The Next Chapter
“The circle brings perspective to the process of aging. As you age, time affects your body, your experience and above all, your soul. There is a great poignancy in aging.” — John O’Donohue
WARNING!
This piece is about aging. If you choose to be in total denial about this universal phenomenon, walk away now! However, if you have a niggling desire to explore how to age with grace, wisdom, and joy, I invite you to forge forward.
Why am I devouring books on conscious aging? Why am I choosing to write about a topic that many of us would rather ignore?
For me, it’s simple. I am aging. Not only am I aging, I know that I am aging. Not only do I know that I am aging, I know that I want to do it differently than some of those who have come and gone before me.
The women in my family were not fans of getting older. We lived with my grandparents from the time I was three until I was seventeen, when my mom remarried. When I was nine, my sweet grandfather died suddenly from a heart attack at the age of seventy-seven.
My grandmother, seven years his junior, lived another fourteen years as an unhappy widow. Her so-called golden years were difficult beyond measure. It was no walk in the park for those around her either. She was a tough woman before Grandpa passed. After he died, she added a layer of bitterness mixed with envy towards those who she saw as having a happier existence. From her perspective, aging, physical decline, and inevitable death were deemed a failure, rather than a natural part of life.
With each loss of a friend or physical capability, she became more and more morose. As a young woman, I found myself by her side often as she was failing. There were rare moments where we would laugh together as she related stories of her youth when times were easier and lighter. That was a blessing. Mostly I heard a litany of complaints about the unfairness of having to get old and move towards death.
I still remember her last words as I sat by her side in the nursing home after we could no longer care for her congestive heart failure at home. She looked at me and with every bit of disdain she could muster and said, “The food here stinks”. Then grandma closed her eyes and never woke up. Sadly, as my mother aged, she followed a similar path of resentment.
Conversely, my husband had a friend and mentor named Jerry Jud who passed in 2019 shortly before his hundredth birthday. I fell in love with Jerry the minute I met him at age ninety. He was the founder of the Shalom Mountain Retreat Center in New York state, more than a bit of a mystic, and a force of nature.
As a brilliant theologian and ordained minister in his forties, he sustained the devastating loss of his wife in a boating accident as she saved their youngest daughter from drowning. This loss sent him into the bowels of anger and grief, leading him on a path of profound spiritual discovery at a time when the human potential movement was blossoming.
The rest is history. Suffice to say, Jerry leveraged his own hardship into a life-changing journey of helping others to transform their lives. He was a man on a divine mission. What a hoot he was, a testament to joyful and conscious aging!
Jerry was wise, insightful, and loved to be around people of all ages. Those same humans loved to be around him too. After he retired from Shalom Mountain, we attended occasional gatherings at the old farmhouse in Pennsylvania he shared with his current wife and cat. These were times of communal meals, deep conversations, great insights, and raucous laughter.
While Jerry did not escape the aches and pains of aging which included his fair share of hospital visits, I never heard him complain. Mostly, he talked about his soul, our souls, his thoughts of writing another book, and maybe even living to one hundred and six. He was old. Very old. Yet, Jerry did not shirk the reality that goes with being on the journey of life and loss. He lost his son, his son-in-law, all his siblings and many friends. He accepted that loss was part of life and consistent with his advanced longevity. He bore this inevitable suffering with authenticity and grace.
Jerry was a beacon of hope to many. He offered me a glimpse into the opportunity of elderhood that was unlike my experience with my family.
I am choosing to follow Jerry’s example, to the extent possible. What about you? How do you want to move forward into your life?
In the book from Age-ing to Sage-ing, the late Rabbi Reb Zalman offers the distinction of becoming an “elder” or being “elderly”. He tells us that extended longevity calls for extended consciousness. He further states that “if our added years are not matched by an expansion in awareness, life becomes depressive.”
This concept flies in the face of our cultural expectations of inevitable decline. While there is no doubt that aging requires us to face changes in our physicality, with a mindful approach to expanding our awareness, we have a choice.
We can take the path that that my grandmother and mother chose, or we can look to Jerry’s mindset to do it differently.
To get real, the sudden awareness of lost youth can be unpleasant. I still remember a shock in my early forties. I was living in Michigan, stopped at a light and noticed a very hot young guy in a very hot sports car stopped in the lane next to me. Trying not to stare, I quickly refreshed my lipstick and did a little head toss. As I caught a glimpse of my silly self in the mirror, I realized that this young man may have been interested in my twenty-something niece but certainly not me! Perhaps we all have those stark moments of reality.
That cute story aside, this is also not about minimizing the level of physical, emotional, and spiritual grief that is inherent in getting older, or worse yet, experiencing earlier than expected tragedy. In addition to a series of inevitable setbacks, I have lost three siblings: a younger sister to kidney failure at age thirty-eight, a younger brother to ALS at age fifty-four and an older brother to heart disease at age sixty-five. It sucks.
Necessary suffering touches all of us. We must grieve each loss fully as our journey continues. That willingness to touch grief and acknowledge losses, whether they happen to us or others, is one of the hallmarks of those who choose to age with a strong bend towards mindfulness.
My friend Karen Trench experienced grief directly and fully when her beloved husband of many years committed suicide. In her book, Love, Loss, Light, she writes:
“I have learned well that it is the brought-to-your-knees experiences that teach us the most valuable lessons. That everything in life is transient. That our good and bad experiences are all fleeting. That this too, shall pass. And finally, that our lives are so precious — each moment is a gift to be cherished and embraced because nothing lasts forever except one thing — and that is love. Love is the heartbeat off all creation. Love is eternal and everlasting. Love never dies, ever! Love is the greatest blessing of all.”
Karen is a joyful, heartfelt woman who also carries enormous grief in her heart with grace. Her loss has motivated her to write an amazing book, become a grief coach, and start a podcast, all in service of helping others find life beyond their losses. Her willingness to fiercely embrace her life is an entry point into wise elderhood.
Karen also talks about aging as “a time of full blossoming with the smell of wisdom permeating the air, and everyone, everywhere, is made better by it. Now that’s a beautiful thing”.
Aging with grace and awareness takes intention. Undeniably, I am not immune to the doldrums that arise from checking the mirror for new signs of wrinkles, wishing for magic skin cream to erase the fine lines of time. On the other hand, there is a sense of gratification that comes from earning those wrinkles and that gray hair. The payoff of this mindset of acceptance is considerable.
Our journey may include looking back to the past for lessons on how to live the future. This is not the practice of living in the past with a wistfulness for youth, that is common for many. This examination entails being firmly rooted in the here and now with a mindful eye for how our past can inform us.
As we look back with curiosity, the outcome of skilled inquiry can be surprising. The gifts I am personally receiving include a growing sense of wisdom, joy, and wonder about the life that is unfolding now. While my former corporate career had many rewards, the ability to shift more time to touching others with the gifts of yoga and mindfulness taps into who I am now, not then. I have also been drawn to explore the Jewish roots of my birth, long pushed away. So far, eldering is turning into quite the adventure! What might you discover as you enter a deeper exploration of your evolved self?
After one of the group gatherings at Jerry’s home mentioned previously, our old friend leaned back in his chair, looked slowly at each person, stroked his long gray beard and in a long drawl that spoke to his Texas roots, uttered the words “I’m satisfied”.
That satisfaction, driven by peace and a place of profound purpose, can yield the fruit of living our lives fully, one moment at a time, as we open to the wisdom of aging.
In her book, The Grace in Aging, Kathleen Dowling Singh, writes about finding the deep sense of ease that results from stilling our constantly churning mental and habitual thought patterns. In her words “resistance begins to release, and we begin to deeply relax, to surrender into undefended peace”. Undefended peace sounds awesome to me.
Regardless of where you fit on the age spectrum, I ask you this:
What if you embodied the conscious intention to live fully, to love fully and to feel fully every step of this journey of life with mindful intention?
That my friends, might just be the definition of the art of aging consciously into the next chapter or our lives.
Concluding with the words of T.S. Eliot:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
Peace,
Cynde
For those interested, below are additional resources on the topic of conscious aging and grieving.
Books:
- Anam Cara, John O’Donohue
- From Age-ing to Sage-ing, Zalman Schacher-Shalomi and Ronald S. Miller
- Life, Part Two, David Chernikoff
- Love, Loss, Light, Karen Trench
- Still Here, Ram Dass
- The Grace in Aging, Kathleen Dowling-Singh
Websites:
- Saging International, https://www.sage-ing.org/
- Conscious Aging Program, IONS — Institute of Noetic Sciences — https://noetic.org/experience/conscious-aging/
Cynde Denson is a Mindfulness Instructor, a certified Yoga Instructor, a Co-Active® Coach and a group faciliator. For more information about Cynde’s classes, workshops, and coaching services, click here.
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