Aloha Sangha

ancient wisdom for crazy times

Category: aging

this is why we meditate
In the present moment we discover a spontaneity beyond time, where there is no aging, no measuring, no comparing to what was, and no worry about what will be.
Perhaps I get a little carried away with Buddhist contemplation?
I mean, just the other day I felt compelled to pull over while driving to ponder whether in light of the radical teachings of impermanence, do I continue along as usual, making coffee, going to work and streaming my shows when I get home?
Perhaps I am ruminating on mortality as I recently had a birthday?
Aging. It kind of sneaked up on me.
Am I old? Well, according to John Shoven, a professor at Stanford University, someone age 65 is now considered old. No wonder so many nurses at work ask me when I am retiring.
I guess I am officially old at 68.
Woody Allen once remarked about his own mortality:
I don’t want to live on in the hearts of others. I want to live on in my apartment.
We know we are going to die. It’s only a question of when. Yet we console ourselves we have lots of time, much of which is spent planning on some better version of now.
Christopher Titmus recently gave a talk in which he quipped,
Taking an exam in chemistry is a picnic compared to taking chemotherapy.
Ulla-Carin Lindquist, at the height of a successful career as a newscaster in Sweden, was diagnosed with ALS. She kept of journal of her few years, published as Rowing Without Oars: A Memoir of Living and Dying, in which she wrote:
There is no bright future for me, but there is a bright present.
Reflecting on her line, I suspect life itself let her in on a little secret–that her mortality is not a problem to be solved, but a “brightness” disclosing itself right here, right now, in the present moment.
Even though I started studying Buddhism when I was 22, the depth of the teachings is really hitting me much deeper now. I appreciate aging as at the heart of the Buddha’s message.
Suzuki Roshi, whose talks in the 1960s became the classic book Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, taught that each breath was like a whole life, with a beginning, a middle and an end.
And that each exhale is a kind of dying.
In our practice, we especially get to know our out-breath, fading into a “sheet of white paper” as Suzuki Roshi described it. To which his student Mel Weitsman adds,
When the moment of death comes, our last breath is familiar and comfortable. There is no need to be afraid.
As we journey through the pages of our human story, our practice encourages us to be softer, more vulnerable, more caring, and loving.
And to flow with change.
In the present moment we discover a spontaneity beyond time, where there is no aging, no measuring, no comparing to what was, and no worry about what will be.
Ulla-Carin Lindquist, suffering from a terminal illness, was spot on:
There is no bright future… but there is a bright present.
This is freedom. This is love. This is peace.
This is why we meditate.
06/07/2024
chocolate comes, chocolate goes
Impermanence is the fragrance of my life just as it is. This notion brings a subtle joy to these old bones and bare scalp.
A New Yorker magazine cartoon depicts a couple strolling down the street, one saying to the other:
These are the ‘good old days’ that someday we won’t be able to remember.
I think a lot about when the kids were little, and how great it felt to be a new dad, and now that both kids are adults, and living in an empty nest… Well, I feel sad sometimes.
Like the cartoon, I know there are so many memories that aren’t easily accessible anymore. That “someday we won’t be able to remember” is here. I guess memory itself is impermanent, uncertain, imperfect, fading.
At least mine feels this way.
One of the Buddha’s most significant teachings is to really examine our life and our world as impermanent and changing all the time, disappearing even as it arises.
There is a chant in the Pali language I used to chant daily as a young monk in a monastery in Sri Lanka (before kids):
Anicca vata sankhara/ Upada vaya dhammino/ Upakituva nirujihanti/ Tesang vupasamo sukho
One translation would be:
All conditioned things are impermanent/ Their nature is to arise and pass away/ To live in harmony with this truth/ Brings the highest happiness.
How do we live in harmony with the way things actually are when I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast yesterday?
But I can appreciate the point here. The chant suggests our discontent comes from wanting things to differ from how they are. Like trying to push a river in a different direction with our bare hands.
Take my hair, for example (yes, please take my hair!) As many of us get older, the hair thing comes up (or off in my case).
what happened to my hair?
When I look in the mirror, it’s like I am seeing a photoshopped version of myself. What happened to my hair? Sure, there’s not much left, but I catch myself quarreling with nature herself that what little she left me with is all white.
Our son came home for the summer yesterday after finishing his 2nd year in college. It is truly magnificent to see him again. And I really can’t wait for him, as my dedicated hair trimmer, to cut off this sparse outgrowth of white partially covering my scalp.
how to live in light of impermanence?
The question I turn over a lot in my mind is how do I live as I let the Buddha’s teaching on impermanence soak into my rickety bones?
That Pali chants suggest the answer rather obliquely: To live in harmony with the reality of impermanence brings great happiness.
How do I live with what little time I have left that feels in consonance with the way things are?
Shortly before he died, William Butler Yeats wrote:
If I had to put it in a single phrase, I would say that one can live the truth, but one can really not know the truth, and I must express the truth with the rest of my life
This helps immensely. It takes the burden off trying to get a deeper insight into impermanence through my practice of insight meditation.
I got it enough already. I just need to be mindful of not wasting time, and expressing the truth of impermanence with the time I have left.
I love how the Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke expresses this:
The knowledge of impermanence
that haunts our days
is their very fragrance.
The fragrance of impermanence IS the fragrance of my life just as it is. This brings a subtle joy to these old bones and bare scalp.
And the fragrance of impermanence is sweet.
I think the late, great Tibetan Lama Yeshe should have the last word here:
Chocolate comes
Chocolate goes
Chocolate disappears
All such transient pleasures are like this.
But take heart!
There is another kind of happiness available to you,
a deep abiding joy that comes from your own mind.
This kind of happiness is always with you, always available.
Whenever you need it, it is always here.
This is why I keep meditating. This joy just gets deeper and more meaningful every day.
06/03/2023
Buddhist death meditation: letting go of regrets
Buddhist death meditation encourages a gradual letting go of regrets.
In her most recent book, Alive Until You’re Dead: Notes on the Home Stretch, the 81-year-old Zen teacher, editor and writer Susan Moon relates an ordeal she went through while riding on public transit from Berkeley to the San Francisco airport.
When she got to the airport, she realized that her carry-on bag, which had her IDs, credit cards, cash, appointment book and teaching notes, had been stolen.
She writes she felt “stripped of everything.”
She could not board her flight to her teaching gig without her ID, but she still had her round-trip public transit ticket. So she took the train back to Berkeley. And on the way home, she had an epiphanic insight.
Yes, she lost some valuable stuff, but she suddenly realized she still had her life, her body, her family, and her friends.
“I touched my own knees in amazement, and wanted to jump up and down in the train, shouting, `I’m alive! I’m alive!’ She writes:
The theft was a strange gift. I lost some objects, yes, and I gained a sense of gratitude for my life that is still with me. I often forget how amazing it is to be alive, but if I concentrate, I can open a drawer in my mind and find the memory of that train ride.
My life feels more complicated each day, with a ridiculous number of choices to make and noise to filter out. I get stuck in overwhelm mode. My system gets bogged down, flooded with sticky memories triggered by the media.
As much as I try to practice culture war pacifism, the news still gets to me. But then I reflect on the words of the American Buddhist monk, Ajahn Nisabho:
There is a role for political discussion, for talking to people about what is meaningful. But it’s very important to understand that as practitioners of this path, you have stepped into a higher order narrative and received something which is far more important than the political debate of the day.
Reading this, I take a breath and try to connect with this “higher order narrative.”
I appreciate the late Indian philosopher Krishnamurti’s words here:
You think you’re thinking your thoughts. You are not. You are thinking the culture’s thoughts.
Yeah, and many of us even take our cell phones to bed with us. I admit to being guilty as charged (or maybe guilty when charged–my phone, that is.)
what is this higher order narrative?
The other day I sat in meditation, turning Ajahn Nisabho’s phrase over in my head: what is this higher order narrative I have stepped into? And as nature would have it, I had my own epiphanic insight.
I’m not sure I can describe it in my own words, but a few lines from the poem “When Death Comes,” by Mary Oliver kept coming up.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
perfect just as it is right now
Our simple mindfulness shows us this amazing, crazy world is perfect, just as it is right now. It couldn’t be otherwise.
Yes, even my life as it is right now: overweight, under-exercised, and not looking forward to the long drive home in heavy morning traffic from my night shift job.
I used to feel quite depressed. A part of me was consumed with fantasies and expectations: my kids, my marriage, my meditation practice, my crazy job.
I’m much happier now.
letting go of these fantasies of some other life
Finding happiness was about letting go of these fantasies and realizing that life is truly amazing without them. I would even say–especially without them.
My higher order narrative is just this: when I lie on my deathbed, can I let go of any regrets for having just been me?
Thank you Suan Moon, for the gift of having your bag stolen on public transit, and for sharing it with us.
05/30/2023
on aging and humility
If I’m going to explore aging and humility I need to remember we older ones are no longer as energetic, or slim, or good looking.
The other day I received an interesting catalog in the mail. My wife thought it was a medical scrubs catalog, but when I looked closer the company’s about us page was all about “adaptive clothing” for a clearly older demographic.
Opening to a random page I find a grinning couple sporting comfortable “adaptive” flannel nighties.
For the non-elder-attire-informed reader: adaptive clothing is apparel designed for people “who have difficulties dressing themselves due to age, disability or general lack of mobility.”
I had to sit with this for a few minutes to let this settle in.
OK, I just turned 67; any inner turbulence caused from receiving this mail-order catalog is clearly my issue.
OK, let me own this.
Theravada Buddhists monks and nuns chant The Five Remembrances every morning, one of which is “I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.”
A few deep breaths…
Calanque des Antibois (1891–1892) by Henri-Edmond Cross
Our culture is so crazy focused on youthfulness I confess I catch myself feeling left out.
A couple of weeks ago, the nurses I work with threw a fellow nurse a party celebrating her 28th birthday. Everyone was talking about it.
They did not invite me. They call me the old man. But the moniker comes with lots of respect, which, I confess, is very cool.
I get it, we older ones are no longer as energetic as we once were. Or slim, or good looking. Or into Instagram big time.
As the “older” poet and Zen teacher Norman Fischer writes:
All this focus on stopping aging implies somebody made a big mistake in the universe. It’s as if we should be getting younger instead of older.
The Jewish mystical traditions, as Fischer observes, have a direct and radical answer: just because we are born incomplete and need to bear a certain amount of suffering does not mean the universe is flawed.
Rather, bearing disappointment, hardship, and suffering with grace is profoundly healing. And necessary.
From the ancient teachers of Judaism as recorded in the Talmud:
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now. Love mercy now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, nor are you free to abandon it.
Let the media bombard me all they want with their longevity pitches; I am learning not to bite, thank you adaptive clothing catalog.
It’s just more false advertising, and the media is no dummy–it has our number! We bite on the false messages to avoid going through our fundamental discomfort, which the Buddha called dukkha.
We can call it in English stress, pain, despair, sorrow, disappointment.
The incredible power of our meditation practice is simple and direct
You experience dukkha with intimacy and grace. Then, it’s no longer dukkha.
(Substitute disappointment, stress, pain, sorrow for dukkha, if you like).
In our efforts to avoid distress, disappointment, boredom and fear we can get a little numb and withdrawn. And it’s really this that feels most awful.
Carl Jung observed:
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.
If we just give up and feel the dukkha in our life moment by moment mindfully, with curiosity and equanimity. It may or may not go away, but that’s not the point.
It’s the ungraspable beauty of change, the indescribable peace of impermanence we learn to embody in our simple practice which is the most profound.
Instead of seeing adversity, disappointment, fear, anger, the whole cosmic nine yards as some Huge Existential Error, let’s hear Rumi’s response:
Pretend the universe is rigged in your favor.
This is a liberating secret our meditation reveals.
03/26/2023
In Buddhism aging is a practice
As we approach the last pages of our human story, in Buddhism aging as a spiritual practice encourages us to be softer, more vulnerable, more caring and loving.
The other day at the hospital, I ran into a nurse I haven’t seen in a while. She looked at me and asked “You’re still working?” I guess I’m not used to getting this question because an answer didn’t roll off my tongue as it would if she had asked what I had for breakfast or what kind of car I drive.
My immediate mental reflex was to ask myself what kind of question is this? Of course I am still working! I have the rent to pay and food to buy for my family. But then I remembered, oh yeah, I’m the oldest nurse “still working” at the hospital, so OK, this was an appropriate question.
“Uh, yeah,” I managed to say. To which she replied with the inevitable, “So when are you going to retire?”
Aging. It kind of sneaked up on me.
It seems like I was just 50 last week. As many of us can tell you young’uns reading this, time seems to pass faster the older we get, and Scientific American can explain why this is.
As an older person recently observed, I forget who (likely due to my age):
I feel like I am having breakfast every fifteen minutes.
Am I old? Well, according to John Shoven, a professor at Stanford University, someone age 65 is now considered old. No wonder that nurse asked me when I am retiring. I guess I am officially old at 66.
An Orange-Headed Ground Thrush and a Death’s-Head Moth on an Ebony Orchid Branch
Even though I started studying Buddhism when I was 22, the depth of the teachings is really hitting me much deeper now. In a way, aging is at the heart of what the Buddha talked about his entire 45 years of teaching.
Impermanence is the big message. Everything is changing moment by moment. Everything.
This is way deeper than I can convey here.
I feel we missed another teachable moment. After 9/11 many of us felt the reality of impermanence was as close as our breath; and we came together in ways we hadn’t before to comfort each other.
But a few months later we were back to finding comfort in our distractions and consumerism.
Before we began this recovery from the pandemic, death was palpable. We felt its proximity every night we turned on the news. By tuning into the reality of aging and death on our TV screens we were living the essence of the Buddha’s teaching.
Putting on N95 masks, and wearing gloves, and standing six feet apart, death was close by.
Now it’s back in the shadows of our mind.
There could have been a more thorough-going, culture-wide realization, not unlike the historical Buddha’s first encounters with old age, sickness, and death.
Suzuki Roshi, whose talks in the 1960s became the uber-popular book Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, taught that each breath was like a whole life, with a beginning, a middle and an end. And that each exhale is a kind of dying.
In our practice, we especially get to know our outbreath, fading into a “sheet of white paper” as Suzuki Roshi described it. To which his student Mel Weitsman adds,
When the moment of death comes, our last breath is familiar and comfortable. There is no need to be afraid.
As we approach the last pages of our human story, our practice encourages us to be softer, more vulnerable, more caring and loving.
And to flow with change.
In the present moment we discover a spontaneity beyond time, where there is no aging, no measuring, no comparing to what was, and no worry about what will be.
This is freedom. This is love. This is peace.
This is why we meditate.
08/09/2022
the church of what's happening now
This is our true home. We must live here, for it is only there that we are fully alive, in the church of what’s happening now.
Our son Kupai started Kindergarten last week. When I woke him up for school the other day I asked him how he had slept. He said that it was really frustrating that after we read him his story and kiss him goodnight he thinks about the events of the day.
He explained that he thinks of some apparently very meaningful things to say about his life “but there’s no one to tell” about these insights, as he is all alone with the lights off in his bedroom.
When I heard him relate this complaint, the thought of Ryokan, the 18th century Japanese hermit monk flashed into my mind. (After all these years of meditation I have come to accept that I do indeed have a monkey mind, and there’s no changing this).
There is one poem of his I vaguely remembered as my son mentioned this grievance. Later that day I looked through his poems and found the poem that had partially come into my mind:
Light sleep, the bane of old age:
Dozing off, evening dreams, waking again.
The fire in the hearth flickers; all night a steady rain
Pours off the banana tree.
Now is the time I wish to share my feelings —
But there is no one.
I am struck by the juxtaposition of the pre-sleep ruminations of a five year old boy and those of an elderly hermit Buddhist monk two hundred years before. Both deal with insights, isolation, the need to be with, to connect, the loneliness of awareness, and the awareness of loneliness.
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that my true home is my life as it is, not as I want it to be, or as it used to be, or as it should be according to some spiritual notion, but as it is.
I find I need to remind myself of this every day.
Sometimes it is messy, badly in need of repairs, or unpleasant, but whatever it is, it’s my home nonetheless; I can only live this life, even if I don’t particularly like it right now.
Here is another poem, this one is by another Japanese Zen teacher, Gesshu Soko:
Breathing in, breathing out,
Moving forward, moving back,
Living, dying, coming, going —
Like two arrows meeting in flight,
In the midst of nothingness
There is a road that goes directly
to my true home.
Gesshu Soko wrote this poem shortly before he died. It speaks to me more about life than about death. I hear him saying that our true home is right in the middle of what’s happening now, whether it be living or dying, moving forward or moving back, coming or going.
When we are fully with with things as they are, we meet the circumstances of our lives like two arrows shot from different directions coming together point-to-point in mid-air.
Breathing in or breathing out, we live our lives as they are, not as we want them to be or they were.
Farming Village in Spring, Kamisaka Sekka (1909-1910)
This moment, now, is our true home. The road that goes directly to our true home is the road that leads to this moment. That road doesn’t go anywhere.
It doubles back on itself and leads to this moment, as it is.
Walking the road of this moment is challenging. It is a lifelong practice. It can be a breeze when we are on easy street and difficult when we don’t like where it leads, the now that is pain or regret.
Because our life as it is is our true home, we can never really step outside of it (death is another issue, and who really knows what happens then?)
I think about the character created by the comedian Flip Wilson in the 1970s- Reverend Leroy at times, a minister of the “Church of What’s Happening Now.”
I am a very happy parishioner in this church.
Earlier we read Gesshu Soko’s lines
Breathing in, breathing out,
Moving forward, moving back,
Living, dying, coming, going —
This about covers our life. Like two arrows meeting point-to-point in mid-flight, we meet our lives fully in each moment, again and again.
This is our true home. We must live here, for it is only place we are fully alive- singing in the church of what’s happening now.
read another?
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02/25/2008