This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. It's really meaningful to me to be here. Green Gulch is one of the true homes of my heart on this planet. Had some very wonderful times here. And it makes me a little nervous to be sitting up here, but I'm also very honored to be here. I haven't sat in this seat here since I was head student in the practice period here many years ago. So it's great to be here again. I might... I have to be careful how I move.

[01:03]

So I am going to talk to you today about aging, which is something I'm learning more about every single day. Every passing day, I become more of an expert. And I hope... that it's of interest to people who are not old yet. I see quite a few people in the audience who are definitely not old. But the fact is that no matter how old you are or how young you are, you are getting older. We're all doing it right this second. And even if you're young, you probably know somebody who is old. And so it is part of our life and what it means is part of our life. And if we stay around for a while, we will all get old. And it's also kind of incredible to me to realize that every single person in this room was once a baby in diapers.

[02:07]

Just look around and think about that. So it's a process we're all doing together. It's also a Buddhist subject. And as you may well know, when the young Shakyamuni Buddha first left the palace, he was very shocked by the sight of an old person, a sick person, and a dead person. And he had never known such things existed. But those were the heavenly messengers. And the fourth heavenly messenger who Buddha saw was a monk who... gave him the idea that there was a path to meeting this suffering that he observed. So his observation, his shock at seeing an old person makes us know that even for Buddha, from his point of view at that point, it wasn't a bowl of cherries.

[03:09]

There's something challenging there. But as he himself became an old man, presumably he came to some peace with it, and he did indeed. follow the way of the fourth messenger, he found some liberation from it. So we are practicing his teachings and ourselves seeking some freedom from these different forms of suffering. So myself, I was never planning to get old myself. I was hoping to have lots of birthdays and live a long time, but I didn't really want to get kind of frayed and bent and wrinkled in the process, and I didn't think it would happen to me because I would take my vitamins and do my exercise and everything. And it's hard to kind of grasp that this does happen to us. Of course, it happens to different people in different ways, but kind of like death, it's hard to really get it that it's for everybody.

[04:17]

If you stay around, it's for everybody. Some form of it. And about the time I turned 60, I began to notice that it was, in fact, happening to me, too. And my knees got bad, and this is why I'm in a chair now. I have arthritis in my knees, and I had to give up a hip-hop dancing class I was taking at the Y. I can't go back-talking anymore. And, you know, I can live without the hip-hop dancing and I can live without the backpacking. It's a loss. And the other thing I've noticed, particularly in my own case, is memory problems. And my memory is definitely not what it used to be. And I forget the names of people I know quite well sometimes. And I sometimes forget where I parked the car and I have to go searching around for a long time. And so these things are annoying, and they're kind of signals that something is happening here.

[05:22]

So I do acknowledge, though, that they are not great problems, and that I'm really still a baby of getting old. And I'm very grateful for my health. I'm in my 60s. I'm 68, and I'm kind of... A young old person, not an old old person, yet there's a writer, Mary Pfeiffer, who makes the distinction between the young old and the old old. And she says that the young old are people who may be older in years and are aware of the fact that they are getting old, but they're living full lives. And the old, old are people who have begun to suffer some real losses and are frail and have some disabilities from age that are significantly affecting the way they live their lives and have lost some independence, perhaps. So I really know that I am still a baby in the matter of getting old.

[06:27]

But I wanted to take a look at it and see what it was as I noticed that it was happening to me. And my Buddhist practice encourages me to not turn away from what's difficult. This is one of the main things we are taught, to try and just be present with what is. OK, what is this? What is it? And so I brought that habit of mind to the process of getting older. try to just look and see what is going on here with the idea that perhaps it wouldn't be so frightening or worrisome if I just paid attention. And also, as a writer, my writing practice also encourages me to bring my attention to what's challenging, and that's what's most interesting in life anyway. That's where the juice is and the creativity is where there's some challenge, some difficulty. And that's really what keeps our lives real. If everything went smoothly all the time and we never had any problems, well, we'd probably be dead.

[07:36]

I mean, we wouldn't really have that situation in life. But meeting what comes, meeting the challenges that come, really keep us on our toes. So I really did start writing about the different things I was noticing about aging. And out of that came the book that Arlene mentioned, and I will read an excerpt from it during the talk this morning. And I've been doing readings and talks about the book, and often somebody afterwards in the discussion or question and answer, some person in the audience will say some white-haired... bent-looking person will say, well, you have no business talking about getting old. I'm 85 and I'm old, but you're not old. So I really want to acknowledge that I have tremendous respect for my elders who are older than I am. I'm just beginning this, and I learn from older people, and I admire older people, and I know that I will continue to learn from them and watch them and see how people meet real challenges with courage.

[08:49]

My own parents, I observed and watched, and often our parents are the people we can learn the most from about aging, if we're lucky to have them around when they are old. My father went blind in the last years of his life, and my mother lost her mobility, really. She couldn't walk more than about 100 paces at the end of her life. So they both had... real difficulties and losses, and they both met them with considerable courage, actually, and it was helpful to me to see that, and not just courage, gritting their teeth, but some good spirit and love and enthusiasm for life that continued. So, right now, I can practice what's coming for me, and we can all be doing that at every moment in our lives, of course, whatever age we are, we can... Meet what comes and say, okay, what is it? What is it right now? And just be present with what is.

[09:53]

And right this moment, I'm exactly the age I am right now, and you're exactly the age you are right now, and that's the perfect age to be in this particular moment. The Grey Panthers office in Berkeley, where I've been, has posters all over the wall, and each poster has a portrait of a person's face. of different ages, and underneath each one it says, the best age to be is the age you are. So that's a very Zen thought, too. We can keep that in mind, that this moment, the best age we could be is the age we are in this very moment. And, in fact, it is... Amazing, this moment right now that we are all here, all these different ages. We could go around the room and everybody could say how old they are, and that would be interesting. But we're just here right now, together, in this particular moment. And what a miracle. In the Genjo Koan, Dogen wrote, Zen Master Dogen, in the early 1200s, he wrote...

[11:04]

do not think that the firewood is before and the ash is after. Firewood is a stage unto itself, and ash is a stage unto itself. So in this way, I too am in the stage of life that I'm in, and I'm really practicing being in this stage and not thinking of myself as a has-been young person or as an about-to-be-dead person. I'm this stage. And so it's really, in the moment, we're not really any age in one moment of time. But then we do live in a world where we are getting older and time passes, and we are stepping through one Dharma gate after another as we go along. The poet George Oppen said, The old are new to age as the young are to youth.

[12:05]

So I'm new to age and I'm looking at it freshly and I'm approaching the subject with curiosity and considering myself to be in training as a person getting older. My mother died four years ago And she was 84 at the time she died. She died as the result of a car accident. She was actually going strong and enjoying her life in spite of her physical frailty. So that was really too bad to lose her in that way. But the last time I visited her, she lived in a retirement building in Chicago in Hyde Park over next to the lake. And in the last visit, it turned out to be the last visit before her death. I had a nice time with her. She invited a bunch of friends into the building, excuse me, into her apartment, not into the building.

[13:10]

She invited a number of older women, old women, they were in their 80s and 90s, several friends, for a glass of wine or water to meet me before we went down to dinner. And she was, I was very, proud of me, she would introduce me to her friends by saying, this is my Buddhist daughter from California, which was kind of embarrassing to me. And I was kind of exotic for being a Buddhist there. And at that, I remember on this day, I had just been at a sesheen, and I mentioned that, and one of the women, one of my mother's friends, Betty, said, oh, well, did you get really calm while you were at the sesheen? And I said, well, you know, the The point is actually not to get anything. You're supposed to just give up, gaining mind, let go of gaining mind. And Betty said, well, I can see that I don't need Zen practice because old age just forces you to let go of one damn thing after another.

[14:15]

So in a sense, getting older is very much like Zen practice, and it's good training in letting go. My mother had, the way she lived in this apartment building was also something I really learned from. And she had a community of friends there. And they really looked out for each other. And this is the kind of thing that we all think about increasingly as we get older for our parents and then for ourselves. And I know Zen Center thinks about this. How do we live in this apartment? How do we live together, or where do we live when we get older and frailer? So I learned about that also from observing my mother, and it's something that we all need to keep thinking about and talking about together to make preparations. And I learned other things from my mother. I really saw her aging up close, and I was close to her.

[15:18]

Even though she lived in Chicago, I was not physically close to her. And I didn't visit her as much as she wished I did, but I tried to visit fairly often. And as she lost her mobility, she got good at staying still. She used to sit in her chair by the window. She had a six-floor apartment with a wonderful view of Lake Michigan, and she was a complete view hound. She loved a view. So she would just sit in her swivel chair with her binoculars and look at the... or boats and the ducks and things on the lake. And she really enjoyed that. And she also, right towards the end of her life, she discovered that the building had one of those scooters that people use on the sidewalks. They're not a wheelchair, but they're like a little electric chair that you can sit in. And it was for the use of the people in the building. And she discovered that and got all excited about it.

[16:19]

going around. She went to poetry readings in museums and things, taking herself around in her scooter. So there was that kind of adaptability that I think is something we all want to learn in whatever circumstances we're in. You lose something, but then maybe you gain something else. What came to take the place of the thing you lost? Or what else is here now? You can't play tennis anymore. What comes instead? Maybe it's shuffleboard. Who knows? But new things can come and take the place of something that's gone. And also we can have fewer things, maybe. We can be satisfied with less. I also learned a lot about getting old from my granddaughter, who was born just before my mother died. So there's kind of an exchange of generations there, as if everybody... moved over one seat. And she's four now.

[17:21]

And I learned about getting old from her because of her youth and because of her attitude towards me as an old person. And I see that to her, I'm not old. I mean, she doesn't really have that idea in her mind. There's nothing wrong with me. I'm just the way I am. And I'm Grandma Sue. That's who I am. And that's how I walk. One time, we were walking down the sidewalk, and she started walking in this very stiff-legged walk and said, this is how you walk, Grandma Soup. And I was horrified, oh my God, is it really that bad? But she wasn't making fun of me. She wasn't, actually. She was just noticing how that was my walk. She has her walk. She was just demonstrating that she could do my walk, too. And we would go to the playground, and she... You know, there were these bars that she would hang by her knees from the bars, and they're about this high above the ground.

[18:23]

And then she would say, okay, you do it, Grandma Sue, you do it. And even if I could hang by my knees, which I can't anymore, I couldn't have fit myself under that bar. So she finally realized that I really couldn't do that. And she just accepts the fact that there are things that I can't do, that she can do, and that's okay. And she... She also knows that there are things I can do that she can't do that are interesting to her, like I can tell her stories about the silly things her father did when he was a little boy, and just that fact that her father was a little boy and that I know about that is kind of stunning to her. And then I think how I learned from my grandmother and how I felt about my grandmother, who I love very much, and I remember climbing into bed with her in the morning, and sort of cuddling with her, and she would hug me, and she had these great, huge, pendulous blobs of flesh hanging from her upper arms that were, well, they weren't huge, but they were larger than I might want to have on my upper arms now.

[19:29]

And they were nice and cool and soft. I just thought it was great. I loved it. There was nothing wrong with that. That was just how she was. So that kind of child's mind of just accepting, here we are, this is the stage we're in now, and try to bring that forward for myself. Also, I realized, as I think about my granddaughter and my mother, it occurred to me that I never knew my mother when she was a little girl, and I will never know my granddaughter when she's an old woman, and I'm somewhere in the middle there, and it gives me a sense of belonging to the turning over of the generations and the leaves falling from the tree and the next season coming and the leaves falling. And this feeling of being in the turning of the generations and the feeling that my life is just a blink, really, in this continuum of the life stream is actually very comforting and very closely related, I think, to our Zen attitude of respect for the lineage and the ancestors and the sense of being part of the lineage and the sense that generations will come after us, hopefully.

[20:43]

And so our lives become just part of a stream, and this makes getting older seem like a smaller deal in a way, as well as our own mortality becomes more bearable or sensible and logical in that way of thinking about our lives. And in the Zen tradition, in particular, I think, well, maybe the Buddhist tradition in general, but in the Zen tradition and in Japanese culture, there's a tremendous amount of respect for old age. And in our teachings, we have all kinds of wonderful koans about old people or old women selling tea cakes and things like that. And they're very respected and they really have teachings to give us. So there's... a good feeling about old age in our tradition, which I'm grateful for.

[21:48]

And I've been told that in Japan, people sometimes lie about their age and say they're older than they really are, which you don't find very often here. I wanted to read you one koan. I won't comment on it much, but it's an example of the kind of koan I'm talking about, and this one is from the Kahawai koans. It's translated by Thomas Cleary. Magu Nanshwin and another monk went to call on Master Jing Shan. After meeting a woman on the road, they stopped at her tea shop. The woman prepared a pot of tea and brought three cups. She said to them, O monks, let those of you with miraculous powers drink tea. As the three looked at each other, the The woman said, watch this decrepit old woman show her own miraculous powers. Then she picked up the cups, poured the tea, and went out. So I love that, that, you know, what a wonderful miraculous power to pour tea.

[22:54]

And a decrepit old woman pours tea, and that's her miraculous power. And so we can all pour tea, and we can all have miraculous powers. even if we're old or maybe because we're old. So I'm trying to understand what it means to be a human being and now what it means to be a human being growing older. And I always say that I speak of myself and my own experience, not because I'm important, but on the contrary, really, because I'm using myself as an example of an ordinary person. And I'm the example that I know best. So that's why I talk about myself. And in my book, I've written, my essays in the book are very experiential and they're about my own experiences. But what I find is that people like to hear other people's stories.

[23:57]

I like to hear other people's stories of their own lives. And we can connect to each other that way. And I think it's really helpful to share our own experiences as human beings, struggling to be free and have some equanimity. And also, as I was working on the book and thinking about aging, I really came to see that there are some good things about getting old, quite a few good things about getting old. And there are, so I read have written about some of them as well. And just as it becomes harder and harder to make big adventurous journeys off to foreign lands, it's a good time to journey inward. And so we can do that more. And we can do that at any age, but older age seems to be a particularly appropriate time to maybe journey even more within, take advantage of the opportunity.

[25:04]

And we get to practice letting go, like my mother's friend Betty was saying. It's a good excuse to let go of the things that we don't like, as well as the things that sometimes we have to let go of things that we wish we didn't have to let go of, but we can also let go of some things that we don't really want to bother to do anymore. And to go ahead and use our... our time and our energy and appreciate our precious human birth just for what we really want to use it for. And sometimes we have to keep doing things that we don't really want to do. But we can steer our course by what's most important to us. And remember what it says on the Han of don't waste time at the end of a little verse written on the Han. This is a precious human birth, each moment of it. So aging happens because of impermanence, which is one of the three marks of existence.

[26:15]

And impermanence is another name for time, for time passing. And we grow old because time passes in the relative world. And I've noticed as I've gotten older that my own relationship with time has changed to some extent and kind of in a good way because we all are used to saying to each other as time goes by, how did this year go by so fast? How could it be Sunday already and so on? But even as these things go faster and faster and faster, there's something else happening in the way I feel about time. So I thought I would read you one of my essays about time. And this one I wrote while I was studying Dogen's fascicle, Uji, or The Time Being. And it's kind of, you wouldn't know it really, but it's sort of like a commentary on that.

[27:16]

And it's called For the Time Being. When I was 49 and my sons were more or less grown, I kept a promise I had made to myself to go on a long retreat before I turned 50. I arranged a leave of absence from my job, had a set of robes sewn for me, and went to a practice period at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, deep in the coastal mountains of California. For three months, I followed the strict monastic schedule, meditating... studying Buddhist teachings, and working in silence at whatever I was assigned to, whether it was chopping carrots or cleaning kerosene lanterns. I didn't get in a car or hear a phone ring the whole time. 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 15 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.

[28:24]

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, it's a great matter. Don't waste time. One evening, somewhere in the middle of the practice period, it was my turn to hit the echohan, 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 fruit 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 again, and the light was still on the trees, and I was ready for the next hit.

[29:29]

A couple of years ago, when I was a few months shy of being 65, I packed up my things at work. I loved my job. I had loved it for 17 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, F-O-M-S, 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.

[30:32]

To put it more positively, I'm curious about everything and everybody. And so, when I first retired, feeling rich was 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? 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?

[31:36]

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, because it was some kind of triumph. 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, there's less and less of it. There's less of it in front of me than there used to be. And then 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 I think thin practice is partly to blame for that. And fourth, it takes me longer to do each thing. So 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.

[32:38]

I remember impatiently watching my grandmother making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a picnic. This was the same grandmother with the soft arms. 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. And she did it again for the bread. 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.

[33:42]

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 backyard 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 I want to keep working with other people to help this feverish planet. 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 trying to put some white space back into my appointment calendar.

[34:51]

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 timelines 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 exactly wrong.

[35:55]

They're living in the deep time that Dogen calls the time being. Dogen says, each moment is all being. It's the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment. I think of time as a 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.

[37:02]

My three-year-old self was there 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 with water. 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 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. So, you know, I've been talking about aging and writing about aging really as part of a conversation.

[38:05]

I'm so aware of this that I'm just making a contribution to a larger conversation. I want to know what other people have to say about it. I want to know what you all have to say about it and what you think about it. And I think the important thing is really for us to remember that we're not doing this alone, that we're all getting older together, and we can find ways to help each other, young and old. And I'm struck by how, as I get older, it seems to me that young people in my life are much more kind and respectful of me than I was when I was a young person. I remember, don't trust anybody over 30. And I don't think I paid much attention to my elders, really, when I was young in Cal law. But now I feel as though young people are more interested in what I have to say or older people have to say. And I'm really interested in what young people have to say. I think that's so important, too, that we have to keep learning from each other and having that conversation across the different ages.

[39:07]

So we can talk together, those of us who are getting older, about what we're experiencing, and we can laugh about it. And I want to read a poem by Charles Resnikoff about this, which I think has some gentle forgiveness in it. Hail and farewell. Waiting to cross the avenue, I saw a man who had been in school with me. We had been friendly and now knew each other at once. Hot, isn't it, I said, as if we had met only yesterday. It hit 95. Oh, no, he answered. I'm not 95 yet. Then he smiled a little sadly and said, you know, I'm so tired. I thought for a moment you were talking about my age. We walked on together and he asked me what I was doing. But of course, he did not care. Then, politely, I asked him about himself, and he, too, answered briefly.

[40:12]

At the stairs down to the subway station, he said, I know I ought to be ashamed of myself, but I have forgotten your name. Don't be ashamed, I answered. I've forgotten yours, too. With that, we both smiled wryly, gave our names, and parted. So, you know, one admits he's forgotten the name, then the other can admit it, and then they can both feel like it's really okay. It's really okay. And I'm in a Crohn's group, we call it, a group of five women friends who meet together once a month to talk about our own experiences of aging and how we can kind of help each other and talk about what we're going through that's difficult and how can we kind of help hold the suffering of the planet or what is our contribution, what do we want to... what kind of contribution do we want to make now as we get older? And how does that change? And we're talking about the idea of becoming an elder. As you become older, you can also become an elder.

[41:15]

And what is it to be an elder? And what do we want to offer young people? And I'm aware of the fact that really our lives don't belong to us alone. And it's not just a matter of me trying to get by as best I can, but to remember that also I am... in the world and I'm walking around and what do I want the people in my life and the young people in my life to know about what it means to me to be old by observing me what do I want to model and so I think we all have some responsibility for how we can we can take good care of ourselves in a loving way for the sake of ourselves and for the sake of those who love us and also be willing to ask for help when we need help and to be authentic and honest about what we need. And there's a difference between, you know, how do you find the line between whining and asking for help? Or how do you find the line between having a sort of stiff upper lip and being in denial and having some dignity?

[42:19]

And so these are interesting things to work on and to just keep on practicing having something to give out whatever age we are and that we can Just keep on becoming ourselves at each stage of the game. So I want to end by reading a limerick that my mother wrote, who makes many appearances in this book, which I think is a very zen limerick. She was a poet, but she also had a particular fondness for dogger rolls. So this is her limerick. In her old age, a rickety miz took up learning the isness of is. Since it's not what one does, she just was and she was. Now she's gone off to be in Cadiz. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive.

[43:21]

Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[43:38]

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