This is Getting Old (21 page)

Zen monks are called to zazen by the striking of the
han
, a heavy wooden block that hangs from a rope beside the temple entrance. The han is hit with a wooden mallet in an intricate pattern that lasts for fifteen minutes, and at Tassajara, where the monks' cabins stretch out along a narrow valley, a second han, known as the echo han, hangs partway down the path, to pass the
signal along. You can tell how much time you have left to get to your cushion in the zendo by listening to the pattern.

The crack of wood on wood runs fast through the valley. Written in calligraphy on the block itself are the words:

Wake up!

Life is transient

swiftly passing

Be aware

The great matter

Don't waste

Time

One evening somewhere in the middle of the practice period, it was my turn to hit the echo han, strike for strike. I stood on the dusty path, mallet in hand, like a frog on a lily pad waiting for a fly. I faced the garden, where the evening sun came through a gap in the mountains and landed on a pair of apricot trees. I was poised in the brief interval between hits, waiting, and the weeks of the practice period stretched out before me and behind me into infinity. And when that next hit came to my ears, my arm lifted the mallet and whacked the board, no holding back, and then it was quiet, and the light was still on the apricot trees, and I was ready for the next one.

A couple of years ago, when I was a few months shy of being sixty-five, I packed up my things at work. I loved my job—I had loved it for seventeen years. But editing a magazine with a quarterly deadline meant that I was under constant time pressure. I wanted to retire before they had to gently push me out, before my brain wizened up right there at my desk, with the phone in one hand and the mouse in the other. I wanted to have time for other things before I died—quiet time, deep time—for writing, dharma, family and friends, and for something new and unknown.

The part of me that wants to lower my bucket into a deep well and draw up cool water is sabotaged by another part. I suffer from a condition that a Zen friend calls “FOMS Syndrome”—fear of missing something. It's a form of greed—the urge to cram as many interesting activities into the day as possible, coupled with the impulse to say yes to everything. To put it more positively, I'm curious about everything and everybody. And so, when I first retired, feeling rich with time, I signed up for all sorts of activities, classes, and projects. Each separate thing I was doing was worthwhile; I loved my Spanish class and my photography class, for example. But soon I was busier than before. Where was my deep time?

When I get too busy, old habits of mind kick in. I try to solve the problem by readjusting my schedule, which only makes it worse. I change one appointment in order to make room for another. I stare at my week-at-a glance calendar looking for white space, and when I find it, I pounce. Ah, a delicious piece of time! I write down: “2 pm—Nomad Café, plan workshop w. Jean,” and the white space is gone. Woops! No more time. Then I feel like an animal flailing around in a trap made of netting, getting more tightly bound.

I try to measure out my time in the long run as well as the short. I'm a person who likes to count things, and I run the numbers. At sixty-six, I figure I'm about three-quarters of the way through. That's if I make it to eighty-eight. How long is that? I go backward twenty-two years, to when I was studying Russian and I went on a “citizen diplomacy” trip to the Soviet Union. Remember the Soviet Union? So I guess twenty-two years is a pretty long time—but it's all gone now, including my Russian. The next twenty-two years will go faster than the last, and besides, I might die sooner.

Like my father, who died at seventy-three. That would mean I've already lived—wait, let me check my calculator—90 percent of my life.

Admittedly, sometimes it's appropriate to think about time this way—to consult the actuarial tables of the mind. I have a seventy-year-old friend who has heart trouble and other chronic health problems. She's financially stressed, and she has to make decisions about her house and her living expenses. She has to decide how soon she can max out her equity line of credit, or whether she needs to keep on working part-time. She came right out and asked her cardiologist to give her a rough estimate of her life expectancy. She told him that she had tentatively figured out financing that would get her to the age of eighty-two.

“You've been doing well for the last few years,” he told her. “According to the statistics, you have a better than fifty percent chance of living to the age of eighty-seven.”

My friend rolled her eyes. “But I can't afford to live that long!” They both laughed, and now she's looking for more part-time work.

Of course you can't really measure time at all. Our calibrations are like pencil marks on the ocean. Einstein taught us that time is flexible. It passes differently for a person in commuter traffic, a person centering a lump of wet clay on a potter's wheel, or, so Einstein told us, a person approaching the speed of light in a spaceship. An hour can seem like a year and a year like an hour. In the last days of my father's dying, he was in a lot of pain from cancer. He would often ask what time it was, and whatever the answer was, he would groan and say, “Oh, no! Is that all it is?” I couldn't understand why he wanted time to hurry up, because there wasn't anything that was going to happen, except that he was going to die. I think the pain made time pass slowly, and he wanted to know that he was getting through it, from one hour to the next.

I, too, have had times when I wanted time to hurry by. Mostly, though, time is what I want more of, and as I get older, it gets scarcer and scarcer. First of all, there's less of it in front of me than there used to be. Second, each year swings by faster than the
one before. Third, I'm no good at multitasking anymore—I can only do one thing at a time. And fourth, it takes me longer to do each thing. Age is forcing me to slow down.

I'm not the only one. There's got to be some biological reason that old people drive so slowly on the freeway. I just saw a bumper sticker that said: “Old and Slow.”

I remember impatiently watching my grandmother making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a picnic. She got the jam out of the cupboard and put it on the blue linoleum countertop, and then she walked back across the kitchen to the same cupboard for the peanut butter. It took forever. Well, not quite forever, because she did make the sandwiches, and we ate them on a plaid blanket down in the meadow.

Here's the amazing thing: aging is giving me back the present moment. It's only linear time that's shrinking, and as it does, I have a better chance to enter deep time. It only takes a few seconds to slip through the crack between two hits of the han into a timeless garden.

This is what zazen is all about: it's time out of time, it's stepping aside from activity and slowing down to a full stop. While I'm sitting zazen, even if my monkey mind is swinging wildly from branch to branch, at least I'm not accomplishing anything useful. As the Heart Sutra says, “There is no attainment, with nothing to attain.”

It's easy to get nothing done while sitting zazen; a person of any age can do it. But now that I'm getting older, I'm learning to accomplish practically nothing in the rest of my day as well. If the trend continues, my next-door neighbor will think I'm doing standing meditation in the back yard when I'm actually taking in the laundry.

I like to bury my face in the sunny smell of the sheet on the line before I take it down. I like the slow squeak of the line through the rusty pulley as I haul in another sweet pillowcase. The laundry lines of my childhood made exactly that noise.

I'm not saying I'm ready to quit. In spite of what the
Heart Sutra
tells me, I still have things I want to accomplish in the world beyond the laundry line; and then I want to go on to something new, something I can do with other people to help this feverish planet. I want to keep working—I use the word
working
broadly. I'm learning that slowing down is the way. I have to pay attention to my natural rhythms. I try to let each thing take as long as it takes, and I'm putting some white space back into my appointment calendar. I've made a rule for myself that I mostly keep: no appointments, no telephone calls, and no e-mail before noon. Mornings are for writing and study; I can look at the to-do list in the afternoon.

Now layers of time live in me. I think of this layering as vertical time, when all time flows into the present moment, as opposed to the horizontal time lines that used to appear on classroom wall charts: on the left, the beginning of bipedal human life when our ancestors came down from the trees four million years ago in the Pliocene epoch, and then, at the other end of the long line, the current Holocene epoch, in which we hominids can travel via the Internet to look down at the melting polar ice cap without ever getting up from our chairs. It's all in me, in the present moment. Even though I don't have a clear recollection of our Pliocene days, this body remembers how it feels to climb down from a tree, swinging by your arms from the lowest bough, then letting go of the rough bark in your hands and dropping to solid earth like a ball into a catcher's glove.

When old people get the generations mixed up and call a grandson by a brother's name, they're not wrong. They're living in the deep time that Dogen calls the “time being.” “Each moment is all being, is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment.”

I think of time as the landscape I'm traveling through on a train, and the train is my life. I can only see what's outside the window. Yesterday was Naperville, Illinois; today is Grand Junction, Colorado; tomorrow will be Sparks, Nevada. I just see
the piece that's framed by the train window, but it's all there at once, all those places, the whole continent.

I was visiting my granddaughter Paloma on her third birthday; we went to the neighborhood swimming pool and played in the shallow end, and she poured pailfuls of water over my head, pretending she was washing my hair. She looks like her father when he was a small child, when I sat on the closed toilet lid in the bathroom while he took his bath, watching him fill graduated plastic cups with water and line them up along the edge of the bathtub for Snow White and Peter Pan to swim in. My three-year-old self was with Paloma, too, on another hot summer day, filling a wooden bucket from the hand pump in my grandmother's garden in order to “paint” the garden chairs. Playing in the pool with Paloma, I didn't think of those watery long-ago moments consciously; I didn't need to. As Paloma turned her bucket upside down over my head,
long ago
disappeared, and those other childhoods, those other summers, flowed over me and soaked my skin.

Before we left the pool, Paloma went over to the lifeguard sitting in his elevated chair; she held up three fingers and called, “Hi, Lifeguard! I'm three! I'm three!” Threeness was in me, too. I can't be in more than one place at the same time, but I can be in more than one time in the same place.

Time is not something I have; it's what I'm made of.

Alone with Everyone

T
HROUGHOUT MY LIFE
I've struggled with loneliness and the fear of loneliness. Through my Buddhist practice I've gradually come to understand that I'm not alone, even when I'm alone, at least in theory.

I was past sixty when a sabbatical from work gave me the opportunity, and I finally felt ready to turn theory into practice. I decided to spend a month alone in the woods—in a small hippie-style hand-built cabin on a piece of land I own with two other families in Mendocino County. I've been going up there for twenty-five years. It's a great place to go with someone you love, but I've never liked going there alone because it's so isolated, and I've been afraid to get out on that lonesome limb. But now I felt ready. I wanted to find out who was there when there was nobody there but me.

How do you really know you're alive, that you're a person, if there's nobody around to say, “Yeah! I know what you mean!” Or even, “Hey! You stepped on my toe!” So this was the core question I had. If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody hears it . . . ? If a woman sits on a porch in the woods, and nobody sees her . . . ?

The cabin is two miles up a steep dirt road on a ridge. There's
no electricity, no phone, no cell phone access, no refrigeration. There's a wood stove for heat and a propane stove for cooking. The outhouse boasts an excellent view. The nearest neighbor lives half a mile up the road and works in the town of Willits, a half hour's drive away.

It was my intention not to see or speak to anyone for a whole month. How often do you go even one day without seeing or speaking to another person? It practically never happens. Some people in my life couldn't understand what I was up to. My mother's initial response was, “What would you want to do that for?” And even in Soto Zen practice, we don't have a tradition of solitary retreat, as there is in Tibetan Buddhism.