Aging is stressful.

Aging is a lifelong futile grasping for certainty, permanence and immortality.

Whenever we let go the riddle is solved.

Old age, illness and death are all workable.

These are the Four Ennobling Truths of Aging. If they sound vaguely familiar, it is because they are patterned after the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, expressed 2500 years ago and still inspiring millions of awakening beings. The Buddha taught that when a person grasps at experience, there is suffering; and when a person lets go and learns to meet life experience with equanimity, compassion, and wisdom, suffering is dissipated.

Learning to open to suffering and the suffering of others was the Path which the Buddha offered to his followers, a transformative and empowering Path. Millions of followers across two millennia have embodied and verified that Path. Part of what they have discovered is that compassion and wisdom flow from the steady application of mindfulness to the stresses and challenges of life. Thich Nhat Hahn has accurately named it the “Miracle of Mindfulness.” This blog will focus on the exploration of a mindful Path in the process of aging, an approach to Aging as a Spiritual Practice.

In the story of Oedipus and the Sphinx, a riddle is posed: ‘What is it that walks on four legs in the morning, on two at noon, and on three in the evening?’ Oedipus answered: ‘A man, who as an infant crawls on all fours, as a youth walks on two, and in old age walks with a stick. Part of Oedipus’ wisdom was his insight into the inevitability of aging, and his equanimity in the face of it.

Let’s take a closer look at these four statements.

Aging is stressful. It starts with gentle reminders when muscles lose their tone, eyes dim, ears strain to hear. The rolodex of our memories becomes full to overflowing until the retrieval of information is frustratingly slower. Visits to the doctors become more frequent and more disheartening. Sleep becomes simultaneously more difficult, more necessary, and less satisfying. Loneliness, embarrassment, powerlessness, despair, depression, and fear become daily visitors to the altar of our awareness. Our friends move away, become sick, or die. Our family structure becomes decapitated as the older generation dies off. Inevitably our own generation of siblings and cousins take their places as the elder statesmen and women, reiterating the same litany of complaints and regrets, another variation on a familiar organ recital. Gradually our own generation begins to die.

One person lamented that the Golden Years does not arrive with altogether warm and fuzzy feelings. It fact, they arrive bringing disquieting discoveries:

“thinning hair, declining vision and hearing, slower, less certain movement, arthritic hands, increasing weight, more time spent with doctors, now including specialists and technicians administering tests. All seemingly bringing the same message — exercise more and lose weight. A repeating message which only brings no delight but gathers momentum.”

Memory is stressful, both in the coming and the going. The aging brain is a “post-traumatic” brain. It contains trauma in every corner: memories of assassinations, wars, death, sickness, personal tragedies, and not just headlines from forty, fifty years ago, continuing reminders from yesterday’s bad news. On the one hand we are conditioned to believe that the aging memory is full of regret and disappointment. On the other, we begin to lose the details of our own life: the names of familiar places, people and things are retrieved slowly or not at all.

But is it possible to re-frame the traumatic memories the aging brain still holds on to? Of course, in addition to the trauma and loss, there are contrasting images of joy, and wonder, victory and accomplishment, praise and fulfillment. Are we condemned to calibrate like grocers on the scales of profit and loss – good and bad? Positive or negative? Up or down? Is meaning ever found in dualistic comparison? How does memory integration proceed? How do we link up the disparate incidents of our lives into a narrative that forgets all dualism and has meaning?

These are some of the questions to be explored in this blog.

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I decided to take a walk in the rain before I posted this. Getting the blood circulating is always a good idea for an aging body with spiritual ambitions. As I walked through the neighborhood, I was struck once again by the beauty of autumn, the rain-soaked bark of trees highlighting leaves changing to red, orange and yellow, gray skies pressing down gently on all the eyes peruse. Suddenly I caught sight of a tender-hearted leaf, dangling from a branch, saturated with rain and ready to release to the unknown. One beat, and then it let go its hold to the tree, and floated down into the duff below. How many leaves have aged today, released today, begun another cycle of return today? Was it stressful for them? Why does autumn make us so sad?