It’s Just Who I Am Now: Feeling More Deeply at Home in Our Bodies

One gigantic reality each of us must face is aging. We can feel it when we’re 11 going on 18, or 65 going on 85. At first, the aging, the changes are usually so small, so subtle, just normal reality. Then, seemingly suddenly, the change is immense, startling, towering over our old understanding of ourselves.

 

A few days ago, I was experiencing persistent shortness of breath and thought I should go to the ER for immediate diagnosis and treatment. The symptoms started during a hike; suddenly, it got so intense I couldn’t tell if I would be able to make it back to my car. I kept imagining having to call on my phone for an ambulance. It was too late in the afternoon to call a doctor; so I slowed my pace and distracted my mind from the fear by counting my steps until I reached my car. And when I did see the car, what an amazing relief it was.

 

But despite all that, I didn’t want to go to the ER. I had a physical sense of what might be going on, and it wasn’t a heart attack. So, I drove home.

 

The difficulty breathing abated for a while; but after dinner, it returned, with even more symptoms added on. So, my wife drove me to the ER. After several hours, the ER medical team decided I had issues, but nothing warranting a stay in the hospital.

 

When we got home, the sky thundered. I couldn’t see any lightning, but I felt not only thunder but a driving wind; and an intense rain seemed to fall suddenly out of everywhere, from the sky, the hills, the buildings. We ran inside, dried off, and went to bed as soon as we could.

 

The next morning, I at first wanted to buy myself something, some material compensation for going through the confusion, fear, and physical discomfort, but wasn’t sure what it could be. I imagined going to some local store, maybe a bookstore. I love bookstores. Or go online, if I could just think of something I felt I really needed or wanted. Consumerism shows itself in unanticipated ways.

 

Then I realized these occasional symptoms and physical changes were just an important element of who I now was. I didn’t need any distractions from my own life. It was just that my self-image was miles behind my reality. My awareness hadn’t comfortably settled into my moment-by-moment experience. But now, maybe, this was changing, like everything else. And maybe now I could perceive this seemingly new situation or time of life as valuable, not just something to deal with⎼ but as something interesting in-itself to observe and learn from.

 

And it became clear to me that no material gifts, or outside objects was what mattered the most to me. What mattered the most was my response⎼ what I did, what actions I took, how I understood whatever occurred. This mattered. This was what would most determine the quality of the next moments and years of my life.

 

A few days later I ran into a co-worker from a job I had years ago. We went through the usual greetings⎼ how are you? what’s your life like now? And we answered as honestly as possible without going into many details. She talked about being 80 years old and beginning to feel old; and she added that young people she knew described older people as afraid of change.

 

But I replied I didn’t think that assessment of older people, of us was entirely accurate. As we age, certainly as I age, I notice changes more quickly than I used to, especially changes in my health, in my environment, in my friends….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

What I Learned from My Dad that He Never Knew He Taught Me: We Never Know What an Experience Will Teach Us

When we’re in the middle of anything, we of course don’t know the ending. But even more, we never know what it might teach us. We just don’t know.

 

My Dad died when he was 96. For the last 4 years or so of his life, it was often painful or frustrating to be with him. Luckily, beautifully, he remained mentally sharp right until the end, but physically, it was a different story. It was painful to see his pain, and frustrating because he took so much time to do anything, from the smallest details to the largest.

 

And he wasn’t always good tempered about it, either, or good tempered with other people. He usually started very polite and upbeat. But if anything didn’t go as he thought it should, like in a restaurant with a server, he’d get annoyed or angry. Maybe he was as frustrated with his own physical slowness as I sometimes was with him, and he let it out instead of restraining it. Maybe he just didn’t have energy left for restraint.

 

He had difficulty accepting his new limitations, as many of us do as we get older. We retain so clearly this image or feeling of when we were younger. When we’re a teenager or in our 20’s, we might be more focused on the future then the past, or on images of what we dream of becoming. When we’re 50 it might be of being 20 or 30. When we’re 70, it’s of being 35 or 50, maybe. But what is it when we’re 96?

 

We carry this conflicting sense of ourselves in our mind and body, a conflict between image and reality, memories or thoughts of other times, and NOW. We think and often feel like we’re much younger than we are, until a medical issue makes itself felt; maybe we have a pain we never had when younger, or we can’t hear or see as well. Or when, like my dad, one minute we can do something seemingly like we’ve done it for twenty or more years. The next moment, it takes us so long to do even the most basic things.

 

And there were days my dad called us to say he went to the ER that morning; and I wondered if he had to do that, or was he just frightened by his aging body.

 

One time when my wife and I we were visiting him, we were awakened by a noise in the middle of the night. We got up and saw my dad getting dressed to go out. He said he was about to call an ambulance to take him to the emergency room. We asked him what was wrong and if he was in pain. I think he was feeling short of breath, but I don’t recall his exact symptoms. He said don’t worry; he’d just go to the ER on his own, and we should go back to bed.

 

I thought the ambulance unnecessary and said we would drive him; we wanted to be with him. We argued about it for a few minutes. And then he started to sound more normal. The more he talked with us, the more his symptoms seemed to subside. He paused for a moment, apparently thinking it all over. And said he felt better. We should all go back to bed.

 

And now, for me, in my later 70s, these images of my father come back to me, almost like a message. When I have back pains that make walking difficult, I see my father walking slowly with a cane or walker. I understand better how he might have felt back then. Or I have a sharp pain in my chest and have trouble breathing and can’t tell if I should go to the ER, and I remember my dad. I wonder if what I felt was being exaggerated by fear and the unknown⎼ or was I having a heart attack?

 

And I remember how our talking with him, our show of love, seemed to soothe his pain….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

Every Year, Fall Speaks to Us About Seasons of Life, and Death

Fall is such an instructive season. Of course, any season or any moment can be such, if we can allow it to be. I’m writing about the fall because it’s the time we’re living right here and now. And because the lessons are so blatant. We see the changes, see impermanence held so clearly in the embrace of beauty. Once colorful, shining flowers are now withering and dropping off their now brown, dry stems. The once lush green leaves are turning miraculous colors, only to wither and drop off, leaving trees naked to the cold. The once warm air is now, slowly, fitfully, changing to cold.

 

We can learn so much from just looking and feeling, not only the changes in the flowers and air, but our responses to it. We can learn from our joy over the colors as well as our fear of what might come next, with winter.

 

In a meditation recently, the seasons came up in dramatic fashion. Maybe it was because of the election, or the climate emergency, or my own conundrums with aging, but I suddenly felt something that is almost forbidden to speak about. I felt and saw myself buried in soil, dead. It was so frightening. I wanted to do anything I could to run away from the mere thought, or to explode the image. I considered who I could call to help free my mind from the image and get comforted.

 

Maybe the image reminded me how much we don’t know about dying. We don’t know when or how or what it might mean. It’s clearly the great unknown. But then I asked myself what could I, myself, do, right then, to help me live with this? What could help me face this? Was the season somehow instructive? Could the fear be used as a soil in which to personally, spiritually grow?

 

I started imagining doing or picturing different things. I studied my response to each imagined action and noticed if I freaked out ⎼ or felt ok. I thought of my wife’s flowers. She’s an amazing gardener. Our home in spring and summer, and to a lesser extent, in the fall, is surrounded by their beauty. And I thought of the trees I loved. There was inspiration imbedded in the flowers and trees.

 

As I pictured my body lying in the soil, I unbelievably felt flowers grow from me. Never before⎼ never ever before did I feel this thought as a comfort. Never. But maybe what turned the soil from something traumatic to something fruitful is the love I felt. Maybe there was something in the love. The flowers I saw in the dream were, after all, my wife’s. Maybe loving her right then was enough to help me realize this moment right now was enough; that nothing was lacking in my life.

 

And maybe by facing this directly, something in me flowered? Maybe the image of death was a distraction of sorts from my meditation⎼ or maybe it was the object of the meditation.

 

It’s so very difficult to accept, live fully with, the reality that I’m going to die someday… Yet, possibly, if I could simply notice and accept the reality of death, without fear making me cling to it or hide from it, I could move on without fear to face whatever the moment held for me. Facing this fear would hopefully help me face any fear. I could learn from the emotion without it clouding my mind or heart and act freely and appropriately….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

Aging Isn’t an Illness to Recover From: Lowering Our Resistance to Living with Kindness

As I get older, I realize the images and expectations I once held of “old” people were distorted. We are not those images. I can do so much more now at 65, 75 and older than I once expected I could do. And I sort of laugh gleefully. Aging is a more complex, engaging experience than I ever realized before.

 

The same applies to facing death. Our culture has a prohibition against speaking openly about the subject, which can be so damaging and isolating to us all.

 

I once imagined being older was a time of increasing feebleness or diminished capacities. That people spent more time looking backwards than forwards. And that except for maybe having more “free time,” there was nothing positive about it. A popular meme was “don’t trust anyone over thirty” ⎼ until my whole generation was way over thirty. I’ve found there’s plenty of looking back, but there’s even more of an appreciation of each moment now.

 

It’s true, however, that when I was younger, I might see a doctor once a year, at most. Lately, it’s almost every week. A frequent question that arises when I feel pain or physically “off” in some way, is whether the symptom is due to “normal aging,” or something else. In the past, when I was injured or developed some medical condition, I approached it as a problem to solve. Bodies could usually recover, injuries usually heal. But now, ankle or hand pain, for example, doesn’t heal as quickly as it once did, or at all.

 

Aging isn’t an illness to recover from. But our attitude or understanding of it is another story. We hopefully re-learn daily who we are. We re-learn what change means, what living means, that living is change. To even breathe we change, every second, taking in, letting go.

 

And as we get older, so many of those we know leave the world before us. I remember my father, who lived to be exactly 96.5, saying, “I’m the last of my friends, and the last of my relatives from my generation.” There’s an awful pain and loneliness in this. In each friend or loved one’s death we can feel friendship dying in us. We can feel loving is dying; loving is being vulnerable. To love is to make ourselves vulnerable to loss, yet we do it anyway. Dying is there in the loving itself; the two are almost indistinguishable.

 

So, every once and awhile now, I look up and see the reality of death getting closer. I can’t claim I’ve accepted it. Surprisingly, it doesn’t depress me, despite the moments when I experience intense fear. Or when I realize everything beyond what I can see in front of me right now, beyond what anyone can see, is an unknown we haven’t yet learned how to embrace or face. Maybe death is there as a sign, or a reminder, a message from reality.

 

And this reality touches and hopefully improves my relationship with everyone, with good friends and relatives, and especially my wife. My wife and I have been together for so many years, and the commitment to each other is as real, as clear as anything could be. As wonderful. As present. There is less judgment. Less impulse to distance. Just feeling.

 

Yet, different ways to trick myself into ignoring the reality of death still occasionally leap into mind….

 

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

To Enjoy Life When Young, Honor What It Means to Get Older: To Value Aging Is to Value Life, To Value Ourselves, and Human Life In All Its Stages

Yesterday, I was going to a local movie theatre and a younger person held the door for me. I was surprised. I had the same questioning response when someone gave up a seat for me on a bus or called me “Sir.” I am in my mid-seventies and in apparently good physical shape. Were these gestures just politeness? Or was it an assumption or a stereotype of the physical capabilities of those with gray hair and wrinkles?

 

Or was it respect? How do people see me? Do younger people see me in any way like I see myself? Does my age make me seem dignified? Knowledgeable? Or fragile?

 

It’s difficult to believe, to really feel and acknowledge, we’re getting old or older. In my mind, like almost everyone I know who’s near my age, I’m 30 or 40 years younger than I am. Our psyche hasn’t caught up with our body. To ourselves, on the inside, we might feel young. Vibrant. But others see us from the outside.

 

We’re always aging, and we’re always aging together. So, if we don’t value all phases of life, even being old, even being sick, we cut ourselves off from ourselves and others.

 

In the 1960s, I remember the talk about not trusting anyone over thirty. As a sixteen to twenty-year-old, I couldn’t imagine being thirty, let alone sixty. Sixty was a time of frailty. I’m constantly astonished that I’m now not anything like I once imagined a person of seventy-plus years to be.

 

And it’s not because we’re boring that older people talk so frequently about their medical conditions, pains, and doctor visits. It’s partly a way of us saying, “Can you believe I’m going through this? Me?” We might suddenly feel we’re becoming the parents we’ve lost.

 

And we don’t want to waste time faking the reality of our lives. We want to speak of meaningful things. We want to share and feel in sync with others. And one thing most of us share is pain and wanting to know how to deal with it. How to deal with life and face change and dying.

 

As we get older, we realize the deep meaning of change and impermanence, but it’s a difficult lesson and can be hard to accept. After a heart procedure, I was told I had to temporarily stop intense or long periods of exercise. So, I did. I cut back drastically, taking only moderate walks on flatter ground. That lasted one day. Then I started counting steps again, or imagining long walks up steep hills and the views I could get. Or imagining exercises I could do.

 

Imagining I could die from exercise (or at all) was just too difficult. I mean, I could feel all this life around me⎼ the crickets, birds, wind, friends⎼ things, and places I enjoy. I mean, consciousness, except for when sleep (and somewhat even then), has always been there; luckily, no pain or illness has dimmed it for me. Slowed, maybe. But how do we imagine it ceasing, permanently?

 

We all need to learn, and schools to teach, the psychology of human development and aging. Larger public schools especially are islands of youth and as such are highly artificial and developmentally problematical. Children need to be around people of various ages, who can serve as models and provide care and support. It’s so easy for them, or anyone, when so isolated from other age groups to over-value youth, the example of their peers, and of what’s new and popular. And we can carry this isolation over to our later years….

 

*To read the whole piece, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

Feeling More Comfortable with Aging: Maybe If We Stop Fighting Ourselves Our Lives Might Not Seem to Pass as Quickly

All through my life, I felt I would continuously get better at doing things. With practice, I’d improve in sports, or writing, carpentry, cooking⎼ whatever I set my mind and body to do. Maybe most of us feel this way. Practice improves performance. But this is no longer true for me, at least not with physical skills and activities.

 

I had in the past assumed that if I had a pain, it was temporary. And if I treated it kindly, wisely, and went to consult a doctor or some form of healer, it would eventually go away. No longer. Pains appear and do not always go away. They change all the time, but do not disappear forever.

And meanwhile, time, life can go by too fast. Aging is changing.

 

The older we get, the faster our days, weeks, lives seem to disappear behind us; or the speed at which our life passes is directly proportional to our age. This seems to be a syndrome that plagues all (or most?) of us as we age. Maybe we should call it the aging time syndrome.

 

I first heard about it in a college philosophy class. The professor said it was often used as an argument against the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent creator. How could a beneficent God allow time to speed up for us as we got closer to death?

 

Why it happens is not understood. Is it caused by a slowing down in our ability to process information so we can’t keep up with time passing? Or is it because aging means we have more memories of old moments to shorten our habitation of the new? I don’t know.

 

But the more I think about it, the more it becomes clear that what happens is not that the present goes by faster. We still have moments that can seem to last forever. What happens, I think, is that as we age, the past gets larger quicker. We look back and suddenly feel the day, the week, the decade⎼ they were here one moment, and too quickly, they’re gone.

 

Is this sense of the past getting larger quicker an inherited alarm clock? An inborn prompt that evolved to teach us to live the last years or moments we have left more fully?

 

Last night, I discovered new twists in an old exercise. At 3:30 am, after pain woke me up and I had trouble getting back to sleep, I decided to return to window watching, a practice I had begun earlier this year. But I changed it a bit and discovered new applications for it.

 

Instead of gazing out the window to simply notice the beauty of the world, I took a breath and then looked to see what before I might have missed. I asked the night what beauty is here that in recent times had eluded me? What had I never verbalized to myself or others, or never felt? Or: what can I perceive now because of what I had noticed before? I looked outside; then closed my eyes and visualized the scene in my mind. Then l opened my eyes and looked again….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

 

The Snow Falls in Slow Motion as the World Turns too Fast: We Age Slowly and Feel It Suddenly

After several days of dangerous weather throughout the nation causing too much death and disruption, a “cyclone bomb” in many places, going from rain to ice to blizzards, with extreme windchills ⎼ temperatures changing where I live in a matter of hours from 45 degrees Fahrenheit to zero or below ⎼ today is cold but the snow is falling lazily, individual flakes dropping from a still, gray sky.

 

Inside myself, there’s a stillness in the center of a storm. A feeling that my life is changing too quickly, that I’m aging too quickly. Despite being 75, until recently I had felt internally maybe 35 or 40. Still exercised an hour and a half to two hours each day. Still wrote blogs each week. Until a year or so ago, despite being retired from regular teaching, and when the pandemic allowed it, I still led an after school martial arts class at my old school. But not this past year. One health concern after another, and the sickness and death of friends and family ⎼ this is aging me.

 

Add the earth in tears with so many species in crisis and near extinction; so much hate, politically manipulated hate and violence, thanks a great deal to a former President who, despite now being out of office, is still lying about and working to overturn an election he had lost, overturn democracy. Then there’s the invasion of Ukraine and the pandemic ⎼ this ages all of us.

 

My dad died at age 96. Before dying, he looked me in the eye and said, “you know, this man is dangerous.” He was warning me that DJT reminded him of the early years of Hitler. He would say the would-be dictator’s name, but wouldn’t say the German dictator’s name, and wouldn’t say ‘Nazis’, just pronouns, ‘him’ and ‘them.’ This wasn’t a warning I needed. But it did make the DJT presidency even more real and frightening to me.

 

Months earlier, my dad had talked about spending his whole morning just getting dressed and ready for the day. And then most of the evening getting prepared for bed. I wasn’t the most understanding, then. My comparative youth got in the way. But now I feel what he was saying. We age to the point where we spend most of our day waking up and then going to sleep. Or maybe, we do that our whole lives without realizing it, preparing for life instead of realizing we’re living each second of it.

 

We think death won’t touch us, then it does, and powerfully. At some point we need to look at the slowly falling snow and realize here we are. This is it. We’re falling; we have been falling since we first stood up. And now, the flake of snow is getting closer to the ground.

 

Can this closeness turn the whole thing around and make us also closer to waking up, to wising up as we get closer to dying?…

 

 

*To read the whole post, please go to The Good Men Project.