Another aspect of getting older for me has been a shift in my viewpoint. All my life I've been accustomed to thinking ahead - plans for the next day, the next week, details of projects for the future, plans to improve my finances, my weight, lists of books to read; I've kept notebooks with outlines that I wanted to expand into well worked out essays. There were friends and acquaintances that I wanted to spend more time with and get to know better. And of course there was spiritual practice - I tried to keep at it day by day, but also looked forward to a more intense level of practice sometime in the future. At work I considered new projects in part for how they would look on my resume. I looked steadily toward the future.
Then, when I was fifty, and had just completed a very difficult project, it dawned on me that I would never top what I'd just finished. Not long after that I began to see that my resume was loosing its importance because I was nearing the end of my working life. This was a pleasant prospect. Although I enjoyed my work - except for the stress of the job itself (computer support) and always being on call - my pleasure was simply that of solving puzzles and making systems work; it was not a vocation that I would miss when I left it.
By then I'd also begun to notice how much longer my view into the past had become. I looked back at decade after decade of my own life - and from knowing various family members and hearing family stories and reflecting on our whole family's past, my view seemed to stretch even beyond my own time into that of my parents and grandparents. All of the 1900's seemed familiar, as though I'd lived it myself, because I'd tasted the flavor it had for Grandma and Grandpa, and my aunts and uncles. There's a certain richness to this experience as well as something strange, almost like remembering a past life.
But as the past expands, through the passage of time itself as well as through knowing other's lives, the future is contracting. Just in this wonderful era when scientific knowledge is exploding, and I have the leisure to explore it, I can no longer realistically think of studying everything that fascinates me. I do not have the span of time required - even if I am very fortunate. I hear of experiments and studies that in a few years or just a few decades will tell us so much more about our world, and our reality. This future is exciting - and yet, in a few decades at the most, I won't even be here. One afternoon while meditating, I looked up at a beautiful statue on my shrine, and an image flashed through my mind of a stranger meditating before that statue sometime in the future. Things that I treasure may still be here, may still be treasured by someone, but not by me. The poignancy of that moment brought tears to my eyes and though it passed quickly, it left its mark.
Of course for a Buddhist there is a context for this awareness - it is even a blessing to be reminded over and over to use my resources well. And in the Buddhist context these reflections are not grim and depressing. In contrast, our western view of aging is practically to deny the process. "You are only as old as you feel..." and so on. There is a strong push to see older people as essentially no different from people in their twenties and thirties (just more medicated, I'm afraid.) Their interests and activities remain the same - and it's thought wonderful that they can still keep up with all the things they always enjoyed. Unfortunately this view misses almost entirely the real differences - and so the value in them is left unexplored. I can't say what that value is - I'm only starting to consider it myself, but it is one of the things that makes my own life interesting right now. I am old and this process is fascinating.
Then, when I was fifty, and had just completed a very difficult project, it dawned on me that I would never top what I'd just finished. Not long after that I began to see that my resume was loosing its importance because I was nearing the end of my working life. This was a pleasant prospect. Although I enjoyed my work - except for the stress of the job itself (computer support) and always being on call - my pleasure was simply that of solving puzzles and making systems work; it was not a vocation that I would miss when I left it.
By then I'd also begun to notice how much longer my view into the past had become. I looked back at decade after decade of my own life - and from knowing various family members and hearing family stories and reflecting on our whole family's past, my view seemed to stretch even beyond my own time into that of my parents and grandparents. All of the 1900's seemed familiar, as though I'd lived it myself, because I'd tasted the flavor it had for Grandma and Grandpa, and my aunts and uncles. There's a certain richness to this experience as well as something strange, almost like remembering a past life.
But as the past expands, through the passage of time itself as well as through knowing other's lives, the future is contracting. Just in this wonderful era when scientific knowledge is exploding, and I have the leisure to explore it, I can no longer realistically think of studying everything that fascinates me. I do not have the span of time required - even if I am very fortunate. I hear of experiments and studies that in a few years or just a few decades will tell us so much more about our world, and our reality. This future is exciting - and yet, in a few decades at the most, I won't even be here. One afternoon while meditating, I looked up at a beautiful statue on my shrine, and an image flashed through my mind of a stranger meditating before that statue sometime in the future. Things that I treasure may still be here, may still be treasured by someone, but not by me. The poignancy of that moment brought tears to my eyes and though it passed quickly, it left its mark.
Of course for a Buddhist there is a context for this awareness - it is even a blessing to be reminded over and over to use my resources well. And in the Buddhist context these reflections are not grim and depressing. In contrast, our western view of aging is practically to deny the process. "You are only as old as you feel..." and so on. There is a strong push to see older people as essentially no different from people in their twenties and thirties (just more medicated, I'm afraid.) Their interests and activities remain the same - and it's thought wonderful that they can still keep up with all the things they always enjoyed. Unfortunately this view misses almost entirely the real differences - and so the value in them is left unexplored. I can't say what that value is - I'm only starting to consider it myself, but it is one of the things that makes my own life interesting right now. I am old and this process is fascinating.
