on to beat the world, and warehouse those whom dementia takes back to childhood.

One reason I spend the extra money to belong to the McConnell fitness center is that it is also a rehab facility, associated with a hospital system. The majority of people there are "older" and have experienced big hits, stroke, heart attack, pulmonary disease. They are plump and gray and mostly cautious. Few would dream of trying to run marathons.

I have no idea how many of them are online. There is a prejudice or fear among even some people younger than me, the Boomers, against all this technology that got going while our attention was somewhere else. And who, under sixty, wants to read about the realities of old age? I found when I got on Facebook (briefly), that it has a special section for the elderly, defined as those over age forty.

You do write to be read, the same way you speak to be heard. So I may do it or not.

If I do a blog like that, I might call it, "Goodbye to All That." It is a very heavily used phrase, so resonant, but I haven't found another blog by that name. Today I read for the first time Joan Didion's classic essay of that title. It is perfect, an elegant, finished piece of art, the way essays sometimes were when they were written on typewriters, or by hand, and published on real paper, before the days of . . . tossing off a blog. That sort of personal essay is now part of literary history. I was amazed to find that "the number one public library in the country," here in Columbus, does not own a copy of Slouching to Bethlehem, the book in which it is collected. I'll have to buy it online.

And just now the tiny iridescent green hummingbird paused midair in front of my window, then passed on, reminding me how surprising and sudden happiness, too, can be.