Aging Is Life's Way of Helping

Barbara here: I am borrowing (stealing) this lovely piece by Jeannie Zandi from Taos. Enjoy. I just say to her, just wait Jeannie, and let me see your entry when you are 77. Will you be so able and positive? Will you have slowed down to "less than?" We hope not. And thank you to Linley Solari for sharing this piece with us.

Aging Is Life's Way of Helping by Jeannie Zandi


The Almond Trees in Blossom
Endlessly I gaze at you in wonder, blessed ones, at your composure,
at how in eternal delight you bear your vanishing beauty.
Ah, if only we knew how to blossom: our heart would pass beyond every
small danger, and would find peace in the greatest danger of all.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

t a public gathering in my town's plaza, two women pass me. The elder, who
seems about 85 to 90, walks slowly, unsteadily, on sensible shoes. One of
her slender, thin-skinned legs, bruised and dotted with age spots, is
partially covered in knee-high panty hose, while the other is bare, the
stocking fallen and gathered around her ankle. Her sparse white hair,
somewhat disheveled, is loosely gathered at the back of her neck. Her frail
arm stretches out, with her bony hand firmly grasping the arm of the other
woman, who I assume is her daughter. The younger woman takes in the scene
around her, while making herself wholly available to the older woman,
putting aside any agenda she might have for herself. The mother relies
utterly on her daughter 's strength, kindness and slowed pace. A tender
closeness between them is palpable in the willingness of the daughter and
the dependency of the mother as she clings to her daughter 's arm in much
the same way the daughter must have clung to hers when she was too young to
walk on her own.

Only a week before, my 7-year-old daughter, Sophia, brought up the topic of
aging while we were walking. "Mama," she observed, "old people are kind of
like babies." I asked her why. "Because they need help like babies. They
cannot do things on their own. Sometimes they need help walking, some need
helping eating, and some have to lie in bed and be changed like babies. It
's so sweet." I asked her what she thought that would be like, and she
replied, "I think it would be nice - like having servants."

Most people experience being dependent as a humiliation rather than a treat,
like my daughter does. Sophia 's innocent and positive view stands in marked
contrast to the response of many people I know to the prospect of getting
older and becoming dependent: "Shoot me first!" they exclaim. It 's as if
the idea of becoming dependent on other human beings is so abhorrent that
one would rather die a violent death than consider it.

How we value our independence, our strength and capability! How we prize our
ability to do things for ourselves on our own, thank you very much. How we
fear the fact that aging requires us to let down our walls, our protections,
our pride, our privacy, and ask for and accept assistance. It lays wide open
and bare the simple fact that we are not perfect islands unto ourselves, but
fallible, sweet, interdependent beings in need. Aging asks us to open, to
trust, to let go. It asks us to let others into our most private worlds and
see us in our naked humanity.

Aging is life's way of saying, "Last chance to realize what this is all
about!" If one hasn't been lucky enough to be humbled, softened and opened
to one's place in the interconnectedness of all things by parenthood,
midlife crisis, illness, a failed relationship or two, or some other of life
's challenges, aging certainly offers the opportunity in spades. Aging asks
us to radically redefine who we take ourselves to be, after a lifetime
perhaps of defining ourselves by what we can do. It invites us either to
start defining ourselves by what we cannot do or to drop the defining
altogether and allow ourselves to explore what it means to exist outside of
definition, within the whole rather than separate from it.

Why should I write about aging? While I have not yet hit the deeper parts of
aging that others around me have, despite my 44 years of experience in
getting older, I have tasted enough to be intrigued by the rub of loss of
youth that is just beginning for me. I felt like I was just about to find my
groove until I gave birth to my daughter at the age of 36. Over the next few
years it slowly dawned on me - as the soft saggy skin from my pregnant belly
hung during yoga class, as I dropped into bed at the end of a working-mother
day, as I glimpsed the chicken skin and wrinkles in the sunlit rearview
mirror, as my child grew up and I grew tired - that gravity was calling me.
Age spots like my grandmother's started to appear on my face. The skin on my
shoulders is turning from soft to dry and rough from the years of sun
exposure. Now, I hold small print away from my eyes and have just purchased
my first pair of "old lady" glasses, marking my entry into the realm of the
aged. I started to hear inside my head something I 'd never anticipated:
"You are too old to do that . . . to wear that . . . to say that
. . ." When I ride my bike to work, I feel more like the Toto-hating Miss
Gulch than I do a soaring bird or fit athlete.

I can feel the field of limitless possibility that is youth slipping away.
The baseball players and movie stars on TV are starting to look like babies;
the newscasters were born after my baby brother. The world is being taken
over by the next generation, and I am not part of it. I am slipping out of
it. I will not be world famous, I will probably not be much more of anything
than what I am now. I am as beautiful as I will ever be, as strong as I will
ever be, as capable as I will ever be. And I am fading into the past, while
my daughter rises to greet the world. The world is going on without me - it
does not need me to function, and I will likely disappear without having
made much of a mark on it at all.

Oh, the small person in me does not like this. She was unconsciously betting
on some future glory that would prove her excellence and importance. She
doesn 't want to be one of the many unknown faces, one of the multitudes
that live and die with little trace. She wants to be bigger than life,
someone to take note of, making history. She wants superlatives: biggest,
best, strongest, most beautiful. Life is a continual assault and insult to
this one because unless we are lucky or delusional, we do not get to be the
best at much of anything, or at least not for long. And aging is the final
and most definitive insult. If we held out until now - either by large
amounts of external success, achievement and prowess, or by ignoring the
obvious fact that we as persons are insignificant grains of sand among the
many - age and death will certainly rectify that. At some point there is no
ignoring this, and the final settling with reality begins.

Do I need cheering up? An exercise program? A list of the pros of aging?
Examples of women playing basketball, running marathons, looking smashing in
their 70s? A lecture on rejoicing in my cronehood? Not at all. I want to
face the gritty details of being in an aging body and touch that reality
with tenderness. I have not found it useful to wave the flag of the bright
side when darkness looms; darkness doesn 't go away by patting it on the
head and telling it to go to its room, and the brightness of cheer is not
the deep light for which I live. Aging is loss. Anything that I hold dearly
that passes will invite my loosened grip. Aging is about getting weaker,
saggier and wrinklier, losing faculties, and eventually dying and one 's
body rotting. I want to embrace this darkness; I want to hear the voice of
loss, weakness and dying. I want to hear what it has to say and be reborn as
a light that is not birthed of reassurance, but of synchronizing myself with
what is real and surrendering to it. I want to be it all and know it all and
kiss it all.

Aging is not a stranger, it is simply a more dramatic version of the same
old friend whose face returns to us all throughout life in little and big
ways - loss, death and resurrection. Rainer Maria Rilke advised: "Be ahead
of all parting." The more one has kept pace with the invitations that life
offers along the way to grieve, open, be humbled and let go, the less
settling of accounts must occur in order to meet the greatest invitation of
all: to lose one 's strength, prowess, capability and, finally, life. And to
open and soften one's heart in the face of it. Old age lays bare our
vulnerability, our longing, our fear of each other, of ourselves. We cannot
run, we cannot delude ourselves; we have to sit still and wrestle with and
come to terms with the great mystery that this life is.

One invitation of being infirm is to be tender with ourselves. Not
impatient, rejecting and judgmental, but tender. Aging invites us to learn
self-acceptance and, with that, acceptance of all the parts of life as holy
and worthy of our love. We are not worthy of love only for what we do and
contribute, but worthy of love and tenderness because we are. Another
invitation is to be humbled: we return to beginners, to not knowing. There
is nothing we can use as a crutch to prop ourselves up and say, "See? I am
worthy because I ." And we find ourselves worthy, as Sophia says,
just because.

We lose it all. If life let us keep it, we would not soften. We soften into
the arms of life, into the arms of our caretakers. We let them love us. We
let them have us. We let ourselves return to what we belong to, though we
walled ourselves off from ever knowing that all along it owned us, this
life, this clock ticking, this symphony of birth, death, living, dying,
crying and loving.

We let it go, we open our hands, we let the bird fly away, we find the heart
that lives through us, we find that we do belong, that we always did, that
we are part of it, that it is OK. We are not special. We are not gods. We
did not win a gold medal, write a famous novel; we will not go down in
history. And it 's enough to have lived, to have done the best we could do,
to have loved the best we could love, to be part of it all. Aging invites us
to open to the truth that we are one, we belong to each other, we are here
to be loved and to love.

Sophia and I play a game, where we take turns closing our eyes and leading
each other around the neighborhood, up hills, through vacant lots, up onto
the curb, down off the curb. She observed once during the game, "Mama, I
trust you more than you trust me." May I surrender and grow in this trust as
I grow in years.


Jeannie Zandi will be leading a women's retreat October 13-15 at Ojo
Caliente. For more information, you can e-mail her at jeannie@ taosnet.com,
call (505) 751-4827, or see an upcoming announcement at
www.ojocalientespa.com.