01/12/2024
Some valuable wisdom to consider here.
WHY I PRACTICE 13/17
AGING
The greatest campaign of one’s life is to age gracefully.
You can do that if you take care of yourself, exercise, meditate, attend to diet and sleep, and prioritize your personal fulfillment. That requires finding your purpose in life. It means saying you went through each day trying to achieve the utmost. It also means being flexible. I set out to be an artist. Now I know too much. It all seems so arbitrary, the careers too often manufactured, and the network and gatekeepers too intent on popularity-connected-to-profit. It took me a long time to realize that my purpose wasn’t the label of a particular role. It was about being creative and spiritual. There isn’t a specific career for that, and I’ve had to find my own way.
We need to examine the capitalist idea that a person is only as good as their job, that they need to offer their labor in exchange for money, that sacrificing one’s health and happiness is being a “good” person, and that the compensation for that is to be an excessive consumer. We are not here to participate in a mad carnival of tangled exploitation.
But even with great care, we will get older. Eyesight, muscle tone, stamina, cardiovascular health, cataracts, skin and hair will all undergo changes. Women will go through menopause. Men will go through andropause. Every decade will bring changes.
Practice is about integration. Yes, we can integrate ourselves with aging, and integrate aging with ourselves. Aging is a process. I prefer to avoid terms like decline and degeneration. There are secrets and advantages to every age and we need only be open to finding them and using them. If we are to do that, we need to keep moving.
I bet you are far quicker to make decisions, to turn from time-wasting people and ventures, and to spot deception than when you were younger. One can easily be older and wiser, and that’s the right way to age.
My body isn’t the same as it was in the first half of my life. There were years of transition in middle age when I was tired and my mind was cloudy. But I took steps to address that. That’s what practice means too: to change with age. I do more to maintain the level of health I have. I don’t know what’s ahead—doctors are eager to measure my deterioration—but I’m going to keep it up as long as I can.
The greatest challenge is coping with death. That’s probably the ultimate test of every philosophy, religion, and spiritual tradition. I don’t find it persuasive to accept fairy tale stories. I don’t see any likelihood of an afterlife and certainly not one that is going to reward me for all the travails I’ve endured. Such doctrines comfort the miserable with false hope. The premise is: “Die so you can go on to a life of great bliss.” Yeah.
I’m engaged in the process of getting ready to die. I think of dying many times a day. I don’t want that to sound morbid.* It isn’t. All the elders who died left big messes for others to clean up. I don’t want to do that. I want to be mature about it. I’m preparing my archives, getting rid of things I don’t need, and trying to write some account in case relatives have questions after I’m gone.
I’m getting older. I’m going to die. So in the time I have left, diminishing though it may be, I’m going to live well, be responsible, and continue to study. That, I have found, is the way to serenity.
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* BBC.com, 24th February 2022: Bhutan’s dark secret to happiness
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20150408-bhutans-dark-secret-to-happiness
