This is Getting Old
Read This is Getting Old Online
Authors: Susan Moon
Shambhala Publications, Inc.
Horticultural Hall
300 Massachusetts Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115
© 2010 by Susan Moon
Cover design by Jim Zaccaria
A continuation of the copyright page can be found in
Credits and Permissions
at the end of the book.
Some of the essays in this book, or earlier versions of them, were previously published in the following places:
“Where Did I Put My Begging Bowl?” and “I Wasn't My Self” (under the title “The Worst Zen Student That Ever Was”) in
Inquiring Mind
, “Stain on the Sky” in
The Sun
, “Leaving the Lotus Position” in
Tricycle
, “House of Commons” in OnTheCommons.org, “Grandmother Mind” and “The Secret Place” (under the title “If She Can Bear the Longing”) in
The Shambhala Sun
, “What If I Never Have Sex Again?” in
Persimmon Tree
, “The Tomboy Returns” in
Jo's Boy
s, edited by Christian McEwen, and “Alone with Everyone” in
Turning Wheel
.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
L
IBRARY OF
C
ONGRESS
C
ATALOGING-IN-
P
UBLICATION
D
ATA
Moon, Susan Ichi Su, 1942â
This is getting old: zen thoughts on aging with humor and dignity /
Susan Moon.â1st ed.
p.   cm.
eISBN 978-0-8348-2306-8
ISBN 978-1-59030-776-2
1. Older peopleâReligious life. 2. Agingâ
Religious aspectsâZen Buddhism. I. Title.
BQ9286.7.O43M66 2010
294.3â²440846âdc22
2010003821
In memory of my mother, Alice
,
and for my granddaughter, Paloma
.
I never knew Alice when she was a child
and I will never know Paloma when she's an old woman
,
but they both have inspired me with their enthusiasm for life
.
Contents
PART ONE
Cracks in the Mind and Body
Where Did I Put My Begging Bowl?
Senior Moment, Wonderful Moment
PART TWO
Changing Relationships
What If I Never Have Sex Again?
PART THREE
In the Realm of the Spirit
I
N MY MID-SIXTIES AND IN GOOD HEALTH
, I'm still a baby at being old. Now is a good time to investigate the matter and to develop courage, because getting old is hard. Getting old is scary.
I was never planning to get old myself. I was hoping to live through plenty more birthdays, but I wasn't planning on getting eroded in the process. Not long past sixty, as joints stiffened, as proper names fled, as hairs disappeared from some parts of my body and sprouted in others, I had to admit it was happening to me, too.
My Buddhist practice encourages me not to turn away from what's difficult. That's where the good news often hides, right in the middle of the mess. As a writer, too, the investigation of what's painful is what interests me the most. So I started writing about getting old. I wanted to look right into the face of oldness. What is it?
At first, I made a list of the difficult things that I was experiencing myself, like memory loss, sore knees, and fear of loneliness, and I set out to write an essay about each one. I wanted to teach myself how to get old without getting bitter. Then, as I kept on getting older, other things happened, both wonderful and painful. I became a grandmother, my mother died, and I kept on writing. Not only did I write about the things I didn't like that were happening to my body and my mind, I also wrote about
how my relationships were changing because of age. As I wrote, I noticed mysterious changes, too, new openings into the spirit, new ways of being alive that aging was bringing me.
The book that emerged is personal, and I hope my concerns will connect with yours. I'm also thankful for those who write about the economic stresses of aging, the concerns about health care and housing, faced by so many older people.
Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, shocked the literary world by bringing his personal experience into his intellectual and philosophical writings. He said, “I am myself the matter of my book.” He called his writings “essays,” meaning
attempts
. I'm grateful to him for leading the way so long ago. These are my tries.
And this book is part of a larger conversation. I am in a generation of people who developed the habit of constantly talking to each other about what we are going through, and we are doing this together, too. I am not getting old alone, even when I'm alone in the house.
I'm part of a group in which five of us, all women over sixty, meet together to talk about our experience with aging, about what's happening to our hips and our family life. We call ourselves “crones,” claiming the word. The dictionary says a crone is “a withered old woman.” Some of us in the Crones Group are more withered than others, but we all have more withering to do before we die.
I'm reminded of another women's group I was part of back in the seventiesâmy “consciousness-raising” group. We met to take the veils away from the sexism that we had grown accustomed to and to help each other resist what was no longer acceptable to us. In the Crones Group, too, we support each other, but this time around we meet not to resist but to accept. I'm not talking about resignation, but:
This is how it is. This is what happens. How can we work with it?
And sometimes we find ourselves celebrating our age.
It annoys me when people say, “Even if you're old, you can still be young at heart!” in order to cheer up old people. Hiding inside this well-meaning phrase is a deep cultural assumption that old is bad and young is good. What's wrong with being old at heart, I'd like to know? “Old at heart”âdoesn't it have a beautiful ring? Wouldn't you like to be loved by people whose hearts have practiced loving for a long time?
In the cluttered Berkeley office of the Gray Panthers group, the walls are covered with posters, portraits of faces of different ages, and under each photo are the words, “The best age to be is the age you are.”
Old age is its own part of life. In thirteenth-century Japan, Zen Master Dogen wrote, “Do not think that the firewood is before and the ash is after. Firewood is a stage unto itself and ash is a stage unto itself.” We are in the stage we are in; let's not think of ourselves as has-been young people, or as about-to-be-dead people.
But even the venerable Zen teacher Robert Aitken Roshi, in an interview about being oldâhe was in his eighties at the timeâadmitted with a laugh, “I often feel like a young person who has something wrong with me.”
It takes a while for the self-image to catch up with the body. Glimpsing my reflection in a shop window, at first I don't think it's me, but someone much older than I am. When I went to my fiftieth grade-school reunion, I thought I had wandered into the wrong room: Who were all those codgers? And then the amazing recognition: in the white-haired old man's face, the boy who used to pull my braids at recess.
My mother, Alice Hayes, a serious poet with a fondness for doggerel, put it this way:
In her old age, a rickety Ms.
Took up learning the isness of is.
Since it's not what one does,
She just WAS and she WAS . . .
Now she's gone off to BE in Cadiz.
Just so, Mom. As the Buddhist teacher Wes Nisker reminds us, we are called human beings, not human doings. Laotzu said it, too, long ago: “The way to do is to be.” We older people, forced to slow down in the doing department, have a leg up on being.
My mother is one of two people who surprised me by making a disproportionate appearance in this book. She died just about the time I began to write about getting old, but she didn't let that stop her from showing up over and over in these essays. I shouldn't be surprised, since she's the old person I knew best. Something must have rubbed off on me as I watched her go from young old to old old.
The other person in my family who weaves herself repeatedly through the book is my granddaughter Paloma, born just before my mother died. She helps me understand old by showing me young. I see that we are different: I can't hang by my knees on the jungle gym, and she can't tell stories about life in the long-ago twentieth century. I see, too, that the years between us can be not a barrier but an enrichment of our pleasure in being alive together.
“Wabi-sabi” is a Japanese expression for the beauty of impermanence, the imperfection of things that are worn and frayed and chipped through use. Objects that are simple and rustic, like an earthenware tea bowl, and objects that show their age and use, like a wooden banister worn smooth by many hands, are beautiful.
I sew patches on my clothes and I glue broken plates back together. I love mended things. I like to take pictures of old things: the spiderweb of cracks in the windshield of a truck, bright mildew on the wall of an abandoned railroad station.
Teenagers pay good money for shortcuts to wabi-sabi when they buy designer jeans that are pre-faded, pre-frayed, and pre-ripped,
but the true wabi-sabi look can't be made in a factory. It depends on the passage of time.
In
ikebana
âthe Japanese art of flower arrangingâflowers that wilt quickly are particularly valued because they demonstrate the beauty of impermanence. The very fact that they fade makes them precious.
I'm turning wabi-sabi. I study the back of my hand with interest: the blossoming brown spots, the blue veins becoming more prominent. With my other hand, I can slide the skin loosely over the bones. Can this be bad?
As I get older I am turning into myself. Job gone, children grown and living far away, parents dead. Can't backpack, can't do hip hop. Who am I,
really
? Now I get to find out.
