We Age From Our First Breath
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The emotional undertow of aging, I think, is a feeling of loss — loss of youth, loss of dreams, loss of possibility. This quality is what used to be referred to as mid-life crisis. Other phrases have come into vogue now — such as the cheery “60 is the new 40″ — but the undertow of such homilies is still loss.
Is there some way out of this sense of loss, some fresh point of view that assuages the pain of it? Actually, there is. Aging is not a matter of years — 40, 60, 80 — but of life process. Everything is aging, all the time. We age from our first breath. The problem is not aging per se, but our view of it.
It is natural to want to avoid pain and abide with pleasure. Even a sunflower wants to turn to the sun as much as possible. Why should it be otherwise? And yet, this pleasure bias does not really maximize our pleasure. Even pleasure turns to pain as it fades. Though we want to maximize gain and minimize loss, gain and loss are actually interwoven in each moment.
In teaching Zen meditation, I sometimes talk about breathing in terms of gain and loss. We breathe in and gain a new moment of life; we breath out and that moment is gone, never to return. This is how our life is.
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Find the full article at: http://edgemagazine.net/2012/04/we-age-from-our-first-breath/
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