Age and Aging, Part 1: Time

Lately I’ve been thinking about age and aging a good bit.  I’ve had two brushes with death due to medical issues, one two years ago and one twelve years ago, and I am now over 70 years old. I’m not as strong as I used to be and I can’t do physical work for as long as I could in the past. I recently read Ram Dass’ book Still Here: Aging. Changing, and Dying written after he had a massive stroke at the age of 66.  I know I only have so many years left, and this is true of everyone regardless of their present age.  By the time of only the tenth reunion of my high school graduating class, at least 22 of my classmates had already died—before reaching the age of 28.  At this point in my life, approximately half of the people who were born the same year I was have died.

The surprising thing about this is that I don’t find any of this depressing.  I find it interesting and it’s raised questions for me that I have strong curiosity about.  The Buddha taught that there are two kinds of lives:  the first being intentional, conscious, and assertive, and the second random and passive—like a leaf being blown this way and that way by external forces.  I’ve always liked this teaching and tried to live by it, so I decided to sit with some of my questions.

The biggest and most compelling question is “What do I really want to be doing with my time—the remaining hours of my life?”  This is a very fundamental question that many people avoid.  It asks us to confront the yawning existential abyss of “What is my life all about? Is there any meaning to the things I do in my life?”   The avoidance of questions such as this is often why many people keep themselves so busy and distracted all the time—when we get quiet, the questions bubble up. 

But if we engage in inner work only at a level where it’s easy, safe, and pleasant, we are unlikely to see or change anything significant about our lives.  We need to work at the level of our obstruction, the places where we are stuck and suffering in life.  Ironically, our fear and discomfort of confronting things at this level invariably causes more suffering than just doing the actual work—which ultimately will be very liberating.  Fear and discomfort is like a messenger telling us that there is something important going on that we need to look at deeply.

So I did a series of sittings with this question of what I want to be doing with my time and discovered that it has several layers to it.  When sitting with this and other questions it is important to do it in a relaxed way without trying to force things and make something happen.  If something useful bubbles up it’s a good idea to write it down.  And sitting with a question is not something you do only once—it needs to be done with some regularity for a while.

The first layer is the question “What are the things I do not want to be doing in my life as it is today?”  This a powerful practice.  When I sat with the question the answers that came to me were as follows.  I share my answers here as an example and an inspiration for getting started with your own answers.  I will also offer a few suggestions for how to work with these issues.  So here are my answers.  Your answers are likely to be similar but also different.

• I know that I do not want to spend my time complaining about things, talking about what is wrong with things—this seems a total waste of energy and leaves me in an agitated, suffering state of mind.  I have very low tolerance for this and have learned a few skills to stop it or extricate myself from it gracefully: “How about we talk about something positive for a while?”

• I do not want to spend much time chatting about stuff nobody actually cares about just to fill space with words “making conversation.”  As part of my desire to live intentionally and assertively, I am learning how to gently “steer” social interactions into more positive areas or extricate myself if it becomes clear that this is not possible. I also need to remember that if my experience is unsatisfactory, I need to ask myself, what am I doing to help create this situation?  Usually I’m being passive, and need to quit it.  

• I do not want to be doing a lot of hard manual labor or doing work that is hugely repetitive.  I have three decades of habit energy that I need to let go of and not just continue with this because it is what I have done in the past in building Ahimsa Acres and I really enjoyed it.

• I do not want to be living in fear.  This is a big one and can be tricky because fear is an emotion and it will arise in all of us—it is not possible to arrange my life in such a way that fear doesn’t arise.  But I can have a relationship with fear that does not ruin the quality of my life. 

        I can practice identifying the things that I am doing that create unnecessary fear and then stop doing them.  I can, for example, limit my exposure to mainstream news media and negative people. A second practice is to learn to deal with the fear that does arise in a way that allows me to make my peace with it and not be dominated, driven, or crippled by it, or have it color everything in my life and take the joy out of it.  (See the following blog posts for explanation of how to do this:  1) Meditations for Difficult Emotions, September 28, 2023, and “Just Be with It,” July 7, 2023, and  Lessons of the Heart, Part 4: Working with Fear, January 31, 2023.                       

       After reading Chapter 6 of Still Here, I got the idea of writing down all the things that I have some fear about (please make up your own list!):  Ending up with no friends; Ending up with no one to take care of Sandy and me when we need it; Sandy’s death; My death; Trump supporters taking over the country; Climate change making living here horrible; Being sick. 

       My practices here are to remind myself that all these things are in the future and some of them are only possibilities, not facts.  I also can practice doing the things that I can do to stay healthy, prevent climate change, and so on.  Taking positive action in this way helps to diminish my suffering in the present moment.    Also useful is practicing acceptance of what is real in the present moment--living alone for example, or having a US president with bad intentions in power.    

       And finally, I can practice sitting with fear and making peace with its presence (dropping the resistance to fear’s presence).  Working through these processes can be scary at times but also extremely helpful in loosening fear’s grip—I highly recommend making your own list of fears and then working with them.        

The second layer of “What do I want to be doing with my time” focuses on asking myself ”What uses of my time really energize me and make me feel fully alive?”  This brings up a cluster of related subquestions:  Who do I want to be spending time with and how much do I want to be having “alone time?”  How much of my time goes to things that I am “supposed to be doing” or have been involved in for many years but really have no heart connection with anymore?  And again, these questions apply at ALL ages in life.  I found sitting with these questions to be a very powerful practice.  I hope reading my answers brings up some helpful insights into your own situation.  Here are the things that energize me…

• Learning and helping others to learn, helping people to find their true path in life, to heal, to think outside the box, to free themselves, to stop causing so much suffering for themselves and others, sharing my wisdom, being a “tribal elder” and teacher.

• Spending quality time with Sandy and friends. This can be sharing ourselves at a deep level, as well as simply having fun together.  Letting go of toxic relationships also plays a part here.  For me, a toxic relationship can be identified using the following questions. Do I like who I am when I am with this person?  Do I feel energized or depleted.  Optimistic of hopeless?  Does this person want to know me as I am and not make me into something else or try to tell me how I feel or should feel?  

• In the Dhammapada, the Buddha says, “It is good to meet the wise, even better to live with them.  But avoid the company of the immature if you want joy.”  Immaturity really has nothing to do with age, but rather with willful blindness and resistance to growth. And the Buddha’s advice here does not mean we should shun the immature, only that we recognize that they cannot be part of the foundation of our life.                      

• Being around young people who inspire me.    

• Writing (blog, essays, books, emails to personal friends and others).  

• Playing music with other people.   

• Listening to music.  

• Watching quality videos and reading quality books.    

• Being in nature with no tasks occupying me.    

It is worth noting that answering questions about how I want to use my time puts me in a better position to answer another central question:  “Where do I want to live?”   If, for example, I lived in a city house or an assisted living facility, I couldn’t have any interns to teach about alternative paths in life, nor could I grow my own food as easily or be out in the country in the same way.

In Part II of this post we will examine the role of self image in dealing with the ever present process of change in our lives.

 

                                            

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            If you have questions, comments, or ideas for new Blog topics please contact Dale at ahimsaacres@gmail.com.