“I’m twenty-seven and I’ve suddenly realized that I’m growing old,” Howie’s e-mail said. When I thought back to the time I was twenty-seven—my son had just been born and I was still in training as a Zen priest—I had never given a thought to growing old, so I had some trouble imagining what Howie meant. But I thanked him for his insight. Everyone experiences aging differently.
“I’m seventy-three and I’ve never felt younger,” wrote Jerry in response to one of my blog posts. I could only imagine the conversation Howie and Jerry might have had if I had put the two of them together!
Some people get to sixty before they can say, “I’ve suddenly realized that I’m growing old.” And others can live their whole life and not be able to say, “I’ve never felt younger.” How each of us ages is individual. And yet there are recognizable stages and emotions on the journey of aging.
In the first stage, Lightning Strikes, the dominant emotion is surprise. We are taken aback to realize, “I’m really growing old,” and then surprised again at how long it took us to see it.
The next stage, Coming to Terms, takes hold when we compare ourselves with how we once were—favorably or unfavorably. We look back at the “old me” and see how it measures up against today’s “new me.” If we like being the age we are now, that comparison brings happiness; if we don’t, it leads to regret.
The stage of Adaptation comes when we no longer compare ourselves to the past and can rest in the age we are now.
And the final stage, Appreciation, comes when adaptation matures into full acceptance.
As Howie and Jerry show, any stage can arise at any age, and stages do not necessarily appear in a fixed order. Sometimes we have to traverse these emotional zones more than once.
People come to terms with their aging in a variety of ways, but one common way is when parents become ill or die. Until then, whatever our actual age, we think of ourselves as young in comparison to our parents. After all, we were once children in their homes, and somewhere in our hearts we remain their children.
But once parents become ill and need our help, suddenly we assume the role of the grown-up, and they become a little like our children—a role reversal that is unsettling all around. The drama may begin suddenly, but what follows is often a long, drawn-out march that may take months or years. That process of adjustment, whether long or short, is another example of Coming to Terms.
Anna, a successful choreographer and dance producer, experienced this when her father, and then her mother, were both diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Until then Anna hadn’t given much thought to aging. She had a dancer’s physique and the youthful vigor to go with it. Her idea of a relaxing vacation was going river rafting or climbing a mountain. She was proud to tell people her age—forty-seven—and loved hearing the invariable response, “You’re kidding! You look ten years younger.”
But once the twin diagnoses came from the small clinic in her faraway hometown, Anna’s life changed dramatically.
“I can’t tell you how exhausting it was,” Anna told me as we sat in a corner of her dance studio sipping tea. “First there were the trips home, at least once a month, and sometimes more often than that. Then there were the arguments, especially with my dad. He thought they were both just fine and could take care of themselves. It didn’t matter that their doctor said otherwise.”
“It must have been hard to keep the studio going,” I said, indicating the large dance floor.
“Oh, I managed. My dance friends filled in. The worst thing was the fights with my brother and sister. Their idea of solving the problem was to sell the house, take away the car keys, and get Mom and Dad in a nursing home as soon as possible. And they lived right there! They actually could have taken care of them if they’d wanted to.”
Anna’s Coming to Terms was fraught with difficulty. “If only things could go back the way they were,” Anna sighed. “I know that’s impossible, but in the middle of the night that’s how I feel.”
She yearned for the way things were before, for her “old me,” but eventually a time comes when the “old me” is finally ready to go, and the “new me” is ready to settle in. For Anna that happened the day she was talking alone with her parents’ doctor.
“How long do they have to live?” she blurted.
“They’re both physically strong,” the doctor answered. “They could live for many years.”
That’s when Anna realized that her old life was gone; what she needed now was to build a new one.
The next stage, Adaptation, is a time when our emotional ups and downs begin to level out. We have come to terms with what we have lost. We look forward to what we still have. We know we are getting old and we have accepted it. The “new me” is here to stay, and our new job is to learn to live with it, adjust to it, and enjoy it.
For Toni Bernhardt, author of How to Be Sick, acceptance dawned in a moment of tenderness and laughter with her husband.
Toni, formerly a law school dean, writes of an important moment seven years into her illness, a chronic fatigue that would not end:
My husband [Tony] came into our bedroom and joined me on the bed that has become my home. I greeted him with, “I wish I weren’t sick.” Tony replied, “I wish you weren’t sick.” There was a slight pause, then we both started laughing. “OK, that got said.” It was a breakthrough moment for the two of us. We’d had this exchange dozens of times since the summer of 2001, but it took seven long years for the exchanges to bring us to laughter instead of to sorrow, and, often, to tears.
As long as we keep comparing ourselves to a younger, better self (who may have been better only in hindsight), we shortchange the possibilities for becoming an older, wiser one. The wisdom of Adaptation begins in the willingness to let go of who we used to be and embrace who we are now.
In a spiritual sense, this flexibility means accepting and adapting to change. When change brings good things, we like it. When it brings bad things, we fight it. The Buddha was one of the first religious teachers to teach the truth of continuous change and its implications for a human life. Even though we are not the person we were at fifteen, twenty, thirty, or forty, some part of us clings to the notion that “I am, and have always been, me.” Our inner sense of self yearns for constancy.
Central to the Buddha’s message of liberation is that this constancy is an illusion. We are always changing, as is everything and everyone around us. When we are young we don’t pay too much attention to this, but as we age we have less choice. Change and the steady progression of years begin to dog our footsteps, and we hear that tread behind us with every anniversary and birthday, with every letter or e-mail about a good friend who has become ill, or when a parent has passed on.
The challenge of the stage of Adaptation is how well we can adjust and remain flexible as the signs of wear and tear in our world grow more noticeable. One of the clear results of current aging research is that—physically, mentally, and emotionally—those who remain flexible and roll with the punches age the best, stay the healthiest, and live the longest.
Adaptation and flexibility are our best strategies for keeping abreast of our aging, and the keys to creating freshness and new opportunities as we age. We need to remember that change works both ways. It is not just wear and tear; it is also new beginnings.
The oldest person I ever interviewed was Sarah, a dignified woman of 105 who had been an occasional attendee in my meditation group. When Sarah was young she had been a schoolteacher. In her fifties she retired from teaching and took up botany. She had a talent for finding plants that others had overlooked. She became locally famous for discovering rare natives; one of them was named for her. In her seventies Sarah tried retirement but found it boring.
On her ninetieth birthday, widowed but still living in her own home, she took up weaving. Within a few years she had attained the rank of master weaver, and on the day I visited her she sat on her sunporch surrounded by wall hangings woven in her distinctive multilayered style.
As I sat down to begin the interview, I realized that I felt intimidated by her age. I had never spoken to someone so old, and I suddenly felt stupid. She was nearly twice my age.
“What’s it like to be 105?” I began.
For a moment her mouth tightened in irritation. But then she relented.
“Young man,” she said (how long it had been since anyone had called me that!), “look around. Look at all these.” She waved her hand at the weavings that surrounded us.
“When I look at these, I’m happy,” she said. “Really! I’m happy. I lived my life and I did what I wanted. You want to know what it’s like to be me? To be 105 years old—as if that mattered? I made these. That’s me. I did what I wanted to do.”
I was embarrassed at my first question. I tried again. “What do you think is the deepest lesson you have learned in your life?”
She gave me a quick, piercing glance, and then looked down and said quietly, “This is my life; I have no other.”
Not everyone comes to the end of their life like Sarah, in full possession of her faculties and doing work that gives her joy. Some people end their life disappointed. But regardless of circumstance, everyone can say, as Sarah did, “This is my life. I have no other.”
Occasionally we experience all the stages within a short period of time. I’ve already mentioned the moment lightning struck for me. The full story is a yearlong journey that took me through all four of aging’s stages, from the shock of Lightning Strikes to deep Appreciation.
After many years of training as a Zen priest, at thirty-six I was a busy business executive and my blood pressure had been going up.
Most other doctors would have dismissed my blood pressure as job stress and given me pills, but my doctor had a hunch. He sent me for some tests, including an ultrasound, which showed that something about my left kidney didn’t look right. There were more tests, then a CAT scan, and finally my doctor’s pronouncement. “There’s a large tumor behind your kidney. We think it’s some kind of lymphoma. We have to do more tests to find out exactly what kind.” My doctor cleared his throat; he was only a few years older than me, and this was hard for him too. “Lymphoma usually has a pretty good prognosis,” he said in a reassuring tone. “If you have to have cancer, this is one of the better ones.”
One of the better ones! What a thought! “I’m thinking about my family,” I stammered. “That’s all I’m thinking.”
“I would be too, if I were you. But let’s not jump to conclusions,” my doctor said. “Let’s take things one step at a time.” But for me, time had suddenly accelerated to light speed and there was no “one step at a time.” It was all happening at once.
I drove home clutching the steering wheel for dear life. After I told my wife, we sat at the kitchen table in the near dark, not saying much. I kept repeating, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
That’s how lightning struck for me—all in a rush at an age when I least expected it. That first evening, and in the days after, my life pretty much came to a stop. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t plan, and any efforts toward normalcy, like making breakfast or going to work, seemed ridiculous. One part of my mind kept returning to its ordinary rhythms—I would be making my morning tea and forget about my new dilemma—while another part of my mind was still running in circles, saying, “I’m going to die!” There had been a moment early on when I was sure I wouldn’t die, but this part of my mind had apparently forgotten that. I was in a state of intermittent panic.
But panic can last only so long. Even though some part of me was unhinged, physically I was feeling fine—no different than a few weeks before. As the days became weeks, the routines of being a cancer patient took hold, and the panic slowly devolved into tedium. I spent hours each day in one waiting room or another, listening for my name to be called.
Slowly I came to terms with the fact that I was really ill. If I had had any doubt, the chemotherapy treatments—one every three weeks—made me ill. I would come home after each one and lie in bed, waiting for the nausea and weakness to come. I thought about the recent past when none of this was happening and I had a seemingly normal life. I compared that person to the one I now was: the “new me.” After a couple of rounds of chemotherapy I wanted nothing more than to forget about the “new me” and go back to being the “old me.”
That thought is at the heart of Coming to Terms—comparing how we feel now with how it used to be.
Everyone around me was coming to terms in their own way. Amy adjusted the fastest. She has an extraordinary ability to cope with a crisis. She always seemed to know just what to do. So did my dog, Ryan. Every morning, when my wife and son, Ivan, got up to have breakfast, he got up too, while I stayed in bed. And after Amy and Ivan had left for work and school, Ryan came back into the bedroom and got up on the bed to be with me. He knew I needed to be comforted. He stayed there as long as it took for me to finally drag myself out of bed.
My son, who was nine, had been told only that I was ill and would get better before too long. He didn’t question that, but he could see how weak I was and he was a smart boy. Before my diagnosis, one of our favorite games was “blanket bear.” I’d put a blanket over my head and growl like a bear, and we wrestled. Now I was too weak to play.
One afternoon while I was lying in bed feeling miserable, he came into the bedroom and said, “Dad, when you get better will you still be able to play blanket bear with me?”
I assured him I would.
That’s how Ivan dealt with my cancer.
As the weeks of treatment stretched into months, I became depressed. Some of that was a chemical effect of the drugs and some was a feeling that the long ordeal would never end, or if it did it would not end well. One hot summer evening, I was resting in the basement, where it was cool, and fell into a meditative state. I began an exercise in inner inquiry and “sent” a question into my body. From my Zen training I knew that the body has its own wisdom and often knows better than the mind what is going on.
The message I found myself sending was, “I hate this!”
It was a shock to admit that this was how I felt, but I did. I hated feeling so sick, hated not knowing what was going to happen, and hated admitting that was how I felt.
I kept sending my message: “I hate this, I hate this!” For a long time, no answer came. But quite suddenly, when I had almost fallen asleep, a response appeared: “I love you!”
Who said that? Who loved me?
I can’t say it was me. I was busy saying “I hate this.” That voice was connected to me, but it was higher or deeper. I started to cry and felt tremendous relief. The world had shifted under my feet. One moment I was watching my life slipping away and the next I felt it returning to me. I had hit bottom and was on my way back.
Emotionally, I had finally let go of the “old me,” the one who didn’t have cancer. Until that moment I hadn’t really accepted the cancer. Part of me hated it and still wanted to go back to a time before. But some power had a message for the “old me”—and that message was, “I love you. It’s all right.” As a Buddhist, I would call that power “Buddha nature.” Some people might call it divine presence or God. Whatever it’s called, that power helped me put the “old me” to rest and open up to the “new me.”
Several months later, after those long months of treatment were finally over, I sat in my doctor’s office and heard him say that the cancer was gone and was unlikely to return.
“You did great,” my doctor said. “You’re one of the most upbeat patients I’ve ever had.” He pulled out a Polaroid photo of me, taken during the last month of my treatment, showing me bald and grinning from ear to ear. I can’t recall exactly when he took that photo or why I was grinning, but there it was.
He pinned that photo on the bulletin board of his examining room. For years afterward, whenever I went back for checkups, I saw that photo of myself: the upbeat cancer patient.
After that final doctor visit, my wife and I went back out to the car. She drove; I was too emotional. I thought back to the moment when a voice from somewhere inside me had said, “I love you.” I had come to a deep acceptance of my life in a way that I probably never could have without the intervention of sudden illness.
I was grateful for everything.
Lightning Strikes, Coming to Terms, Adaptation, and Appreciation—they all happened to me in the course of a single year. After twenty-five years, my memory of that period of my life has faded. But my appreciation of it never has. I have never since taken my life for granted.
Much of how we experience aging is through our emotions. When things are going well, we feel good and we like the age we are. But things can change all of a sudden and completely overturn that earlier good feeling, and vice versa.
As one example, I was in a meeting with Marcia, a fellow meditation teacher who had just received her Medicare card. She was upset. “I didn’t realize it was going to hit me this way,” she said. “But it threw me for a loop. I feel so old!”
At that moment Marcia was experiencing various emotions about her aging: anxiety, upset, and disappointment. Objectively, the day she received her Medicare card was just another day, but emotionally, it was a shock.
Marcia’s experience is a lesson in what an emotional ride aging can be, and how those emotions can distort our experience of aging.
This Reflection is an inquiry into your own emotions around aging. What one word best describes your primary emotion about how old you are? Is it “surprise,” “regret,” “relief,” “contentment,” “gratitude,” “despair,” or something else? Take a moment to tune in to your emotions and give it a description or a word.
If you are feeling surprise, what has surprised you? Was it a birthday—yours or someone else’s? The death or illness of someone you know? Think back to a time before that event. How did you feel then? What is different now?
If your feelings about your aging are regret, what do you regret? Regret is often a stand-in for other, more primal emotions, such as fear, anger, or anxiety. Is that true for you? Can you dig down to that deeper emotion and see if you can identify what caused it or what it is about? Each of us has some version of Marcia’s Medicare card, some event, perhaps half-forgotten, that connects our aging with some powerful emotion.
If your primary emotion is positive—if you are feeling contentment or gratitude—reflect on the process that got you there. With Anna, whose parents had Alzheimer’s, gratitude or contentment came at the end of a longer story, and so it is for each of us. That story is worth remembering because it is not over. Things change. New challenges will come; new stages will appear. If you are feeling contentment today, know that you may lose it, but also know that you can find it again.
In sum: Pay attention to your experience of aging through the lens of your emotions. What you feel can help you determine where you are in the stages of aging and also help you understand, as Marcia did, that emotions are not the whole story.
I saw Marcia again a few days later and asked her how she was feeling. She said, “Much better. I spent the weekend leading a meditation retreat, and by the end I realized how foolish I’d been. That card is just a piece of paper. It doesn’t reflect anything real about how old I am. Actually I’m just getting older one breath at a time.”
Marcia’s final comment, “I’m just getting older one breath at a time,” points to another way to experience aging, one that is outside the realm of emotion. I call it Aging Breath by Breath.
To begin, take a posture that is comfortable for you. If you are an experienced meditator who can sit cross-legged on the floor, do that. If you prefer a chair, that’s fine too.
Find a quiet place to sit, one free of noise and other distractions. Now gradually tune in to your breath as though to a quiet radio station. Breathe in, breathe out, pause; breathe in, breathe out; pause.
Do this for a few minutes, and then stop and reflect. What are the qualities of the breath? Isn’t your breath quiet, with a steady pulse and a reliable rhythm? In those ways is it not like a clock? In that sense, isn’t it keeping time?
Now return to your breath: breathe in, breathe out, pause; breathe in, breathe out, pause.
Tune in to your breath. It is your own, actual, precious life, and in a way, your body’s own natural clock. When you observe your breath, you are not just passing through time; time is also passing through you.
Stop again and reflect. How does it feel when you breathe in? Isn’t there pleasure in taking a deep inhalation? Isn’t that what the phrase “a breath of fresh air” means? How does it feel when you breathe out? Isn’t there something deeply relaxing about it?
This is how aging feels to us when we age one breath at a time. Remember the previous exercise, when you looked at aging through the lens of emotion, and notice the difference.
Emotions are not like the breath. They are neither rhythmical nor steady. They are often neither pleasurable nor relaxing. Even if they are, emotions change, and time changes with them. When our emotions speed up, time speeds up too. When we are feeling down or unhappy, time slows to a crawl.
When it comes to aging, our emotions are not a reliable timekeeper, but breathing is. As Marcia discovered, the breath is our deepest timekeeper and is the true arbiter of how we actually age.
Now let your focus and reflection on the breath come to an end and simply sit quietly. Our thoughts and feelings about aging may rise and fall, come and go, but the way we actually age is simply one breath at a time.