It's really wonderful to be here because this place is really my home, my home temple. Even though I haven't been here as much, I'm not here on a degree the way I used to be. It's still, it's deep in my bones, this place. And I just, I love it and I love the sangha and I love being welcomed here. to see new and old faces, and some of you, or a few of you, I don't know, especially, I don't even know what the bottom half of your face looks like ever, so I would not recognize you anywhere, probably. But even though we're strangers to each other, and you can't tell by looking at me that I've been, you know, I sort of grew up here in a way, and my son, who's now 51, my son Sandy, was the ring bearer at Liz and Mel's wedding at Green Gulch when he was about five or something, I don't know, a long time ago.

[01:11]

So there are many ways in which this place weaves in and out of my life. So I'm very excited to have the opportunity to share with you some things about my new book. And I'm very happy that Alive Until You're Dead is the name of the book, but it's also kind of the project that we're all on in this life and it's such a big miracle to think right now in this moment we're all here together in this room and none of us are dead yet we're all here alive what a miracle it's great to be here with you alive and breathing so i am old now as ross mentioned well he said i was getting older old but And I continue to get older, even though I'm already old. So I'm almost 80. This is unimaginable to me.

[02:13]

But so it goes. These things happen to all of us if you wait around. But the world looks different. The landscape is different. There are people missing. A lot of people are missing in my life now who I loved very dearly they're still with me somewhere but they're missing in the body and it's becoming more and more obvious to me I'm impermanent that we're all impermanent and that we will all die and even though even the human species may be impermanent there's big impermanences that we're looking at too in our world Of course, actually, of course the human species is impermanent. That's not a question. Everything is impermanent. So that's a very long view, which I'm not really going to talk about this morning, but I want to talk about how getting old and approaching death changed my view and how my Zen practice has helped me with this changing recognition of impermanence.

[03:29]

I wrote a book about getting old over 10 years ago called This Is Getting Old, and that was really focusing on aspects of aging and dealing with them. And now I've crossed a kind of a line in the meantime of no longer am I worrying about getting old as I was then because I've already gotten old. I've crossed a certain line in my mind of, oh, yeah, and accepting. that I am humbled, which is quite a relief in a way, because there's a kind of giving up of the fight against it. There's no mileage in fighting against it. So I've given that up, and it is a relief, the acceptance that comes with that. But there's still things to work with, and how do you work with the difficulties that come. And then the book is also really focusing on mortality itself, and how does this change our understanding of what it is to be a human being.

[04:36]

The fact that we're going to change is what it means to be alive. We tend to think, well, impermanence is one of the three marks of existence, according to Buddhist teaching. And we think of impermanence along with no fixed nothing, self, impermanence, and what's the last one? Sorry. Oh, no. Suffering. Oh, suffering. Oh, I forgot about suffering. Oh, yeah. How could I forget about suffering? Yeah. Okay, so impermanence, and we think of impermanence, or we tend to think of impermanence as the cause of all our suffering, and And in a way, maybe this is true. But what we forget is that impermanence is also the cause of all our joy. And so there's goings.

[05:39]

Those are impermanent. There's birth as well as death. There's winter, and then it doesn't stay around forever. Then there's spring. Thank goodness for impermanence. And the people we love, there was a time when they didn't exist on the face of the earth. But thanks to impermanence, they exist now. Impermanence is the flow of our life itself. It's not a tragedy. It's the condition of our life. And mortality is part of this. Our mortality is part of an aspect of our impermanence. And if I accept my mortality, then I really have a chance to notice that I'm alive and to be grateful for being alive. And when I can accept this, somehow it helps me to feel connected to the entire universe and to notice that I am not separate and that I'm going to return to stardust in the long run.

[06:42]

So one more thought about impermanence as a general thing, just about our mortality. It occurred to me, once I was thinking about this, well, you know, what if we didn't die? How horrible that would be if we didn't die, but we would just stick around forever, getting more and more hearts replaced and becoming more and more bionic and our cute little children and grandchildren would grow up and become wizened up old people along with just all be crowding up the planet, a whole bunch of people who've been here forever and then Our days would not be numbered as the saying goes. They would be infinite. We might get really tired of going to sleep and waking up in the morning and thinking, oh my God, not another one. What am I going to do? So I'm really glad to be impermanent and that I am not going to live forever. I have no desire to freeze my brain or whatever in some tank and hope that

[07:54]

somebody can put it back in the body later on. But good luck to those who are doing that. So I wrote this book really partly to help me with my fear of death, which I did, and I started missing in a large part because I wanted to be able to accept death and I thought then Buddhism will help me not be afraid of death and it has helped me with that. The book is also born out of my curiosity in a way exploring what does it really mean to be a human being and what is the point of birth if you're just going to die. So the book contains a number of It's really a collection of essays about different aspects of being impermanent, so it's quite wide-ranging.

[08:56]

There's essays about adapting to the changes of getting older, about practicing with virya or enthusiastic energy. Even as we get older, there's essays about sitting with people who are dying, who I love. what's left for me when somebody dies, what do they leave behind for me, about tears and do our tears change as we get older, and different ways that I'm trying to approach this mystery. So even though I'm not writing about what do we do about the really big crises that are facing us in this book and and about the possible the impermanence of the world can we help some things to last a little longer i'm not writing about the climate emergency for example but i am writing about how how we can be fully alive and live with gratitude for our lives and

[10:16]

and with a sense of what's going to happen and a delight in this not knowing, and how we can be open and compassionate with each other. One of my main essays in here is called, If I Can Still Love, and I'm not going to read from that one today, but no matter what abilities we lose as we go along, whether we're blind or deaf or disabled physically or with no mobility, we can still love. Nothing can take away my ability to love. And as long as we can still love, or as long as I can still love, I trust that I'll be okay. And I think fostering these kinds of abilities and caring and compassion in ourselves will help us with all these other things that we need to face together. So I want to read, I'll just see how the time goes.

[11:20]

And I'm going to choose parts that pertain particularly to Berkeley Zen Center. There's some references, some direct references to Berkeley Zen Center in here. So I'll read from a few essays, two or three, and we'll see how the time goes. And perhaps illogically, I'm going to start at the end with the last essay. So I'm just reading parts of this essay called Meeting the Final Deadline. We humans could be the only species who are lucky enough to know we are going to die. Because this knowledge makes life shine. A sign I made hangs over my desk.

[12:24]

Don't think for a moment, you're not going to die. Does this seem weird to you? Every time I happen to notice it, I wake up for a minute. I remember not only my approaching death, but the happy corollary. I'm alive. I used to be afraid of death. Now, not so much. It's partly a side effect of getting old. Old people in general are, by their own reports, less afraid of death than young people. We have less to lose, and some of us are getting tired. As our aches and pains get worse, we may even look to death as a safe form of pain management. At 16, I was old enough to drive. As a septuagenarian, I'm old enough to die. I don't want to die right now, but if I did, I've had a long turn on the swing. A lot of people I know have already done it, and even though I don't exactly expect to see them again, I'll be expressing my solidarity with them when I go.

[13:31]

If you can do it, Mary, Friedel, Molly, I can do it too. It's becoming a companionable thing to do. apparently all human beings know how to die i find it reassuring that everybody who's gone before me has managed it somehow and i trust i'll be able to do it too still i fear the pain of leaving parted from loved ones no way that's going to be easy but if along the way i keep on telling people i love telling people i love them and acting accordingly this will make parting easier I fear that I won't be ready. I fear dying too soon before I've finished all this. And more importantly, before I've let go of all my lingering fears and regrets, before I understand that the life I've lived has been just right, sorrows and all. Anne Aitken was a 20th century Zen practitioner and teacher Robert Aitken.

[14:40]

She was a student of Master Yamada Cohen. One day he asked her, what do you think of death? She replied, why, it's like when a bus stops before you, you get on and go. I want to be like her. I want to accept my death before I die. When my kids were little, I rang a doorbell at the Berkeley Zen Center because of death. If I were immortal, I wouldn't have bothered. As it was, I hoped that Zen would show me the meaning of my life before it was over. I hoped it would help me overcome my fear of death and be ready to go when the time came. I received Zazen instruction in the Attic Zendo under the eaves. I was told to sit still, count your breaths to ten, and start again. That was a disappointment. Such a tedious exercise be the path to understanding the meaning of life and death.

[15:43]

But I hung around, attracted by the smell of the tatami mats and the thwak, thwak, thwak of the wooden fish drum as we chanted in the morning. It turned out there was a lot more to Zen than counting to ten. Breathing with others, our one body sharing the air, gave me faith. Each sound born from quiet, was particular. A slight cough, a creak of wood, the whisper of fabric moving against fabric as a leg was shifted. Then the nine full bows, nine soft drum rolls made by all our knees thumping against the floor. Actually, I don't think it's nine anymore. Is it three now? We're back to nine. Oh, you're back to nine. Oh, good. and the big bell made sound waves distinct enough to count, spreading and fading like widening circles in water.

[16:45]

My ears loved everything they heard. I don't know why, but the sounds gave me the gift of fearlessness, at least a little piece of it. Every morning we chanted the heartbeat, and I memorized it right away so I could take it with me wherever I went. I've been glad ever since to have it in my pocket, as handy as a handkerchief, for all kinds of situations. Here's a good line, for example. There is no old age and death, and also no extinction of it. I understand it then, and I still don't, but that doesn't stop it from helping me. Somewhere along the way, I learned the sad story of Kisa Gotami, the young woman who came to Buddha crazed with grief, her dead child in her arms, asking him for medicine to make her child. She could not accept that her baby was dead. Buddha said he would help her if she brought him a mustard seed from a household that had not known death.

[17:47]

She set off hopefully, knocking on doors, and each home had a mustard seed, but at every home someone had died. There are more dead than living in this family. She understood at last that everyone dies, including her child. She buried him in the forest and returned to Buddha to become one of his disciples, one of the first women ancestors. I doubt she ever completely stopped grieving, but I'm glad she has to follow in a way to help herself and others, including me. Buddha taught that everything is impermanent and that fighting against this truth only makes things worse. Every single one of us is going to die, no matter how many parts we get replaced beforehand. Still, Kisugotami's child could have died later, after his mother, instead of before. There are lots of Zen stories about the great matter of birth and death, and I am reassured that the old Zen masters considered death an urgent matter, urgent and unknowable, not knowing what happened in Zen.

[18:59]

The possibly apocryphal story goes that a samurai asked the 18th century Zen master Hakuen, where will you go after you die? Hakuen, how am I supposed to know? Samurai, you're a Zen master. Hakuen, yes, but not a devil. The more I consider death, judging it from different angles, the more I realize that I can't know what it is, and the more this not knowing becomes familiar the less afraid I am. There is no old age and death, and also no extinction of old age and death. Befriending is a work in progress, and it won't be done until I die, of course. Okay, so I want to read another one that is . And this one, I haven't read this one at any other reading, but you'll see why I want to read it here.

[20:05]

And I'm going to read this whole essay because it's a short one. And it's called Going and Coming. My teacher is dying, my first . His wife, Liz, who has become my friend over the years, ushers me into their comfy house. Mel is in a hospital bed in the dining room, propped up at an ankle. facing out the west windows of the house toward San Francisco Bay. I'm going to stop and try to see if I can get my glasses. Whoops. It's this stupid system. Well, it's not stupid, but usually it's very difficult. Maybe if I put them on first. It's got this bar across the back of the glasses. Okay, how's that? Good. Okay. Mel is in a hospital bed in the dining room, propped up in an ankle, facing out the west windows of the house towards San Francisco Bay.

[21:09]

He's called Sojin, or Sojin Roshi, in a formal setting, but in this moment he's Mel. I sit down in the chair that waits for his bed. He wears a nasal cannula, it's plastic tubes crossing his face to deliver oxygen to his nostrils. I wear a flowered cotton mask on account of the coronavirus. I identify myself, unsure whether the mask makes me unrecognizable, and he responds with an enthusiastic, a simple vowel sound that connects us. He seems glad to see me. I'm shocked by his appearance. His mouth is wide open in a perfect O. He's so gaunt that his body barely makes a mound under the light quilt. His face is thinner too. At the same time, the person who introduced me to Zen practice almost 50 years ago, I make up sentences in my mind. I can see death in him. His open mouth is like an Enso, a Zen circle.

[22:10]

These are some of the thoughts I think, and even while I'm thinking them, I know I am making them up as thoughts. These thoughts have to do with a person I love who is right in front of me, breathing. Since he went into hospice care a couple of weeks ago, Saga members have been coming to see him. There are so many people who want to visit him, people more involved than I am anymore with a daily nitty-gritty that I didn't expect to have this chance to say goodbye, but because I've known him for such a long time, I've been given the gift of half an hour to sit with him. The sun has just come low enough to shine directly into his eyes through the uncurtained windows. Liz raises up the hospital tray table, swivels it and hangs a cloth napkin from it to shade his face. Her movements are at once tender and practical. How's that, she asks. He gives a slight nod and murmurs a barely visible, barely audible better.

[23:12]

She strokes his forehead and says she's leaving us to ourselves. She has a work on. What's your project, I ask. setting rat traps in the basement, she tells me with a rueful, sharp shrug, and leaves the room. I tell him I'm glad to see him. He seems to be listening, but doesn't say anything back. I talk about how long I've known him, how much he means to me, and for his teaching. You always taught us to take care of what's in front of us. I feel awkward making these straightforward declarations without nuance, without humor, and without a clear response. But I keep going. You told me it's okay for me to be me, I say. Glad Liz has left the room. I might be too self-conscious to say such things if she were still there, though I doubt that she would mind. I say, you've had a long, full life. Now I hear him speaking. I lean closer and I hear the word voyage.

[24:15]

Yes, it's a big voyage. Not sure if he means his life or his dying, maybe both. I'm flooded with appreciation. Perhaps I should just sit still with him. After all, that's what he's been teaching me to do all these years, to sit in silence. Yes, I will do that, but first I want to speak a little more because it makes me feel connected. The sound of my voice is an offering I make to him. I talk briefly of memories of the early days of the Zen Center he started, including even How he taught us during work period to wash the leaves of the big rubber plant in the living room with milk. And I worry, maybe he's not interested in my animal. Why would he be? He's doing the work of this moment. He's interested in what's happening at this very moment. I stop talking and we sit in silence. He's alive. Soon he will be gone. But we're here now in the same room in the same late afternoon. His dying is a shock.

[25:17]

Because he's had cancer for a year and a half and he's 91, I've known for months that his death is coming. But now that I see with my eyes that he's going to die, it's a shock to my whole system, like a big change in the weather. It used to seem that he would never die, because he was always there, somewhere strong and steady, hardly aging, riding his bicycle in the early morning across town to the Zendo. or in his office at the Zen Center, available to whoever knocked, or glimpsed out my living room window walking his dog on my block, or most essentially on his amazingly thin cushion in the Zen Do every morning. Year after year, he stood at the door of the Zen Do as we filed out after morning service, and he looked each of us in the eye and we bowed to each other. As I stood in line to go out, I looked forward to that moment of seeing and being seen. It was the best eye contact for.

[26:19]

Now I sit with him as the world shifts. Once, in the beginning days of my practice, a handful of us were sitting in the old Attic Zendo for early morning Zazen, under males carrying attention, and an earthquake shook the floorboards beneath us. The evil faces shifted and the redwood rafters creeped. It was over almost as soon as I realized what it was, and we were returned to silence. I was scared, but nobody moved or spoke, and my fear turned into wonder that I had received this earthquake without moving, that I had made the path from one of it to the other from silence to silence. Mel keeps moistening his lips with his tongue. I call to Liz. He seems thirsty. and she comes from the kitchen. She must be finished with the rat traps. She holds a small cup of water to his leg, carefully for a couple of sips, then goes away again.

[27:22]

Mel is alive, drinking water. It's so simple. I read him a short poem I picked out ahead of time by Zen master Dogen. Water birds, going and coming, their traces disappear, but they never forget their path. I ask if he wants to hear another, but I can't tell whether the answer is yes or no, so I read a couple more poems until it feels like time to stop. Time passes strangely, neither fast nor slow. We sit quietly. His hand lies palm down on the cover near the edge of the easy reach of my hand. I long to put my palm on the back of his hand and wrist. His skin looks so soft, but remembering the virus, I don't. The last of the sunlight is golden on the redwood paneling of the walls. Then the sun itself sinks behind a rooftop across the street. Now gestures towards the now unnecessary cloth napkin.

[28:22]

I remove it. The sky is bright pink, sending a wash of pink into the room. It's nice that you can be here at home in this beautiful room, I say, with Liz taking such good care of you. Now he is... again his voice is very quiet with little breath to spare and his mouth is dry and wants to stay open so it's hard for him to enunciate but i hear him say yes it's a nice house perhaps he says so to be kind to make the sort of conversation with me that i seem to want liz comes into the living room i say i know it's time for me to go Mel makes a scooping motion with an arm that seems to suggest, you can stay a little longer. I'm touched, but I say to reassure Liz, my half hour is up. She says, it's just that it's important not to touch. What does it mean to say goodbye? It comes to me that I'm telling myself a story and the story goes, my Zen teacher is dying and I'm saying goodbye.

[29:29]

I've known him almost 50 years and he has always encouraged me to be myself. He did his best to teach me that I have everything I need and will soon be gone. These are his last days. This is an important moment because it's the last time I will ever see him. There's nothing wrong with stories. I'm telling you one right now. And inside this written story is the story I was telling myself as I sat beside my teacher. But he wasn't telling himself this story. He was breathing, going from one breath to the next. I stand up and say, goodbye. I love you. I put my hands together and give him a little bow. He says distinctly, goodbye. And he lifts his hand and looks me in the eye and bows back. That's what really happened. I'm making it into a story now by telling you about it afterward. But while it was happening, it wasn't a story yet.

[30:32]

It wasn't inside my head like thoughts. It was simply what our bodies did. Okay. So, we have until 11.15, is that right? You'll put up the... Okay, well, I want to save time for conversation, but I think I might read. I'm going to read another thing that I haven't read before. And this is from a chapter called Some of My Favorite Contemplations on Death. And it's just from the beginning of this, parts of this. It starts with a koan that's from the Book of Serenity. Seventh-century China.

[31:33]

Seven wise sisters planned a spring journey. One of the sisters, instead of going to a park to enjoy the spring flowers, let's go together to see the charnel grounds. You know where the charnel grounds are, where the bodies are left. The other said, that place is full of decaying corpses. What is such a place good for? This is their spring vacation. The first woman replied, Just go, very good things are there. When they arrived, one of them pointed to a corpse and said, there is a person's body. Where is the person gone? What, another said, what did you say? And all seven sisters were immediately enlightened. Why did we come here if we're only going to leave again? What's next? Death is the big question mark in life. In Buddhism and Christianity, and probably in other religions too, The deliberate contemplation of death is a traditional spiritual practice. It may seem counter-intuitive, but I speak about these situations here, not to be ghoulish, but to raise your spirits.

[32:42]

See if it works. I'm curious about my own absence as it approaches me. Is it the same absence that preceded my birth, a gone-ness that envelops me at either end? I have an urgent way of understanding these matters. In my Zen practice and in my personal explorations, I have learned some ways to have a conversation with death. Strangely, I have found that when I deliberately consider my own death, I feel more alive. Here, I share some of my favorite death contemplations in the spirit of sharing your recipes. Some of them might be to your taste. So I'm just going to read the first one of five. The five are the five remembrances, which I'm going to read. Walking in cemeteries, which is a very nice practice I recommend to you. Maybe you already do it. Making a day of culture, which is right now is the time to do that one. Reading obituaries and writing death poems.

[33:47]

These are all very useful ways of contemplating death. I'm going to just read the first one. The five remembrances. Buddha urged his disciples to meditate upon the... When I first heard them, I thought, wow, this is harsh. But I shouldn't have been surprised. They are straightforward reminders of the teaching of impermanence. Here is Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh's translation. I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death. So there's the first three, old age, sickness, and death. The fourth one, all that is dear to me and everyone of the nature to change, there is no way to escape being separated from them. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.

[34:50]

My actions are the ground on which I stand. The first three on this list, old age, are the three forms of suffering the young Prince Shakyamuni saw when he had first left the protection of his father's palace before he became the Buddha. And each of these remembrances helps us to savor the life we have now and not to grasp for permanence. It is our clinging to youth, health, and suffering. This is a difficult teaching, but familiar to me. The fourth remembrance, that I will lose everything I love, was at first unexpected and unbearable for me. I'll be ripped away from everyone I love one way or another. My heart will be in tatters. See how I make it work? When I stay with it, when I say it gently to myself, this remembrance helps me to love right now the people who are dear to me and urges me not to hang on to them too tightly because that will only cause more pain on both sides.

[35:54]

I wouldn't want to hear, ouch, grandma, you're scared. The other day, I was talking on FaceTime with my granddaughter Sally in Virginia, 3,000 long miles away. These days, because of the pandemic, I can't hug her even gently. Sometimes I think, FaceTime schmace time, my whole body aches. On this call, we were playing a drawing game. And we propped up our phones so that we could see each other. It was Sally's turn to draw something for me to copy, and she was silent for a couple of minutes, concentrating. In that interlude, I could hear a pencil. I looked at the top of her head as she bent over her paper, the shine coming off her curly hair, shifting as she changed the tilt of her head in the light from the window. I stopped clinging. I had all I wanted. That's the joy hiding in the fourth remembrance.

[36:57]

The fifth remembrance, that my own actions are all I have, comes as a gift, encouraging me because I have some agency. I'm not completely helpless after all. My actions have consequences, which is another way of saying that my actions make a difference. The law of karma gives me a force every moment to act out of love. The fifth remembrance tells me the good news that I'm not just a victim of blind faith. I have a say in what form my impermanent life takes. When I learned about them, I took up the practice of saying the five remembrances to myself every morning for a month. I became harsh and became good medicine. The more I accept my impermanence, the more here and the more now I can be. And when I understand that I will lose everything, I see that I have nothing left to lose. So everything around me is a bonus. It's all borrowed from the great library and it will have to be returned on the due date.

[38:00]

Considering our intractable impermanence, it's quite heroic how we keep on taking out the recycling, how we raise and educate children even though they are going to die, every single one of them, how we throw ourselves into making things that will someday burn or be forgotten. The whole time we know we're all going to end up dead anyway. But we're not dead yet. We're alive together. And it's a joint project, breathing. So I think I'll stop there. And we have time for some comments, questions, discussion. Yeah. We're great. Nice to see these people. Did I do anything bad to the mic?

[39:04]

Is it still okay? Hi, all you online people. Nice to see you. So does anybody here? There's a hand. That is Helen. Hi, Sue. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Can everybody hear that? I'm just going to take myself off so I'm not looking at myself. I'd like to take you back to something you said at the very beginning of your talk about how in the past 10 years you've kind of let go of... of stopping aging or not aging. And as someone in her 40s, about to start that whole fight. So I wonder if you have some words, and what I remember you saying is that the relief, the relief that came with going to the other side.

[40:11]

Do you have any encouraging words? Well, I want to say that I'm not saying, oh, you should just give up on exercise and say, oh, I'd rather just sit in a chair and read a book. So since I'm so old and tired anyway, I don't need to take care of myself. Of course, I'm not saying that. And when you're in your 40s, I remember this myself. I realized that I was getting older and I was maybe not going to be in the prime of my life anymore. What is the prime? Who knows? But actually, I'll just... Pause to quote the Grey Panthers who have a saying that was on posters all over their office. The best age you are. But anyway, Helen, I think that what's not useful is having this battle, the battle with impermanence and the battle with aging and the way people really go to extremes to try to keep it...

[41:18]

looking the age they are. I mean, it's nice to look youthful, yes, and it's a compliment when somebody says, oh, you know, look, set your age. I try to be complimented, but I also, it sort of bothers me the way inherent in all of this is this basic assumption of our culture that old is bad. So I think what I began to do was to be more, to try to be more go along with that saying the best age to be is the age you are because that's the age I am right now this is the moment I have and this is the self I have and I can't keep myself from getting old I get the best care of myself as possible and at any age that's an important thing to do and as you realize that you're getting older it can be scary I mean it's much scarier before it happens than after in a way you know I don't I mean there's also for women there's a I think more than for men, edge, I'm looking beautiful and attractive and youthful and, and old women have a, are tend to be pretty invisible.

[42:27]

And I noticed that happening when my hair turned gray or white or whatever that in a line at the post office or something, you become pretty invisible. People don't even notice. But at a certain point you can just accept that too and say, Oh, well, there's, now i get to be a fly on the wall of life or something anyway um i think it's a good question and i honor your concern with your own aging whatever age you are and i encourage do all you can to be fully alive in your youthful bigger or middle-aged figure or whatever age bigger it is and and that's great just don't Feel that it's a battle. You're not fighting against some enemy. You're going with the flow. You can work with time and enjoy it and keep yourself healthy as you go. Thank you.

[43:29]

Anybody? Yes. You have so much wisdom. aging, you reminded me of another Grey Panthers quote, which is, getting old isn't a disease, it's a triumph. And I wondered if you could say something about what that means to you. Yes, I'm going to. Andrea quoted another Grey Panthers motto, getting old isn't a disease, it's a triumph. To me, that means it is hard to get old. There are things that happen that are very hard. And some people lose a lot more than other people. Some people have very lucky genes and lucky constitutions. But everybody loses something. And so those losses and adapting to them and changing

[44:41]

according to um how what's appropriate is really really important and um and so it's a triumph in the sense i mean there's the idea that it's a triumph that you're even living you have enough health to stay alive and you're not dead but i don't think that that it's you know people say it's better than the alternative being old is better than the alternative um i think it also means that to to get old with with some sense of vigor and and energy and love and compassion is a triumph in itself. Yes, please do. Can you see how it opens up for you? Yes. So I thought not everyone gets to live an older age, but there's something quite wonderful, I think, about being able to look back at all of your life and see the development and the integration. of whatever it was and come to accept whatever it was in the way i don't think people in their 20s or 40s who die earlier have that opportunity that's really an important aspect of being old that you have a long life to look back on yeah it amazes me when i'm talking to people of another generation and i suddenly realize you know i have three times as many decades that i've been on the planet

[46:06]

as they do, that makes a difference. And it feels really strange. I mean, I feel as though I've lived completely different lives, like I was some other person, totally. I have lived in different ways. Some people's lives are more on an even path than mine has been, but not just because of that. Things that happened along, we know historical things. You know, we were alive when Kennedy was assassinated or these different moments in history that we experienced or enough to be able to participate in the civil rights movement. Things that happened that were part of our history are also part of our lives when we're old. And that feels strange in a way. And also looking back and doing a kind of life review is really considered a sort of stage a positive thing to do as an old person you'd have that opportunity that you're talking about and it can be very rich to look back over your life and and also with other people that to do that together in their classes of senior centers about writing memoirs and things and looking back on our lives it's very appropriate to do that and to take some satisfaction in it i think also

[47:24]

to forgive yourself, it's an opportunity for that too. I also wanted to mention about your first question, oh, no, not your first question, Helen's question. No, your question. See, this is part of it. Oh, which person asked which question? So one of the chapters in the book is about adapting to the losses and that we really can learn tools of how to adapt to what it means to be old and so i just came up with idea of there's four tools that i developed in my as an idea the first one is to observe okay what is it what is it that's going on right now just notice what is it that i can and can't do what's the actual problem about not being able to find my Actually, that's one problem I don't have. But whatever the problem is, look at it.

[48:27]

The second one is adapt. OK, what can I do to work with this situation now that I see what it is? The problem is I can't drive. OK, how do I work with this? I want to go to some things that happen in the evening. I'm going to find a carpool. I'm going to find people to drive with me. And you adapt. And they're often positive. aspects of that. I make a new friend by driving all the time with somebody else to the seminar or whatever. And then let go. And that's when you can't adapt when you're trying to find a way to do something, and they just can't find a way to do it. And so you stop doing it. You don't drive, you don't go to something that you can't get to or whatever it is. And that's a hard one letting go. But it's also what what is part of our life is about it's good practice letting go and and zen practice is all about letting go anyway and then the last one is um accept which is kind of like the first one observe okay this is how it is right now it's coming back full circle to okay i've let go i've adapted let go where i can't and i'm accepting it that it's like this now yes ross

[49:48]

Thank you, Sue. There's a Zen story of a teacher and a student at a coffin. And there's a wrap on the coffin. And alive or dead, I won't say. Do you find that helpful in dealing with aging and death? And what is alive, what is dead? Yeah, I love that, Koan. It's really wonderful. And I take it to mean that it's evidence. urgency of this question how could it be that somebody was there and now they're not there there's a body there but as the woman in the eternal ground said where did the person go are they somewhere else or is their spirits how could they be dead are they alive or are they dead and in some way they are still alive in our hearts so that question the koan is interesting too because the monk is so inappropriate, you know, he's so shocking, banging on the coffin at the condolence call, and the hosts are there grieving, and he's saying, alive or dead, alive or dead.

[50:57]

And his teacher maybe brushes him out of there, I imagine, and then he says again to his teacher, alive or dead, and his teacher says, I won't say, I can't say, because nobody else can really say that, tell you that, that is a koan to think about and to honor in yourself and um and it's an urgent matter and and the monk was so eager to understand this matter that he broke the taboos and stuff and then anyway he was sent away by his teacher because he had he thought i mean i don't think the teacher said something well i think you better go and practice somewhere else now because if people heard what you did they might be upset with you. But I don't think he himself was saying, you said the wrong thing. He just said, you better go on to another place. And years later, he asked another teacher the same question and was enlightened by a voice saying it, because I think that teacher also said, I can't say, I won't say or something.

[52:03]

Anyway, it's a good question. And I guess we can we take one more from William? He had his hand up before. Thank you. I appreciate your talk. I think we talk about death enough. Great topic. In my own life, my parents have died and my grandmother has died. They were sort of the older people in my life, and all of them were not accepting what's death at all. It was very clear they were angry with religious people in their life for trying to get them to be accepting or just not liking to be around other old people. But anyway, but I think that, so I think that was sad that they weren't more accepting, but at the same time, it kept them going through some great illnesses. My grandmother told me she was 105. She was like, you know, she could get angry and she had a great life.

[53:04]

So I'm wondering if those two things are mutually exclusive or, you know, if you can accept death and at the same time have this great, you know, just like want to keep going no matter what. Yeah, that's a really good question. And it's a really interesting question because I've thought about that sometimes, you know, that wonderful Dylan Thomas poem about his father, rage, rage against the dying of the light. He's saying to his father, yeah, rage against it. That's what a human beings should do. So there is a kind of deep, vital energy in your parents. reaction. But I would hope that as so many paradoxes are possible in Zen, practice and enlightenment are the same thing. So if that's the case, then surely energy really strong, as strong as we can, at the same time that we accept the fact that we will die.

[54:05]

Maybe that is possible to do. And I think it's possible to do without anger but rather with a fierce love of being alive so as long as you're alive fully alive with a lot of energy but with trying to drop the anger part so you don't see them as mutually exclusive i don't see that vital relishing of life being um in conflict with accepting death if you just you die but when you die you die because that's what when the bus comes you get on and go yeah good question

[54:47]

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