theexperienceofaging

[theexperienceofaging]

“If I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance, or repeat a single Thursday that has passed! But here comes Friday with a script I haven’t seen.”

Wistawa Szymboska

LIFE OF FRIDAYS

When I was a child in Houston, Texas, my best friend was Cherry. While we played Bomba the jungle boy and Sheba the jungle queen in her magnolia tree and nursed World War II soldiers back to health in her backyard and hugged and kissed the large white columns on her front porch who were our boyfriends, her mother, Josephine Lowman, wrote a syndicated column called “Why Grow Old?” Why indeed! If it were up to me, I wouldn’t and I’m probably not alone. But someone with a higher pay grade made these rules. No matter what Josephine thought, or what we might prefer, there is no way to rebel, escape, or hide from death. Josephine herself aged and died.

Growing old is a shock. I have friends in their 70’s who worry about issues of aging and I did too, but from this perch I really had no idea of what lay ahead. In reality, we never know what lays ahead. As far as I know, I didn’t ask to be born. If the rumors are right, before birth I had been living in a very high-class continuing care community, some call it heaven, where everyone thinks you are perfect and you think they are all perfect and there is no you and they. Just one big happy blob. Then I got placed in a tiny warm bath perhaps disturbed a little by sudden movements or loud sounds, but overall a nice room at the inn. Without warning, I am evicted down a tight dark tunnel, squeezed and pushed, into bright lights and loud noises and slapped across the bottom. Where am I? What’s going on? I liked it better in the other place. Who are these people cooing at me? They seemed nice at first but I soon discovered they didn’t always think I was perfect. I wouldn’t have chosen those two people if I had known what was coming but we never do, do we?

Later when I wondered how I would know who to marry, my mother said “you’ll know”. But she and my father fought all the time so what had she known? My first marriage ended in divorce. What I “knew” were the good things and they continued, but there were a lot of bad things I didn’t know until later and they continued too and finally won the battle. It wasn’t just him; I contributed to the bad pile too. Yes, you know but what you don’t know is what you don’t know—and there are always things you don’t know.

Becoming a mother—OMG! First your body expands in ways it has never experienced before. Then you have to give birth so you take a lot of classes about breathing special ways with the illusion the it will all be controllable and bearable. Nobody tells you how much it hurts and it really hurts! And nobody tells you that you’ll lose the life you once thought you had. Now all you do is heat bottles (we heated bottles in the ’60’s), feed, change diapers, rinse diapers for the diaper service and walk your baby like a dog—only the baby doesn’t bark, s/he just cries a lot. I will add that despite my (and everybody’s) lack of preparation for motherhood, it is one thing I thank God (if there is anyone who answers to that name) for those three precious beings who had to suffer my poor parental skills but have given me great joy.

Divorce, dating at a later age, aloneness-who knew? You could say it’s like improv; you are given a life circumstance and you find some way to act it out—hopefully amusing—but it’s not real and you go home later. In life, you are given a circumstance and you have to act it out but it’s not necessarily funny and you can’t go home later because you already live there.

I now live in a Community Care Residential Community so I have talked with other oldsters about how they feel about this stage of life. It is a shock to find that when someone is talking, you can hear all the sounds but can’t make out all the words. Or that you have to use a walker so you won’t fall and break some bone or that your eyesight is dimming or even scarier, you can’t remember what you did yesterday and from what I’ve seen, it gets scarier than that.

We all used to think we were someone in particular—that someone traveled a lot, had a successful career, liked ketchup on their french fries, did some mountain climbing and was a good dancer. But where has s/he gone? In this version, you are just an old person like other old people. You might like to think you’re at least a crone or a wise old man but to the rest of the world you’re more like a geezer. You do, however, get cheaper movie tickets and other discounts for having white hair and a cane.

And, of course, old age is shadowed by death. Carlos Castaneda said that death was over his left shoulder. I don’t know which of my shoulders he hovers over but I know he is aware of me and I’m aware of him. And I’m certainly not prepared for that particular exit despite having read 20 near death books and other self help books on how to die. Like birth it’s a passage to another country but not like France or Spain—this one doesn’t have a guide book and we don’t know the language or the customs. And we don’t even know if it exists. I fear dying will hurt and I don’t like hurting. My only comfort is that everyone else has done it so I guess I can too. I felt that way about giving birth and it certainly was no picnic but the results were wonderful. Hopefully death will be similar. And there’s always the possibility that there is no afterwards. So what? Perhaps I will be a raindrop (a raindrop with my personality, of course). Like everything else there’s no way to prepare for being a raindrop either. That’s life—and maybe death too—no way to know.

[theexperienceofaging]

A WAY OF ENDING

Familiarity can be comforting and also imprisoning. During the three years of Covid isolation I had become used to mostly staying in my familiar home, my familiar living room, my familiar porch. Coming to a Continuing Care Community at age 88 upended all that. Now I was in a new space, much less space, new people—all old and lots of them—new routines. At first I felt quite lost. Where now was my “home?” I grieved my old life as thin as it had become in those three years and my beloved home with its view of an Audubon preserve. Would there ever be a home again? When I saw friends from the “outside”, I was so grateful for their familiarity. We knew each other. I knew what we loved to talk about, I knew what we found funny, I knew what activities we enjoyed together and most importantly, I knew they cared about me and I cared about them.

Here I walked down long halls, took elevators. Many people smiled and said hello and introduced themselves but I didn’t know any of them. The Staff were wonderful. Your light is broken? Someone comes and fixes it. You’ve lost weight and your pants need to be taken in? There’s a seamstress who comes every two weeks. And I didn’t have to cook, except for breakfast. I haven’t had that level of caretaking since my mother changed my diapers and put a bottle in my mouth when I cried. I appreciated all this but a deeper level of acceptance and knowing were still absent. It wasn’t “home.” This was the beginning of a kind of transition I had never experienced before. A few months passed. I was observing and learning about this new land and culture I had landed in. In looking back, I realized that after the years of Covid let up, I had little energy to create a new life and the comforting familiarity had become turgid and stagnant. But here, I simply have to walk down the hall and take an elevator to have a new life. There is a choice of activities. The poetry and writing class stir me to to think newer thoughts. The art class starts me on a new skill. Talking to so many new people is stimulating and exhausting. The game of “getting to know you” is often repetitive and superficial. Where did you come from? What did you do? Some political talk since the majority of residents are liberal and we sing in the same choir. Bad days consist of talk about the quality of the food, the usual weather comments, how the place used to be and other subjects of little interest. Good days -a lot of friendliness and feeling a part of a yet unknown community and beginning to feel sparks of connection. It begins to feel like a small town or village where spoken or unspoken there is the deeper knowledge that this is the final chapter. Physical disabilities are talked about in an open and accepting way; everyone has something wrong with them. “What did you say?” is the mantra. We are all in the anteroom of death and friendships literally die. There is some acknowledgment of this; it’s not deeply engaged but it is a constant silent knowing.

I begin to have a sense of who I connect more easily with, offering the possibility of a deeper friendship. And who I enjoy in limited but pleasurable ways and who I avoid. I realize how deeply I have wanted community. This might not be the utopia I would have wanted but I feel grateful that I have the means to be taken care of in a place that strives to make these last years safer, easier, stimulating. Isolation is the new plague and I have been granted the embrace of a community with all its gifts and flaws to continue my life, pursue meaning and pleasure and be surprised by what can arise from one day to the next. I am feeling that I have a place here; I am part of the community and that steadies me. Life now offers possibility. I had forgotten there was possibilty. It could be the end any day or any month or year but as long as it isn’t there’s more life to be lived.

[theexperienceofaging]

Canoe Meadows in late November

[theexperienceofaging]

MORE ON GETTING

I’ve been taking pictures since the ‘80′s, shooting whatever appealed to me without any particular focus.  In the last eight years or so, I have begun to hunker down; so that there is a coherence and evolution in what I shoot.  For awhile I shot nudes and that led to placing the nudes into backgrounds with a kind of narrative; then I started shooting multiple exposures and blurs in camera and took classes with two wonderful photographers in England who were masters of that.  That merged with shooting blurred dancers which is what I’ve been focusing on for the past two years.  Because I’ve been able to exhibit these photographs I have often had to write an artist’s statement.  Each statement has always included the thought that taking a picture for me is an act of love and greed.  Moments of love for what I see and greed to have and hold it.  This involves alot of getting.

Until recently I didn’t understand the boundaries this imposed on my seeing.  But life offered me a moment--one of those moments I assume we all have the good fortune to experience every so often--when you are doing whatever you are doing and by the grace of god or whoever is in charge, you discover something new (and important).

In this case, I was doing an art class on Zoom with Hojin Kimmel of the Zen Mountain Monastery (highly recommended).  Hojin does a dharma talk and then offers prompts and we go off for a half hour and do art, doesn’t matter what kind of art and then come back to share.  I walked over to the side of my glassed-in porch to look at my back yard and the Audubon Preserve, Canoe Meadows, that I am fortunate enough to abut.  When we moved into this house four years ago, I thought I had landed in Paradise to have such a beautiful view.  For the two years following, I thought I had become habituated to it except for special sunsets and weather phenomena because if it wasn’t “performing”, I wasn’t very interested.  A sort-of “who cares?”  At that moment, I realized that it wasn’t habituation at all, but that I had only been able to see the meadow if a good photograph offered itself.  It didn’t occur to me that the meadow and pond had anything to say if they didn’t meet my needs and desires.

Because of that opening, I have fallen back in love with Canoe Meadows.  Now, usually at dusk, I sit in the back yard and notice whatever the land wants to show me and it does speak.  Some wordless language that I understand in parts of me who have been deaf, dumb and blind for a long time.  Now I receive the meadows as it is at those moments, discovering it anew each time I give myself to it.

It happened to me once before when I was in France many years ago at a three week retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh.  Inbetween sittings, I took alot of pictures of poppies in the wheat field and other beautiful sights.  Everyday we did walking meditation up and down a road next to the vineyards.  One day I looked more closely at the grass by the side of the road which seemed to glow with a rainbow of colors.  I, of course, ran for my camera.  When I later looked at the pictures, it was just grass and weeds, nothing special.  I began to understand that my sight had expanded due to this marination in slowness and that always looking for pictures offered beauty but a much narrower visual field.  I stopped taking pictures for six moonths until gradually the magic disappeared and I went back to love and greed, not really understanding what had caused the “magic.”  Mary Trump’s title, “Too Much and Never Enough” is a perfect description.  The camera offers endless opportunities for what an old boyfriend of mine used to say:  “I have to keep feeding the machine.”

In this culture I think many of us suffer from our own unique form of this disorder.  There definitely is too much and hardly ever enough.  COVID  was responsible for slowing me down to there was space to feel the gentle whack on one part of me that was asleep.  May we all have the opportunity for a gentle whack in order to wake up to the knowledge that while GETTING works, it only yields a bucket out of a vast unknown ocean of mystery.  However, what can be received seems without horizon.

[theexperienceofaging]

TOILET PAPER

I have been know to myself and others as a shopaholic--not in debt, but restlessness=a trip to Marshall’s.  The hypnotic search to GET SOMETHING--maybe a particular something--maybe anything seductive and  shiny because it might, it just might, make a difference.  And sometimes just the thrill of the hunt could make a difference--a temporary respite.  As I said in a previous blog, the shiny object becomes a dull object fairly quickly, resting among its peers, silently crying, “look at me; use me.”  But no, there are too many of you; I can’t choose.  It has become more and more apparent how fruitless the consumer pilgrimage is, even tho, like any good “holic/addict” I could still be lured when life dissatisfaction offered no other solution.

A few months ago I signed up for a photo trip to Japan taking place toward the end of this year.  The price tag was more than I could reasonably afford but I deeply wanted to go, so I vowed I would watch my thoughtless spending.   For the last few months driven by a deeper desire than sweaters and shoes, I have regularly asked myself “do you really need this?”  That was the criteria:  Yes to toilet paper and food, but if I just wanted it, NO.  And it has been working; I buy much less useless stuff, even I am still tempted by art supplies I might or might not use.  However, the success is not really what I am writing about.

What has accompanied this change of habit is an awareness of regular dissatisfaction.  I have discovered viscerally how little the search or the acquisition provided.  When I admit I don’t need something, I also feel the raw wanting for something that my past misadventures never even provided.  And it’s a paradox that part of me wishes for that delusional state I used to enjoy and part of me is glad to know this partial truth--that what I thought I wantd is not really what I want..

A.H. Almaas says in The Unfolding Now:  “...And we would love to be able...to be with ourselves in such a way that we can see where we are, notice what is happening and know how we feel about it.”

Yes.  And Enough.  I want to feel that whatever is happening and whatever I am feeling is Enough.  This experience of regular dissatisfaction is teaching me the hard way--the hard way often being the best teacher--that inner issues require inner solutions.  God, what a cliche and how hard it is to really know that.  This has further morphed--that without these desires, does anything really matter?  I have long grounded myself in wanting (not just things--everything) and with the wanting waning I am ungrounded, upended.  My feet have always moved toward promises made and promises unkept. But there were always, always more promises.  Now, despite an expressed desire for deeper human/spiritual states, I don’t know how to move; these don’t have road signs.  They don’t just manifest because you do this or that.  The path is unknown--to be discovered--not reassuriing.

When I made the decision not to buy things I didn’t need, I made it only with the idea of saving money for a desired trip.  I did suspect that not yielding to these desire rushes might have other effects, but that was just a hunch, and who knows where anything really leads?  A long time ago, I read what I would call a hippie book that said something like “we never really know what’s happening” and it always stuck with me.  All I know now is that I’m on an unknown leash and will follow its lead happily or unhappily.  It’s just a reminder that we are on a path we only think we create.

[theexperienceofaging]

AM AND WAS

I have been very busy for several months now.  It seems that knowing and feeling where you actually are, go out the window with dumping the garbage, cleaning the cat litter, returning phone calls.....  But the other night I watched a TV show about these old guys (older than me) growing up in the Bronx, reminiscing about their lives and their days at DeWit Clinton High School.  They talked about the preciousness of having stayed friends their whole lives.  In the show, they return to the high school and talk to the seniors about what it was like for them then and the seniors share what it is like for them now.  The show ends with the seniors graduating to a rousing speech by their peer and the old guys going on with what is left of their lives.  I was quite moved--having a sense of what it was like to graduate with your whole life just waiting to happen--the view is empty and you can fill it with not quite unlimited possibilities, depending on how you see yourself.  There seemed to be so much possibility in younger years just over THERE, so that looked like the road to take.  Who cared or even knew about Now then. Everything that was going to happen was going to happen later. Oh, the excitement and the fear.

Aging has a different view--a very long rear view--the knowledge that I have basically lived my life and I know what happened; I know how it all worked out--with only a little unknown remaining.  It isn’t that I spend alot of time thinking about the past--actually it seems very much over but this is a stage of aging (at least for me) to say goodbye to what will not come again; to grieve because there are losses of ways of being; perspectives that belong to another younger time;  diminished opportunities; friends gone and a body afraid to run for fear of falling.  Along with my slowdowns and lettings go, California burns and there is the terror of a possible four more years  with the Orange Terminator.

  I started this blog commenting on the narcotic of busyness.  Whatever event or feeling cuts thru the fog of getting things done and being annoyed by the roadblocks and ornaryness (don’t know how to spell that word) of daily life, wakes me up to remember that the NOW road is what is left and that each NOW that I remember to inhabit extends my life more even than the touted benefit of exercise.  It sounds both soppy and profoundly true--laughably true--because why have I been slouching towards consciousness by meditating and inquiring for the last 30 years except to BE HERE NOW--the hardest shift of all.  I can’t seem to find a good ending to this particular blog, but that’s ok because right NOW, I just want another cup of coffee.

[theexperienceofaging]

YOU AND YOU

[theexperienceofaging]

YOU AND YOU

How do you feel about yourself?  Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you that you can’t love anyone else if you can’t love yourself.  I’ve never totally understood what it meant to love yourself.  I’ve enjoyed myself; I’ve been glad to be me; I’ve surprised myself--and, of course, I’ve had plenty of moments, especially in my younger years when I didn’t think much of myself.  Loving myself?  Not so sure what that means.  Most people who come to see the therapist me, in addition to other problems, believe they’re not ok--some don’t even know what’s not ok about them, and some think if they were only more of this or less of that, they would be ok--and some just keep watching how everyone else does it to try to figure out how they should do it.  Because of inner work and grace on a spiritual path called The Diamond Approach I learned after years of self misery that how I felt about myself was really how my mother felt about herself and who can tell the difference between your mother and you at such a young age?  I had swallowed it whole and thought it was me.

That’s not the whole story.  I do have wishes to be different.  I wish I could love more deeply and widely; I wish I could feel the oneness of the universe; I wish I were a better artist. I don’t give myself a hard time, mostly, about my perceived lacks, I just wish I could and were.  There is nothing I can do to make that happen--that I know of.  I follow the practices of my spiritual path when I remember to and I wish I remembered more often.  I don’t seem to have any trouble remembering to check my email.  If checking your email got you to heaven, I would have a flowing white gown, a melodious harp,  giant flapping wings and a brilliant halo.  But being curious and inquiring about your experiences, meditating, and sensing your body doesn’t offer instant obvious rewards.  When I check my email, like Pavlov’s dog, I get a hit of seratonin and emotionally salivate.   But when I get curious and inquire about an interaction with a friend which felt off in some mysterious way then there’s no seratonin and my amydala does its jig.  And why doesn’t meditation drop gobs of seratonin, making us run for our pillow every morning?  I like meditating but I have to push myself a little uphill to get to it, whereas with email I sled effortlessly down the hill, only straining slightly to click the mouse.  Because we don’t wake up most mornings greeting the new day with joy and wonder, coffee and email are what we get.  If we did wake up filled with joy and wonder each morning, Facebook would be out of business and we wouldn’t have elected Donald Trump.  We’re mostly trying to keep our heads above water while smiling so no one will know how tiring the incessant dog paddle is.  I heard a comedian tonight who said and I paraphrase:  We don’t die quick enough.  We just keep on living.  How long can we keep doing this?  We have to keep coming up with things to do day after day.

I do alot of complaining about the everydayness of life in this blog and fortunately it isn’t always this way.  Yesterday I sat on the back glassed-in porch overlooking a meadow and pond, in a kind of langorous haze looking at the messiness of August.  Flowers dying, the latecomers arriving, a few too many weeds.  Sunny with glare and it all feels quintessentially August.  There are days of summer that feel so completely and fully summer that they cause a kind of melting gratitude just for the knowing of it.  The isness of summer doesn’t happen in quite that way in any other season.  I have moments of joy when rampant spring appears with every which way of color and shape. if it’s a good Autumn, which doesn’t happen as often anymore, the colors are a regular eye feast and I deeply appreciate the bare stark bones of winter, but I get cold easily, shiver, contract and go indoors.  The world frequently feeds me just by being what it is; that is the magic, being what it is.  Which brings me back to where I started but a step further on.  We too would be magic if we were who we really are.  For that to happen, we would have to really, really know who and what we are.  I’ve had experiences of being a me, a totally unfamiliar me, definitely not the one who checks her email every morning, that grant me glimpses of other planes, hithertofore unknown capacities, but they come unbidden and leave unbidden and they are deaf to being bidden.  So I continue to be helpless, sometimes dreary, sometimes amazed, sometimes shimmery--  still searching for who I really am wondering if there would be anyone left to love myself if I found it.

[theexperienceofaging]

WHAT’S CRAZY?

Do you ever feel when you watch the evening news or read the paper that we are living in an insane asylum?  I.E.  large groups of people put on special clothes and fly long distances to kill each other##??!!  These are considered sane people led by sane leaders who tell them they should do this because these other people are bad.  When you belong to this system,  sometimes this makes perfect sense (Hitler) but when you leave the herd for a few minutes and watch from a nearby hill, it looks nuts!  There is identifiable insanity that we all agree on; the CIA is broadcasting over MSNBC and is telling me to burn down Walmart.  A man who kills small children in a classroom is clearly crazy by anyone’s measure.  In an article in the NY Times today, Richard Friedman M.D. says that someone is technically crazy  if the person is “rendered unable to comprehend the nature of his actions.”  Why isn’t it considered delusional to kill anyone for any reason? (except self defense).  The fact that you believe something doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing.  A belief is just a particular set of thoughts accompanied by strong feelings based on your interpretation of reality.  I think that our definitions of insanity have nothing to do with reality.  We have just decided that whatever the herd does is sane because they are all doing it.  It’s ok to disagree with it, but not to think that it’s crazy.

Individually, people suffer from beliefs that don’t accord with any but the herd reality.  They think they should be prettier, handsomer, smarter, richer, thinner (never fatter).  That’s how they experience it when they are adults, but it starts when they’re children and they get yelled at and ignored and they think it must be because they are or aren’t ....what?  They don’t even know.  It must be them; it couldn’t be those big powerful mommys and daddys they love so much; after all, they know everything, don’t they? 

And then there’s climate change.  We should have meat rationing; we should be figuring out how to use land; huge amounts of money should be going into research developing alternate energy sources, etc, etc.  So, not only are we willing to send people off to kill other people and be killed, we are also willing to commit mass suicide while watching  “Game of Thrones.”  Isn’t that a little crazy??  And then there’s Trump--nothing more needs to be said.

I have a belief system too:  I believe we are all one; how we treat each other has profound inner effects down to our cells and profound outer effects that extend,  probably infinitely.  The universe is made of love.  These beliefs are also just thoughts accompanied by strong feelings but I would make a pragmatic argument:  the proof is in the pudding.  One playground filled with let’s-all-love-one-another children and adults probably looks pretty happy while the every-man-for-himself playground has bullies,  kids playing at shooting each other and, at a more serious level, children in cages without parents and we all know it gets worse than that.

I wish I were so evolved that I actually knew we were all one and knew that the universe was made of love, but for now, I’ll have to settle for just believing it.  The problem for me and most everyone else is that we live in this world and I still love hamburgers and have yet to find out that my deeply experienced boundaries are just an illusion.  And I have yet to discover what it would be like to paddle happily in the divine puddle with every single other who is not really an other.  That would be sane.

[theexperienceofaging]

PICTURE OF A THOUGHT

This is a quote I can’t shack that I thought was illustrated by the photo above or below--I still can’t maneuver this very well, so don’t know where it was placed:  “When we don’t want to open ourselves to others, we may introduce ourselves to each other as if we were good friends.  We may fight with each other as if we were bad enemies.  Nevertheless, we don’t manifest completely who we are and what we are.  We don’t fully reveal ourselves.  We still want to preserve and protect ourselves from the big wound, the big heart within us.”  Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

[theexperienceofaging]

PICTURE OF A THOUGHT

[theexperienceofaging]

TIME AND NOT KNOWING

Recently my friend told me she had to buy a new car and added that if it were low mileage, it could be her last car.  I realized that after a certain age calculations about large scale decisions--buying houses, cars, moving--are based on an inner semi-conscious fantasy about how long we have to go.  Things that you wanted to do earlier in life which were put off because of finances or convenience, you may decide to do Now, because, well, who knows...?  Not only who knows when we each will die but who knows if your legs will work next year or if you’ll be on chemo or if your memory will decide to vacate and reside in an alternate reality.  As I’ve said before, we don’t quite get that we will actually, really vanish from this plane, but the rumor seems true scientifically and from personal experience, so it becomes a vaguely sensed ruler measuring life decisions that appear.

A friend my age (84, so you see I am qualified to write this blog), was diagnosed with cancer and we ruefully noted that each unusual pain or physical occurence carries with it the thought of “is this it?; is this the one?”  He might survive his cancer but there is now the possibility that he has met the owner of the scythe and that this foreshortened future has a different clock that does not read time in the way we are used to reading it.

Aging is a strange creature.  I don’t know where I am heading, I don’t know how long it will take to get there, but unlike the child who says, “Mommy, are we there yet?”, I never ask that question-- partly because I don’t know where “there” is, partly because there is no one to ask and partly because I don’t really want to know.  As a result, much of everyday feels like it always does:  the dishes, the news, the phone calls, the emails, the TV, with only furtive glances towards the black hole that lies infinitely somewhere--perhaps as close as our heart.

Most of us don’t know how to relate to true mystery; that’s why books and movies and TV shows are so satisfying--eventually we know the mystery will be unravelled and all will be revealed.  The anxiety of not knowing is pleasurable because we know we will know.  But how to relate to a mystery that is a question without an answer?  We (pardon the liberty of the plural, but it feels like I am also a we); we think we know things; even things we don’t think about knowing we kind of know we know.  And we examine few of them.  We unwittingly poured that cement foundation of beliefs ourselves, aided by family and society and fate.  From moment to moment we assume that what will happen next is within a known purview.  And that the beliefs we hold are true.

Not knowing and knowing that you don’t know is an altered state, rarely achieved, and often greatly feared.  All those dreams of our car being out of control.  Perhaps if we weren’t such a fearful species, we could discover the deep freshness of life that not knowing supposedly brings.  I say supposedly because I am not so evolved that I can forsake my proud, safe knowing self, if I even knew how, and live in the mystery.

[theexperienceofaging]

ME and Walter Mitty

This is a break from aging and dying since it probably starts a few hours or days after birth when your mother doesn’t respond to your hungry wails and you long for the comfort of SOMETHING.

Recently, I went to Marshall’s, perhaps to alleviate the need for Something and I saw a Braun hand mixer which not only pureed your soup by hand but chopped onions in 3 seconds and even whipped cream.  I am not so pathetic that an appliance called Braun makes my heart go pitty-pat and I hope that folks with the last names of Black or Decker or Breville don’t get turned on by slow cookers named after them.  At any rate, I thought I could chop onions in 3 seconds rather than 2 minutes by hand.  I could whip cream and not have to drag the mixer out from the back of the cabinet--or, eureka--I might even make a lemon meringue pie!  You can guess the outcome.  I bought it and it did chop the onions in 3 seconds and I whipped up a marscapone whipped cream confection with chocolate bits that was a dream right after whipping and tasted sort of granular a day later from the fridge.   No lemon meringue pie yet and life continues as usual.

And that is how it works.  The above is a minor Walter Mitty fantasy but it gets bigger.  Several years ago I received an email about a photo trip to Argentina run by two well known photographers whose rates for the trip were even larger than their reputation.   The pictures of the landscape we would be visiting were lunar and sculptural--just the kind of landscape I most love to photograph.  The price was ridiculous but lower than their other trips.  So, I thought, I will go and take pictures as good as the ones advertising the trip.  I will enter contests and win money and sell alot of these photographs.  All this will pay for the trip.  And, guess what?  I totally believed what I thought and signed up.  I did go to Argentina and I took a few nice pictures and saw some remarkable places.  And I sold a few pictures.  All in all, I found my savings considerably diminished and life went on pretty much as usual.

I needed to lose that much money to wake up and look at my impulsive do-whatever-you-feel-like approach with fantasies to justify my actions.  I carefully retraced my fantasy life and remembered the grandiose ideas I  had about how the trip might even make me a little famous and at least pay for itself. It was a little shocking to realize how much Walter Mitty and I had in common.

Since then I have actually paid some attention to the fantasies that accompany my more expensive desires, but even though I asked myself whether I really needed the Braun mixer that could chop onions in 3 seconds and whip cream, I knew I didn’t but I bought it anyway. 

The moral of this cautionary tale is that if you are a bit gluttenous like I am, that each SOMETHING you decide to buy is accompanied by a fantasy of how this particular something will solve some particular problem, perhaps change your life, make you more beautiful or handsome, massively increase your skill level, etc.  And when you get it home, usually (not always), there is a sort of flat feeling as you confront the reality that this SOMETHING is only some thing that will take up space in your cupboard, on your bookshelf, in your closet, or might have a large learning curve.  And, it might bring you some mild temporary pleasure but after that your life will go on pretty much as usual.  Apologies to Amazon.

[theexperienceofaging]

A WAY WITH WORDS

I have just started reading a very newly published book by my dear friend, Susie Kaufman, entitled “Twilight Time-- Aging in Amazement”, which was originally a blog.  After reading the first few essays I thought, “ this is so good; why do I think I can write; I should just forget it.”  I mean, for God’s sake, I can’t write that well.  She has “her way with words”.  As I sat with this feeling, I started having all kinds of ideas engendered by her work, my response to it, the comparison itself--and here we go again.  I guess I can only have “my way with words”.  Pardon comparisons; they are odious; it’s hard not to when faced with someone who is dancing so magnificently in similar fields of the Lord.  Course, she is very different in background and focus:  Jewish, upper west side and a focus that seems to explore everything and everyone that has made her who she is.  She explores the past and the present--how it was--how that made it what it is now and how it is now regardless of what it was then. While I was a  potential Southern debutante, surrounded by anti-semitism and racism, who  escaped to  the upper west side and by reading the New Yorker, managed to sever my ties to my predatory past.  Now, my blog is populated by ME (you remember her); you’d think I was raised in a vacuum as there is no mention of family (how I used to stare fascinated at my mother’s breasts hanging over the top of her huge girdle  with a forest of hairs peeking out from underneath; she didn’t wear underwear--only a girdle.   Oh yes, I did mention my mother when I wrote about her lips back when I was 70.  And I did have a father and two older  brothers.  As I wonder about my solitary preoccupation, I see that I am hooked on discovery and I am the source of it for me.  Part of the pleasure of discovery is surprise.  After all, when I am being the same old, same old ME (she who protects and limits me), nothing is too surprising.  Everything has a sameness and a sureness--I gasp at nothing and grasp at anything that might relieve this very personal and societal scrim.  Usually, an outward focus like buying something, TV, or a computer works temporarily and then drops me back into that familiar grey place.  A past spiritual teacher, Larry Rosenberg, said that the most common phrase in American movies is “let’s get out of here.”  And, I ask, where to?  But we just keep trying, don’t we?  You might think death would be a relief, but when we want to get out of here, we really just want to go someplace nicer, not someplace truly unknown and incomprehensible.

BTW, order my friend’s book; you won’t regret it.

[theexperienceofaging]

GETTING DOWN TO IT

It seems time to wrote about dying; that’s really the big one, isn’t it.  It’s what underlies “what happened to my lips?” and moving into my last office--all of these ponderings.  Yes, it’s going to happen, they say, but if you’ve never experienced something,  it’s still a rumor.  How can this too too solid flesh (not so solid these days) just disappear?  The body yes,  but even more gobsmacking is that presence that I’ve always lived with--ME.  That which causes me to walk, talk, breathe, cry, laugh, love, --in just the way that I do it.  I have friends who have died.  You would think that might be a hint, but all I know is that they leave; they never come back; I never see them again.  Pointing to----what about ME; that ME I thought I was--that ME I acted like, talked liked and looked just like and, in fact, thought I was.   My spiritual work tells me that ME is a construction of memories, thoughts, beliefs, experiences and when I am lucky enough to stop befriending ME so fiercely, I have glimpses of that--just a quiet, simple world and a quiet, simple person.  However, inbetween, which is most of the time, I go to Marshall’s, watch Netflix and eat Bart’s Vanilla Fudge Caramel ice cream.

It is reported that the soul/spirit leaves the body at death (I imagine a filmy transparent smoky thing traveling up) and I totally believe that, though I have no idea if it’s true.  So, what is a soul anyway and what is its relationship to ME?  A sort of homeopathic essential version of ME--without makeup, naked without a body?  A unique ME form manifesting the universal energy that creates and inhabits everything?  And where is it going--that ME/not me?

Since I don’t know the answer to any of my questions, I’ll ponder outloud in a future blog.  But I will add that the joking around parts of this are partly defensive since the great not knowing is as scary as it is amazing and, if I don’t die of fright, I can’t wait to find out.  What it happens, I wish I could post a blog about it.  We all want to know.

[theexperienceofaging]

ENDINGS

I look back on my somewhat humorous musings from my 70′s and see that the 80′s are a different matter, another time, not so lighthearted--a barer look since it’s internally late Autumn (or early winter?).  The truth of this universal cycle we all partake of is deeper, sadder, more beautiful, more mysterious and profound than the earlier hints which were more like late summer.  Even if I have 20 years left, God forbid, endings of varying sorts keep emerging.

As a psychotherapist for the last 40 years, I have had my mind, heart and body honed by daily contact with the varieties of damage done to us, our children by us and consequently to each other.  My practice is ending, gradually ending.  I mourn the loss of people I have cared for greatly so that each new happy vista that opens for them is both thrilling and saddening.  So, who shall I be when this kind of caring, deep interest and skill is no longer needed?  We know ourselves in many ways (and don’t know ourselves in many others)--but when the painter stops painting and the writer no longer writes and the psychotherapist no longer listens, is that very special self loss of the best kind--that unique inner flow--is it lost?  Can it adapt to another form?  You could say that all through life, we lose people and parts of ourselves and move on, the patterns altered.  I don’t have 40 more years to grow a dedicated someone else.  I can only hope that the profundity of that long learning will color everything else and make the world fuller.   It’s true of all inner growth -- that we see life differently as we expand; we read a book we read 15 years ago and suddenly understand thoughts that we merely skimmed over then.  Additionally, since changes only feel like loss in the beginning and then, that felt, space opens up for whatever decides to appear-- Ah, I just talked myself into feeling better.  So, you see, it’s not so bad.

P.S.  After reading Linda’s letter, I would like to say that I have the great good fortune of keeping my health (quick, knock on wood) but I assume the villians of aging--pain and disability--bring on another similar loss of who you once were and are not likely to be again.  I feel ill equipped to talk about this and hope that others who know about this will chime in and lend further insight.

[theexperienceofaging]

email from friend who didn't know how to submit

Thank you for sharing your blog with me. I don't know how to comment ON your blog, so I'm writing this to your email address. If you want to paste it into your blog as a comment, please feel free. I'm trailing behind you by five years, but, of course, the same thoughts occupy my mind. I, too, know that my body will die (someday), but my mind says it cannot be so. I do wake up aching from arthritis and FMS, and my personal plumbing is working less and less efficiently, which is a bummer. The wrinkles, like bits of indecipherable calligraphy, do tell the whole story, and even with my weight, which is greater than I ever expected it to be, at certain angles my skin resembles crumpled silk chiffon. All this 'creakiness' forces me to consider, each and every day, that the time (years?) ahead are fewer than the those behind me on this path I'm walking. I am not happy with that thought! I do accept it, but I don't like it. I don't want to waste one single moment on meaningless stuff, yet that stuff does intrude regularly, with seeming meaningFULness. I am still working in my studio, behaving as if there is no reason to be concerned about the volume of my work that I will leave behind for my children and/or my husband to deal with/inherit/deaccession. I continue to show and sell my work, and buy new tools and materials. I make new pieces and I am, of course, concerned. I'm also thinking about the aging of the universe around us and the longterm impermanence of all the work I've made for the past many decades... what, if any of my pieces, will be extant, and for how long before melted to slag in the heat of our dying sun. I do so long for immortality, while recognizing there ain't no such thing...just going around until we come around again in new and sparkling forms. I recognize that this is not directly related to my considerations of my aging process, but is somehow connected to it by the end product...death, with all its mysteries. And my feet...dammit! Slightly misshapen by early years of wearing uncomfortable shoes and by studying ballet, they now, supporting a heavier body, protest loudly and painfully after doing their job for longer than an hour. And my knees...also dammit... will have to be replaced by new and better, though non-flesh, titanium ball joints. I am expecting to become an assemblage of hardware and fixtures, clanking my way to a point when the flesh and blood bits of me collapse into themselves leaving a damp pile of screws, bolts and pins in a pile on the floor of the shower. Such of lot of noise that will make, but nothing compared to the whining noise I'm making writing these words. Oh, and, not to forget, as my hearing degenerates, I am afflicted with a high pitched whining buzz, reminding me incessantly that, along with the rest of my body, my dear little inner ear is biting the dust. Oboy, did you open the flood gates. Most grateful, Linda