home
advertise
resources and supporters
subscribe
 

Aging is a Life Process
by Lewis Richmond • San Francisco Bay Area

 

Happy and Sad Face MasksThe 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.

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.

Richmond

Lewis Richmond is the author of Aging as a Spiritual Practice: A Contemplative Guide to Growing Older and Wiser. A Buddhist teacher, Lewis leads a Zen meditation group, Vimala Sangha, and teaches at workshops and retreats throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. He has published three books, including the national bestseller, Work as a Spiritual Practice®. Lewis also leads a discussion on aging as a spiritual practice at Tricycle magazine’s online community site.