The Tao of Aging

by Old Man Moses

The recent and swift change of season from hot summer days to this damp, cold, Sunday afternoon. As I sit, my legs outstretched and bare-toed before the first crackling fire of autumn – enlivens my senses. The change of season reminds me that everything and everyone is changing. Time slithers through grasping fingers like grains of sand. We try to remember the world as it was only because we cannot bear to let it go. Our world is wishful thinking. “Remember the good old days?” We wear spectacles from the past. Memory sustains us. “Life was better then. Simpler too.” People trusted one another. Automobiles were made to last. Why, I remember my first Model T!”

I am not a psychologist, but it occurs to me that much of the unhappiness of our lives emanates from our unwillingness to either let go of the past or, alternatively, from our inability to re-create the present in an old, familiar context. Most of us take an in-between stance. We sit about and mope that “things just aren’t the way they used to be” and complain bitterly that we don’t much like them the way they are. The past beguiles us. We are seduced by our memories. When the present refuses to succumb to our intentions, we find refuge in inundated glory.

Memory haunts us. I recall a phone conversation two or three years ago. The woman calling me (whom I did not know) took me back into the year 1917. She was at the railroad station waiting to say goodbye to her lover, a soldier. She told me her story for forty-five minutes. I listened respectfully, and silently. Another time a woman called regarding a man who, she said, loved her but refused to leave his wife fearing for his position in the church hierarchy. Her only friend was a bottle of Golden Cream Sherry that she sipped as she cried, and decades slipped away.

         I recall a scene from my youth. I am nine years old. I am on an island in a lake, sitting at the top of a small tree, wind blowing through my hair, sun beating on my brow, the world beating in my heart. I remember the thought that crystallized that moment forever in my time: “Isn’t it wonderful,” I thought” to be nine years old.” Then, the afterthought: “I wish I could be nine forever.”

         Memory is an afterthought – a melancholic longing for days gone by. The world as wishful thinking. Trying to replace what is with what was. Doleful counterpoint to this gray old age.

 If we are a culture that worships youth, it is not because of the unfettered joys of that vaunted age, but rather because, somewhere along the way, most of us become stuck in time. Those of us adjudged qualified to inhabit institutions for the insane are stuck in one time – too afraid, or too perversely satisfied, to emerge from the self-spun web of time’s chronic cocoon. Most of the rest of us, judged normal by community standards, become progressively stuck in time, moving forward in seemingly purposive leaps from one moment of extinguished glory to the next, never quite catching up to the present except in those undiluted moments of ecstasis that become the steppingstones to our past.

         “If only I could be nine forever.” Oh, for those good old days. Our melancholic longing for the past belies its presence. We feel seduced, abandoned and betrayed – sucked into a whirling vortex down memory’s drain.

         Being stuck in the past (culturally expressed by the worship of youth) is no more, and no less, than the fear of death looking over its shoulder. Living in the present moves us forward in our own very personal and irreversible time. It brings us face to face with our own physical mortality.

         By denying death, we remain immune to its gift. The gift of death is this: that life is precious. We are to live it today, to savor its beauty, ponder its mystery, and enlarge its possibilities.

While memory provides us with the means to escape to our past, it also provides us with the key to unlock our present moment. We recall the circumstances of the past but rarely their context. We are seduced by the illusion that if we could re-create the circumstances of our past, we regain our own lost paradise. Fool’s gold at the end of memory’s rainbow.

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         To unlock the present moment, we must look at the origin of memory, not its content. Recall your fondest memory. Hold this present moment in the same context that once, long ago, crystallized this memory in your mind. Holding this present moment in the context you have re-created, encounter death. And its gift. If you do this, you will experience the first faint stirrings of immortality.

         “I am nine years old. I am on an island in a lake, sitting at the top of a very small tree, wind blowing through my hair, sun beating on my brow, the world beating in my heart, I thought, without thinking at all, “Isn’t it wonderful to be nine years old.”

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May you be , forever young.

BOB MOSES

Aka, Old Man Moses