Ageing gracefully

"Your face is marked with lines of life, put there by love and laughter, suffering and tears. It's beautiful."
~ Lynsay Sands, an award winning Canadian author.

Ageing is to know how inevitable the inevitable is. Yet, if one does not resist the apparently inevitable, one will never know that the best is yet to come. Ageing is not about postponing, disguising, or reversing ageing. People do not grow old. When they stop growing, they become old. Eldership is the culminating stage of a life fully lived.

In growing old, there is also a fresh opportunity to look to the inner life, to revisit the deeper questions of our human existence that, a busy career, family responsibilities, and other distractions might have long pushed into the background. A regular contemplative practice can indeed be a part of this journey, and Buddhism offers rich resources in this area. To accept ageing with grace is to learn the lessons of wisdom that ageing teaches.

The Buddha had a lot to say about the inevitability of loss and change. What could all of us, ageing folks and the effervescent youth who walk the same path, learn from his teaching today? The Buddha taught that "everything changes," and many of today's Buddhists repeat that teaching as a patent truism without giving thought to its deeper sense.

Everything we love and cherish is going to age, decline, and eventually disappear, including our own precious selves. Suddenly this "truism" takes on a different coloration and urgency. It is all going to go, all of it. In fact, that process is always happening; everything is aging, all the time; and moving towards eventual demise and departure. How is it that we did not notice?

Warming

Once when Buddha was seated warming his back in the western sun; Ananda went to him and massaged his limbs with his hand and said, "It is amazing, lord. It is astounding, how the Blessed One's complexion is no longer so clear and bright; his limbs are flabby and wrinkled; his back, bent forward; there's a discernible change in his faculties - the faculty of the eye, the faculty of the ear, the faculty of the nose, the faculty of the tongue, the faculty of the body." The Buddha said, "That is the way it is, Ananda.

When young, one is subject to ageing; when healthy, subject to illness; when alive, subject to death.

The complexion is no longer so clear and bright; the limbs are flabby and wrinkled; the back, bent forward; there is a discernible change in the faculties - the faculty of the eye, the faculty of the ear, the faculty of the nose, the faculty of the tongue, the faculty of the body. Those who live to a hundred are all headed to an end in death."

From: Jara Sutta, on old age. "The ageing of beings, their old age, brokenness of teeth, grayness of hair, wrinkling of skin, decline of life, weakness of faculties - this is called ageing. With the arising of birth, there is the arising of ageing and death." Sammaditthi Sutta, Discourse on Right View.

History

All of us, everything in the world, animate or inanimate, administered or not, will eventually be consigned to: Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Amongst us, the wisest minds are those who refuse all the negative inevitabilities. In youth, life is full of opportunity; and when things go wrong, there are second chances. On the downhill slope of life, we start to notice the worrisome infinitude of time.

We go to more funerals, we visit more hospitals, we view the daily news with more distance, and we start to feel an autumnal chill in the air.

There are joys too, of course - grandchildren, time for travel, (if we can afford it!), the pursuit of long-dreamed-of avocations and new beginnings, as well as the energising impulse to "give back" to community and society. When the time comes; we can, although we may not always, assume the mantle of eldership as a kind of birthright. Traditional cultures have all honored and supported the elderly, giving their elders specific roles and tasks to do.

In today's wired, youth-oriented world, elders do not typically garner that same kind of respect.

These days, each of us has to imagine and construct our own expression of ageing, and find ways to bring it forward. Today's youth do not realise that, as the body wanes, the mind waxes.

For the first time in human history, people will be living in relative good health into their 70s, 80s, and even 90s. What are we all going to do with that extra gift of time? Each day and every day for the next 20 years, thousands in Sri Lanka will turn 65. We are a fast ageing society and elders will constitute 25 percent of our population by the year 2030.

This is a fact with enormous implications for our politics, our society - and, I believe, our spiritual life. I have come to believe, as I am sure most of us would, that spiritual practice helps us to age gracefully, and that the last part of life is a fruitful time for spiritual inquiry and practice.

This does not mean that we should not be useful to the family and community or avoid taking an active part in family and community affairs. The danger of old age is that we may start acting old.

Wisdom does not necessarily come with age; but to know how to grow old is the masterwork of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living. Age is not only the state of one's body, but it is also the state of one's mind.

You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubts, as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fears, as young as your hope, as old as your despair.

It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved; but by reflection, force of character, and judgment.

In these qualities, old age is usually, not only not poorer; but is even richer. Hence, remember that: Spring still makes spring in the mind, even if sixty years had passed.

Never retire. Michelangelo was carving the Rondanini Pieta just before he died at 89. Verdi finished his opera Falstaff at 80.

The 80-year-old Spanish artist Goya scrawled on a drawing, "I am still learning." Love, humour, and wisdom are ageless; be filled with these and be young beyond age. "Age is an issue of mind over matter.

If you don't mind, it doesn't matter," said Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, an American author and humorist. Remember that, beautiful young people are an accident of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art; all who keep the ability to see beauty, never grow old.

A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old.

It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children; but the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless, are the true gold mines of a culture.

Thus, elder-ship is culture specific. It shows up in different ways in different cultures, at different times and places.

Elders are not the same as identified leaders; often elders are invisible, behind the scenes, shining like gold nuggets at the bottom of the stream.

Elder-ship means to take responsibility, to mentor, to offer perspective. I think contemplative practice can give us inner strength and help us develop the resources to assume our elders' role in a troubled and often rudderless world that needs us, now perhaps more than ever.

As for me, how can I look at aging as the enemy? It happens whether I like it or not and no one is set apart from growing old; it comes to us all. Youth passes from everyone, so why deny it. I am proud of my age.

I am proud that I have survived this planet for as long as I have, and should I end up withered, wrinkled and with a lifetime of great wisdom, I will any day trade the few years of youth for the sophistication of a great mind - for however long it lasts.

I wish all Elders would look at life with the same attitude as I do, as the world celebrates on October 1, the International Day of Older Persons.

See you this day next week. Until then, keep thinking; keep laughing. Life is mostly about these two activities.

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