this talk comes to you from a well meaning elderly man
with memory problems. Yeah,
that's how the Special Counsel recently described Joe Biden. And what a shame that Biden reacted so defensively,
that he couldn't own it.
I'm not going to veer into politics. But he's a good case study, I think, Biden. And when I say he couldn't own it? Well, to be fair, he owned it. He said, what I just said about myself. his political enemies, would be replaying it for the next nine months,
and using it against him. So there's that.
So this talk will be about aging. And, of course, I speak from
experience. I know that.
I hope that the other older people can resonate to some of the things I'll be saying, I hope that the younger people won't just turn this off. Because,
after all, what are they have to worry about? Getting old? But there is this.
There's this basic asymmetry, about an elderly person talking about
aging. That is that the elderly have lived through youth. We were young ones. But the young can't no old age. You can only imagine it. And maybe even not that very much.
So why don't you start by talking about the losses that come from aging. And I'll run through some of these fast because my fellow elderly will not need to be told these things. But
so we lose, we lose
muscle strength, we lose flexibility.
We lose stamina, physical stamina.
Maybe mental stamina. I haven't noticed that. But maybe
we lose eyesight. We lose hearing.
We lose recovery time after injuries. Those of you who are older No, I've heard this from so many people. And of course, in this talk, I'm not just talking from my own direct experience, but from hearing a lot of people talk about it. That it's surprising how much longer it takes to recover from an injury than it does when you're young.
We lose friends and family members. It's a big one.
We lose the respect of those who are younger.
We're often not taken as seriously.
For example, I've learned
eventually that there's no point in talking in teisho when I was still giving TV shows that in Rochester, there's no point really talking warning about the dangers of social media.
There's a really little point in warning about the danger of getting attached to one's identity.
That's a big one. It's a big one in In Buddhist
doctrine not getting attached to identity. But this is now to say that when so many people clutch at their sense of identity, racial identity, and gender identity,
ethnic identity
I've come to believe it pretty much falls on deaf ears. If, if you're at a stage of life where you need to grasp that identity, hold on to a sense of who you are. And then that's what you'll do.
When a younger person, here's an older person conveying some advice or messages. It's all too easy just to dismiss the message because of the messenger
is just an old man. In that respect,
it can be the same with other ageism, it can be the same as other isms.
As a kind of a filter that snaps into place. You notice this. When you've when you've become older, I'm sure women sensitive women can notice the same thing. People of color can notice the same thing that all too often the person you're talking to is not really hearing what you're saying because they've got you pegged
for it to be in a certain category.
Hey, remember,
I made the mistake once a long, long ago of recommending a movie to Roshi Kapleau to take his daughter to when she was in town from Toronto, she didn't come down very often. And he had asked Dad, you know, any any movies in town? And I really overdid it with my enthusiasm about a movie I just seen, called the sting.
Robert Redford, Paul Newman,
I had loved it so foolishly, with the certainty of youth, I said, you will love this Roshi, you and Rama, both. You've got to go. I was so excited that I said, I'll take you I'll drive you to the cinema.
So he took my word for it. Yeah.
I was I was so excited that I said, I'll pick you up afterward. I knew how long the movie would run. And I did pick them up. And they got in the car and the temperature in the car dropped about 40 degrees.
I see silence.
I finally said well,
well would you think
and I still remember his reaction
said cheap con man values and nothing that anyone on the path should see.
And I deflated like one of those.
Those tall sock
figures you see outside of used car lots. And what I'm getting to is young, his young daughter at the time her name was Rama in the backseat. She chirped. Well, I liked it. And afterward when I drove into the back in the Zen Center parking lot when when Rama and I were alone, she said oh he's just an old man.
Okay, okay.
That's the way of the world. That's probably the way it's always been. I would never suggest that that country Change. Remember having lived as a young person, how you easily it is easy it is to dismiss what your elders say.
And
accepting that is part of the gift of aging. That's just the way it is. That's those are the headwinds we elderly are up against in giving advice.
Getting back to sort of what prompted this talk, which I've been toying with in my mind for quite a while, that is the the incident with, with the Special Counsel making this characterization of Biden
again, yes, as we age, we lose a step or two or more. Of course, Biden, who's What is he now 82. Of course.
There are times when he flubs names and the flubs place, places. Times when he is momentarily confused.
That's the natural course of things. Call it entropy.
Call it impermanence. There's one for you.
You may know that his aides, his Vice President and others rushed to defend his cognitive abilities and saying that he was in meetings with him he was he's so sharp, alert and commanding and decisive and as, as John Stewart said, last week, too bad. Those meetings weren't
filmed.
We don't know for sure.
It could be that surrounded by his trusted advisors and having a nice clear agenda in front of him, he, he is more decisive and less likely to be confused.
You know, as I was putting my thoughts together for this talk, just by chance, I got something somebody came across in my newsfeed from Men's Health magazine, in which well, I'll let it speak for itself. And he starts by acknowledging that yes, as we age, our our memory declines. It said that after age 40, our brains start shrinking 3% per decade. And after the age of AD, that shrinkage is 5% per decade. Our information processing speed slows down. It's harder to quickly retrieve information is then names and nouns. One of my jobs when I was in those years when I was Roshi, his assistant secretary was when he was telling stories with a group of people is to fill in the nouns
he would he would
turn turn to me or to Polly and he would hesitate and we had heard his stories enough that we we knew what whom he was referring to the noun he was grasping for. It's a natural part of aging
one of my favorite jokes indulge me in this now, one of my favorite jokes is about two couples. Middle aged or beyond. and they have dinner at the home of one of the couples and then the the two wives repair to the kitchen to make coffee and dessert. And yes, this is dating this joke. But stay with me here. And the husbands are left there in the living room alone. And one of them starts raving about a restaurant that he and his wife had gone to.
The
The food was, was just superb, the the decor, the environment was everything you want everything you want in a restaurant, the service was impeccable. He went on and on. Finally the other man said, Okay, well, what's what's the net? Sounds good. What's the name of it? And the man, the man describing this restaurant, he is face kind of frowned and concentration. He looked down. He looked up toward the kitchen. Then he looked down again. And he finally said, what's the name of that? That that red flower with the thorns?
And the other men said, Rose.
And then the first man turns and calls into the kitchen. Hey, Rose, what's the name of that restaurant? We went to?
We I was telling that joke in a restaurant. And when I hit the punch line, the waitress came skittering over. And I said, What do you want? She said, Well, I said, When is your name? Rose? She said yes. Okay.
There is there is so much fear in this country of having one's memory decline, I think very much misplaced fear. And I've ever read a couple of articles from neurologists who feel also that it's misplaced is too too much of it. Maybe that was what was going on with with Biden's assistance and his his people there. They were so afraid to face the fact and it is a fact of cognitive decline, that they were just doing somersaults to try to claim otherwise with in the case of Biden.
The wonderful thing is that you can compensate for losses a memory
I heard once that
Yasutani Roshi,
at some age, would
keep a pad of paper and a pen next to him while he was sitting alone at home, and
when something
bubbled up that he didn't want to forget, he would just pick up a pen and make a note short note.
And that's something I've been doing for years. Little things. check tire pressure, then you can drop
it, it's gone. You don't have to worry about remembering it.
And there
are wonderful benefits of losing memory. It is becoming less attached to the past, getting free of the past. Some of you have heard me tell the story of the journalist who was interviewing Albert Schweitzer. Obviously Schweitzer was a was a great humanitarian of the last century. He's a physician who devoted his many, many years to helping those in Africa,
tending to them, providing medical care.
To those in Africa. He became world famous as a great humanitarian kind of Physician version of Maria Teresa, Mother Teresa, excuse me, Mother Teresa. And when he had become world famous, a journalist found him there in Africa and in during during an interview he said, Dr. Schweitzer, what is
happiness.
And Schweitzer is reported to have paused and said happiness. It's nothing more than good health and a poor memory
and I can vouch for that. This one person, in his experience can vouch for that. We can't become liberated from the past. And what we have to remember to be functioning well, we can jot down, you have not with pen and paper than whatever device we have, make make notes. To have to make these small compensations is a is a wonderful trade off really, for being free of the past. Free the past doesn't mean forgetting or disavowing the past and this means
we're, we're not imprisoned by it as much.
There are some
cultural factors that I've grown aware of, through a career, I'll find of reading and study of Asian culture. And I think it's fair to say just as a as a, as a general statement that
Asians respect the elderly, more than those in our own culture to the point of Federation.
In this is not original with me, I've read articles where America has been called a youth obsessed culture. Where youth is glamorized to the point that when you reach middle age much less beyond then you just don't count for as much.
And even in Asia, there was
a terrible period, the cultural revolution when the young hotheads men and women both seized with their great idealism of Chairman Mao went through and wrought havoc throughout China, humiliating and imprisoning the elderly. But by and large, I think you can tell from, from the cons, and from a lot of Chinese Buddhist text Japanese Buddhist texts, Korean Buddhist texts, there is a natural respect for the elderly. Well, those of us who those of us elderly ones who live in the West, this is our karma.
And it gives us chance to,
to adapt to that, that disrespect
me go back to
this article from men's health there is a a Scott Kaiser, physician, Director of Geriatric cognitive health at the Pacific Neuroscience Institute, who said, We know that brain volume decreases, but that might not be all that important in terms of how the brain performs overall.
And then the the
author of the article says in some ways, an older brain is better equipped to manage the demands of a job that requires insight, emotional control, and good decision making skills.
The article went on to
refer to what's called crystallized intelligence. So that's what we gain from pulling from a stored base of knowledge. In the SAT is Dr. Kaiser said you have better pattern recognition and can see complex issues more clearly. And then they also bring up neuroplasticity in which we cultivate new connections between brain cells over
age or aging.
Another researcher, this one at MIT said, the raw processing power of youth, isn't the be all and end all. We need to distinguish between legitimate concerns about someone's lucidity and ageist stereotypes, on the other hand. So if we then come down to at what point is our, our memory loss or cognitive decline? At what point does it impair our functioning in our jobs?
When George Washington resigned from the presidency after just four years in office, it wasn't because of mental or physical decline. He was said to have had faith in the judgment of electors, as to
who would succeed him.
Historians have always held him in high esteem for having stepped aside rather than hold on to such power. When King George the Third was told the Washington was going to resign. He's said to have said, if he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.
But I wonder, would
Washington have declined to run for a second term, if his likely opponent had been a malevolent,
unhinged ego maniacal psychopath? Just saying
few years ago,
I realized that
as the abbot or director of the Zen Center at the time, that like, like any person in this fairly advanced age, I wouldn't necessarily know when I had reached and non composite mentors. I think that's what it's called. That that when you slip into dementia, you don't know it necessarily. And so I I petitioned the trustees to add an amendment to our bylaws in which the the trustees by I don't know I can't remember two thirds vote could
could remove the abbot from his or her job. I feel very good about
that. When it doesn't matter. Now, I no longer have that job. But I think it's a good thing that none of us realize on our own
self awareness, because it's not
it's not all within our control of how self aware we are.
Now, I've talked a lot about what we lose. As we age, and of course, that happens to different to different degrees at different speeds for different people. There's quite a range. But here are some other things we quote
lose.
About this one, we lose self consciousness. It is in the negative sense we don't take ourselves so seriously.
As the years pass there was a
some wonderful words from Helen Hayes, Helen Hayes was arguably the greatest stage actress of
I don't know the mid mid 20th century,
Roshi capitals generation. She's I think of her as kind of the, from what I've heard, is the kind of Meryl Streep of the theater in those in that time. She said the hardest years in life are between the age of seven and 77
and 70.
here's another,
here's another. Alright, let's call it a gain of aging, we become less attached to our physical appearance.
We have to our physical appearance changes, things sag.
All kinds of things happen gradually. And what would be the wisdom of fighting that? Well, people do. Yes, there's cosmetic surgery.
And I don't
don't judge that I really don't people feel they have to do that. But
how nice to just accept these physical changes.
I remember Roshi Kapleau. And a pretty advanced age, saying,
age is for people who look in mirrors. There's something to that
satchel page, the,
the great, great African American Pitcher
from also from early in the last century to 20th century, he posed the question, How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?
Here's some more nice things about getting older.
You just you almost have to
acquire more humility. You've suffered so many bumps in the road, so many blows, that it seems to be almost inevitable that you become
more humble.
I mean, just starting with the physical things, the physical changes I mentioned.
He really includes giving up the illusion of control. And with that comes the ability to yield to go with the flow
to yield an argument. So I remember, it came up. Russia was quite a
he had a lot of
legal training and his job as a court reporter. He was a smart guy who could could handle himself in arguments and debates and in my quite, quite many years
as his assistant,
we got into some arguments about things, mostly not about the Dharma, but mostly about who said water what happened. And I remember very vividly the time when I said it was such and such. And he said, No, it wasn't it was such and such. And we went back a couple times on that, and then he just let it go.
And later, later, I heard I learned that he was right. At the time, I thought I got him I won but he reached the point where it just wasn't worth arguing anymore.
He could probably see that he wasn't getting anywhere with me and there was no point to it.
Many years later I I learned from a person long experienced in in marriage counseling the following formula, please commit this to memory.
What do you want more to be right? Or to have a relationship In this yielding is of course mellowing.
We all know this is just common is a common place that this is what happens usually, I guess there are really ornery curmudgeons bitter people in old age but but in my experience, for what that's worth, in my experience, people do mellow as they age. Another little thing I wasn't expecting when I was younger, to happen in, in old age, was
that other people, and
I'm thinking mostly of younger people, younger men.
They are clearly not threatened by you when you get older,
is a certain, I don't know, testosterone thing that happens between some men. And, and I remember it was years ago, I began to notice that there is an openness and friendliness from from men, now that they regarded me as well, basically Toothless,
that's a nice thing. It's nice to, to have
to see people we interact with be less defensive.
And same with women in a different way. With women, it's
not so much competition as it is feeling safe. With an older man safer. I know there are plenty of older men who have done terrible things. But anyway, that's that's what I've noticed. Over the years, that's a nice thing, that you can connect with them man or woman, you can connect better when those those defenses are
less.
And as you know, I talked earlier about how from everything I've read and seen that Asians are more likely to respect their elders, that then then Westerners, but but I also find men this is this is has to be said that their younger people do right. Even this country tend to show deference, and respect and kindness. More so when when you've become older. It's not just good for the older person, it's good for them to be able to access that, that kindness and respect.
And then, the big one, the big gift of aging, is just having acquired life experience. And there's just no, no limit to what that brings with it. Starting with better judgment, generally.
I think Will Rogers knew what he was talking about. When he said, Good judgment comes from experience. And a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
We learn from our mistakes. We all do.
It takes some of us longer, we have to make more mistakes before it sinks in. But we do learn from our mistakes
is a phrase that I heard when I was still young, the wisdom of age. The gift of just acceptance, being able to accept things as they are,
of course, practice just accelerates
this it nourishes this this ability to accept things as they are. In the Blue Cliff Record, there's a koan where the MA asks, How is it when the trees wither, and the leaves fall.
And the master Aman says, body exposed to the golden breeze
and then one other thing that occurs to me and then I'll get off this
soapbox is, is that
life experience is living through history and history can be reassuring. I encourage those of you who are in despair about our current political situation, or climate change, or any of the major crises we're facing, to read history. All right, we haven't been through through global warming before. And that's plenty reason to, to get active, to do what we can to stem that tide. But as for other things, the political things
read, and how terrible things have been in our even in our own country in the past. And, and,
except that, somehow we made it through that those times.
History is a is a kind of a South that really enables us to, to carry on
so I, I do very much hope that no one thinks that what I'm saying is that old J Old age is better than youth. They're wonderful, wonderful things about being young.
So many things, and not just physically
and more of what I'm doing more is trying to bring some balance to this all this talk over this past week and not just this past week. This this this bias against old age and just want to report
from
a well meaning elderly man with memory problems, that it's just so many wonderful things about getting older. Yes, there are the physical the joint pain, the the little things, at least little if not big, the little things that pile up dental things, medical things. And those of us who are for whom the things are relatively minor have a lot to be grateful for. But it's just I'm just trying to give some some balance to it. And I'm going to close with some words
from the Middle East. I'm
afraid I don't know who this guy was. His name was a mood of Omdurman. I should have Googled it sorry. Anyway, this Abboud of Omdurman was asked, which is better, to be young or to be old.
He said
to be old is to have less time before you and more mistakes behind. I leave you to decide whether this is better than the reverse.
