This book is a user’s guide to aging well. It is not a book about diet or exercise, crossword puzzles or memory tips. Those books have already been written and offer much that is valuable and useful. This book is different. It is about aging from a spiritual perspective.
I am a Buddhist priest and meditation teacher, and spiritual practice has been the focus of my life and work for many decades. If you too are a Buddhist, then many of the contemplative reflections and spiritual lessons I write about will be familiar to you, though applying them as we do here—to benefit the aging process—will be new. And if you are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or some other religion, or profess no religious affiliation at all, I believe that these reflections will speak to you too, and be of use to you.
I am in my mid-sixties, so I am not a passive bystander. This journey of aging is my journey too. Many of the fears and worries—as well as the joys and rewards—of aging are mine also. I have had to grapple with the illness and death of parents, the sudden demise of friends younger than I, my own serious illnesses, loss of youthful vigor and sense of open-ended possibility—experiences that may be familiar to you. We are all walking this path together. It is the road that those of us fortunate enough to have lived this long must take.
The seeds of Aging as a Spiritual Practice were planted when I started looking for ways to connect my Buddhist spiritual life with my own experience of aging. Finding this kind of connection is something I have done before. Twelve years ago, when I was working as a corporate executive, I looked around at my work environment, observed the difficulties my coworkers had in coping with uncertainty and stress, and wondered if Buddhist meditation could help people—myself included—transform their workplace experiences.
From that seminal question came my first book, Work as a Spiritual Practice: A Practical Guide to Inner Growth and Satisfaction on the Job, which was published in 1999. There I offered a variety of Buddhist meditations to address common workplace difficulties: stress, pace, emotional conflict, power, worry, and stagnation. This book is arranged differently, but it too applies a variety of spiritual practices to the phenomenon of aging, and in so doing, it offers readers a way to age well.
In the process of writing this book, I started a blog. The interesting thing about a blog is that you have to write something, and write frequently. That imperative was helpful in getting me started. My first post was entitled “Everything Changes, Everything Ages,” and looking back I still think that was the right place to start. That is, after all, where Buddhism starts too, as I learned from one of my Buddhist teachers, Shunryu Suzuki.
Once, after a lecture, someone asked Suzuki (we all called him “Roshi,” which means “old teacher”), “Roshi, you’ve been talking about all this Buddhist stuff, but frankly I can’t understand anything you are saying. Can you say one thing about Buddhism that I can actually understand?”
Suzuki waited for the nervous laughter to die down and then quietly said, “Everything changes.”
It’s not hard to understand this teaching as an intellectual fact; we learn it naturally by living it. But emotionally this teaching means that everything we love and care about—including our family, friends, and even our precious self—will change, transform, and eventually pass away. That is the first truth of Buddhist teaching, and the first truth of aging, too.
At first blush this thought might seem depressing, but the process of transformation—aging and its accomplishments—can be very positive, with new possibilities, fresh beginnings, a wealth of appreciation, and a depth of gratitude that profoundly affects how our lives proceed. These positive, often exciting, aspects of aging are what I want to share with you in these pages. I have talked with many people who are not necessarily in denial about their aging but still don’t like to think about growing old. They probably do think about it—a lot—but don’t know how to approach the subject with dignity and grace.
Beyond a certain age, we don’t need to be convinced that we are aging and that aging has its difficulties. We all know that. But how can we do it in the best possible way, toward the very best end? This book offers an inner road map for aging, one that draws on my many years as a spiritual leader—a map that reimagines aging not as a time of decline, but as a time of fulfillment that can, in spite of occasional indignities, be something to enjoy.
When in one of my early blog posts I first used the words “enjoy” and “aging” in the same sentence, I found myself transported to a time early in my spiritual training when I was still in my twenties. I had come to a small Buddhist temple on a busy San Francisco street to hear a lecture by Shunryu Suzuki. At the time, Suzuki was in his sixties, and most of the people in the room were in their twenties and thirties.
During the question-and-answer period, someone asked, “Why do we meditate?”
Suzuki answered with a laugh, “So you can enjoy your old age.”
We laughed with him. We thought he was joking. Now I realize that he was being honest. He had been ill the whole previous winter and was still coughing and wheezing months later. Physically he hadn’t been feeling well, and yet his whole demeanor radiated contentment. He was clearly enjoying his old age.
I now think that Suzuki was actually letting us in on a great secret, one that the young cannot truly understand: It is possible to find enjoyment in the gift of each moment and each breath, even in the midst of difficulty.
Suzuki died not long after that. It was only then, as details of his life came out, that we discovered how full of tragedy that life had been. And yet he did not show it or let it defeat him. He met what life handed him with kindness and a ready smile. His example has been a lifelong inspiration for me, and a touchstone for the writing of this book. Many of the contemplative practices described here are ones he taught me. Even the teachings I have drawn from Christianity and Judaism come, I believe, from the same universal wisdom source that Suzuki embodied.
So I wrote about enjoying your old age in my blog, and kept writing. After receiving many appreciative and informative reader comments, I came to understand that people experience their aging in a variety of ways. Some blog readers had a good handle on their own aging and were looking for ways to navigate the aging process with more skill. Others were skeptical. One woman in her nineties remarked, “Young man, I’m not old. Aging is a myth. I don’t see the point of what you are doing.” Others were much younger. I had one correspondent who was twenty-seven and wrote, “I’ve suddenly realized that I’m growing old.”
In order to expand my own horizons, I started doing some one-day aging workshops. I began at Buddhist centers, where I knew the participants would be familiar with the kind of meditation practices I taught. I came away from those early workshops with an important lesson: No matter how familiar participants were with meditation, the idea of connecting these practices to the experience of aging was new and exciting to them. At the end of my first workshop, I asked the people attending how many would like to do it again, and every hand went up.
Bit by bit, blog post by blog post, and workshop by workshop, the elements of this book slowly took shape. As you can see from looking at the table of contents, each chapter explores one facet of the aging experience. The chapters don’t have to be read consecutively. If you are feeling down about growing old, start with Chapter 4, “I Like Growing Old.” If you agree with the ninety-year-old skeptic who didn’t believe in aging, Chapter 5, “I Don’t Like Growing Old,” may set you straight. The needs and interests of a forty-year-old reader are different from those of one who is eighty. Aging does progress in stages, as Chapter 2 illustrates, and locating your stage may help you use the book to your best advantage.
I have also included two chapters that review what scientific researchers, doctors, and psychologists have to say about aging. With seventy million baby boomers in their fifties and sixties, aging research is a “booming” field. Not surprisingly, physical exercise and diet are key to healthy aging; the research proves that beyond any doubt. But serving others, maintaining healthy relationships, being in nature, and having an active spiritual life—topics central to this book—are equally important. Inner and outer aging are close partners. Until we can find the inner enjoyment of which Suzuki spoke, exercise and diet alone will not suffice to make us content.
Each chapter concludes with contemplative reflections designed to cultivate some strength or talent or wisdom toward an aspect of aging. Some of these reflections use the body and breath to see through our mental constructs about aging and ease worry and regret. Some help in developing gratitude, refining our sense of appreciation, and teaching the pleasure of serving others. The reflection on “just being” is designed to put us in touch with our own divine nature: the place from which all life has come and to which all life will go. The last chapters help construct a personal “day away”—a time to sit, walk, appreciate, and renew.
“Everything changes,” yes, but that truth has two sides. It is true that everything we love is destined to change, age, and pass away. But it is equally true that every moment brings with it new possibilities. We shouldn’t allow our fixed ideas about aging to take those opportunities away. One of my Buddhist teachers liked to say, “Every breath, new chances.” So if we say that everything changes, we should also add that everything is workable—maybe especially our old age.
Once, one of my workshop attendees raised his hand and half-jokingly said, “I’m fifty-eight and I know where I’m headed—downhill. It’s all downhill from here.”
I thought for a moment and replied, “Well, I’m not sure I agree, but even if you’re right, the real question is: Are you going to just slide, or are you going to steer?”
I hope this book will help you steer. I have tried to put a few stars in the sky to help you navigate. Aging is beyond our control, but how we age is up to us. I invite you to join me on this journey to discover how to enjoy your own aging to the fullest.