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Aging is a Life Process
Other phrases have come into vogue now such as the cheery “60 is the new 40” but the undertow of such homilies is still loss. Is there some way out of this sense of loss, some fresh point of view that assuages the pain of it? Actually, there is. Aging is not a matter of years – forty, sixty, eighty – but of life process. Everything is aging, all the time. We age from our first breath. The problem is not aging per se, but our view of it. It is natural to want to avoid pain and abide with pleasure. Even a sunflower wants to turn to the sun as much as possible. Why should it be otherwise? And yet this pleasure bias does not really maximize our pleasure. Even pleasure turns to pain as it fades. Though we want to maximize gain and minimize loss, gain and loss are actually interwoven in each moment. In teaching Zen meditation, I sometimes talk about breathing in terms of gain and loss. We breathe in and gain a new moment of life; we breathe out and that moment is gone, never to return. This is how our life is. Loss is not really loss if we don’t hold onto it. Gain is not ephemeral if we do not continually invent strategies to make it permanent. Fundamental joy is somewhere outside of this loss/gain calculus. I think that the natural process of aging is also the natural process of wisdom about all of this. It is those of us who are older who have, if you will, experienced many more cycles of breath than the young who are the natural experiencers and teachers of joy. This is our birthright.
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The emotional undertow
of aging, I think, is a
feeling of loss – loss of
youth, loss of dreams, loss of
possibility. This quality is
what used to be referred to as
mid-life crisis.