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For most in old age there is the feeling that the body has outlasted them. Few outgrow the
body. Many want to get out of it before it dies. the mind's image of the body changes more
slowly than the body. The body goes to ash while still a strong flame burns in the heart. Many
are unable to walk with any ease though they still carry the image of athletic youth in the
underdream.
"My batteries are running down." The energy of the life-force is no longer found in
body exteriors; muscles become soft, the skin spots, the eyelids droop. For those who think of
themselves as the body it is hell. But I hear others say that all that has happened is that their
life-force has withdrawn into their heart and that it is in their heart that happiness has at last
been found. "Like the sap going back to the roots in fall and winter."
For some the world is so rapidly changing that they feel out of tune,
misfits, foreigners in a culture they had once participated in. Watching television much of the time to
fill vacant space, they are confronted with the "cult of youth, " where 80 per cent of the
television actors are between 25 and 40 though only 20 per cent of the public is between
those ages. It seems like a strange land where one is punished for being old. Some feel like a
victim.
In India the first twenty years of life is considered the time of being a student, of
maturation. In the second twenty years you are a householder supporting your family. For the
third twenty years you are perfecting your spiritual practice while watching your children
mature and providing for your parents' well-being. By sixty it is presumed that most of your
responsibilities to family and society have been fulfilled, and many spend the rest of their
lives as "sanyasin," as free-roaming renunciates. It is a time of pilgrimage, quiet
contemplation, and devout song.
Many societies honor their elderly for the wisdom accumulated during a long life. Our
society does not approach old age with that reverence but rather with revulsion, so it
becomes necessary for each to give themselves the respect they deserve. It is in the last years
that many touch on a sense of being but few trust themselves sufficiently to let go fully into
it, to let themselves be who they suspect they really might be. Though many come to learn
the real meaning of service: volunteering in hospitals, visiting people in nursing homes,
sharing as big brothers and sisters, baby-sitting, in remedial reading groups, in grief
counseling, they shine with wisdom and compassion.
It doesn't seem to matter whether one has lived twenty years of seventy years, at its
end that life seems to have been exhausted in a single moment. The past is irretrievably gone
but the sense of being is ever present. Indeed, if one asks someone right at the edge of death
if they feel any less alive at that moment than they have at any other time in their life, they
will say no. Those who follow life to where it resides in the heart live fully.
In the workshops we have been conducting around the country in the past few years,
we have met many people in their late sixties and seventies and some in their eighties who
wished to turn inward. Who sensed some deeper experience to life than the transitory
holdings and losses of the past. They trust the youthful heart that seeks to go beyond the
body's increasing limitation. Looking out across a room of meditators, here and there an
older, deeply wrinkled face will smoothe as the breath slows and the eyes quiet behind closed
lids. The love that radiates from them is vintage love.
The old who live in their body are bent under the strain. The old who live in their
hearts are aglow.
--Stephen Levine, Who Dies?
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