This is Getting Old

by Susan Moon

  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

  The great matter

  Don’t waste

  Time

  One evening somewhere in the middle of the practice period, it was my turn to hit the echo han, 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 apricot 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, and the light was still on the apricot trees, and I was ready for the next one.

  A couple of years ago, when I was a few months shy of being sixty-five, I packed up my things at work. I loved my job—I had loved it for seventeen 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”—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. To put it more positively, I’m curious about everything and everybody. And so, when I first retired, feeling rich with 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?

  When I get too busy, old habits of mind kick in. I try to solve the problem by readjusting my schedule, which only makes it worse. I change one appointment in order to make room for another. I stare at my week-at-a glance calendar looking for white space, and when I find it, I pounce. Ah, a delicious piece of time! I write down: “2 pm—Nomad Café, plan workshop w. Jean,” and the white space is gone. Woops! No more time. Then I feel like an animal flailing around in a trap made of netting, getting more tightly bound.

  I try to measure out my time in the long run as well as the short. I’m a person who likes to count things, and I run the numbers. At sixty-six, I figure I’m about three-quarters of the way through. That’s if I make it to eighty-eight. How long is that? I go backward twenty-two years, to when I was studying Russian and I went on a “citizen diplomacy” trip to the Soviet Union. Remember the Soviet Union? So I guess twenty-two years is a pretty long time—but it’s all gone now, including my Russian. The next twenty-two years will go faster than the last, and besides, I might die sooner.

  Like my father, who died at seventy-three. That would mean I’ve already lived—wait, let me check my calculator—90 percent of my life.

  Admittedly, sometimes it’s appropriate to think about time this way—to consult the actuarial tables of the mind. I have a seventy-year-old friend who has heart trouble and other chronic health problems. She’s financially stressed, and she has to make decisions about her house and her living expenses. She has to decide how soon she can max out her equity line of credit, or whether she needs to keep on working part-time. She came right out and asked her cardiologist to give her a rough estimate of her life expectancy. She told him that she had tentatively figured out financing that would get her to the age of eighty-two.

  “You’ve been doing well for the last few years,” he told her. “According to the statistics, you have a better than fifty percent chance of living to the age of eighty-seven.”

  My friend rolled her eyes. “But I can’t afford to live that long!” They both laughed, and now she’s looking for more part-time work.

  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?” 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.

  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, it gets scarcer and scarcer. First of all, there’s less of it in front of me than there used to be. Second, 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 fourth, it takes me longer to do each thing. 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.”

  I remember impatiently watching my grandmother making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a picnic. 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. 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. 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 back yard 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 then I want to go on to something new, something I can do with other people to help this feverish planet. I want to keep working—I use the word working broadly. 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 putting some white space back into my appointment calendar. I’ve made a rule for myself that I mostly keep: no appointments, no telephone calls, and no e-mail before noon. Mornings are for writing and study; I can look at the to-do list in the afternoon.

  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 time lines 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 wrong. They’re living in the deep time that Dogen calls the “time being.” “Each moment is all being, is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment.”

  I think of time as the 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. My three-year-old self was with Paloma, 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. 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 childhoods, 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.

  Alone with Everyone

  THROUGHOUT MY LIFE I’ve struggled with loneliness and the fear of loneliness. Through my Buddhist practice I’ve gradually come to understand that I’m not alone, even when I’m alone, at least in theory.

  I was past sixty when a sabbatical from work gave me the opportunity, and I finally felt ready to turn theory into practice. I decided to spend a month alone in the woods—in a small hippie-style hand-built cabin on a piece of land I own with two other families in Mendocino County. I’ve been going up there for twenty-five years. It’s a great place to go with someone you love, but I’ve never liked going there alone because it’s so isolated, and I’ve been afraid to get out on that lonesome limb. But now I felt ready. I wanted to find out who was there when there was nobody there but me.

  How do you really know you’re alive, that you’re a person, if there’s nobody around to say, “Yeah! I know what you mean!” Or even, “Hey! You stepped on my toe!” So this was the core question I had. If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody hears it . . . ? If a woman sits on a porch in the woods, and nobody sees her . . . ?

  The cabin is two miles up a steep dirt road on a ridge. There’s no electricity, no phone, no cell phone access, no refrigeration. There’s a wood stove for heat and a propane stove for cooking. The outhouse boasts an excellent view. The nearest neighbor lives half a mile up the road and works in the town of Willits, a half hour’s drive away.

  It was my intention not to see or speak to anyone for a whole month. How often do you go even one day without seeing or speaking to another person? It practically never happens. Some people in my life couldn’t understand what I was up to. My mother’s initial response was, “What would you want to do that for?” And even in Soto Zen practice, we don’t have a tradition of solitary retreat, as there is in Tibetan Buddhism.

  I planned the experience carefully. I arranged with the neighbor up the road to drop off some fresh produce twice during the month, but mostly I ate oatmeal, rice and beans, beets and potatoes. I also arranged with my dharma friend and mentor Norman Fischer to be my contact person. Once a week, to keep myself from feeling totally isolated, and so that my family would know I hadn’t been killed by a mountain lion, I would drive twenty minutes down the road and call Norman from a pay phone at a rest stop on Highway 101. That was to be the only time I would use my car and the only time I would talk to another human being.

  My sister kindly let me borrow her gentle long-legged dog, Satchmo, to keep me company. He looks like a deer, especially when he leaps up the hillside through the manzanita bushes. I wanted him with me because a bear had been hanging around the cabin for a year or so; it had broken in several times and trashed all the food, and once my son had encountered it on his way to the outhouse in the middle of the night. He told me he shined his flashlight straight into its eyes and it turned and ambled away, but I couldn’t picture myself doing that. I was scared of this bear, even though it’s not the kind of bear that eats people. I thought Satchmo would make me feel more secure—and he did. More important, he provided tender, limbic companionship. We were in constant communication. But I still had to grapple with being the only English-speaking creature around.

  I didn’t take a watch, because I wanted to explore time in a new way. I wanted to be in the present moment as much as possible. I was taking a break from my week-at-a-glance calendar, from a life of rushing from one appointment to the next, worrying about being late. I wanted to have the experience of getting up when I woke up, eating when I was hungry, and going to bed when I was sleepy. I didn’t want to know what time it was by the clock.

  I developed a routine. I got up and took Satchmo for a walk. Then I meditated for the length of a stick of incense. I had breakfast, and spent the morning reading and writing. I had brought my laptop with me, along with a little gizmo to recharge it off the car battery by plugging it into the cigarette lighter.

  When my belly told me it was lunchtime I ate lunch, and in the afternoons I did some kind of work project. I found myself surprisingly excited about sawing boards, building a bookcase, clearing trails, fixing benches, stacking firewood. After tiring myself out, I would sit down on the cabin porch and drink a cup of black tea with honey and powdered milk in it.

  This porch was the bridge of my ship, from which I steered my way through that September, looking across a valley to the layers of mountains on the other side. The weather was perfect for my voyage: warm in the day but not too hot, and cool at night but not cold. After my tea, Satchmo and I would go for our afternoon walk.

  In the late afternoon, I’d return to my perch on the porch and read, and when it got too dark for my rods and cones to see the words, I’d go inside and meditate for the length of another stick of incense. And then I’d have supper.

  But after supper I didn’t know what to do. Sometimes I read or crocheted, or tried to teach myself the ukulele. I had various projects lined up. But actually, I found that the kerosene lanterns just didn’t have the vigor to get me up to anything very challenging. I faded in the evening. It was dark, and there were strange sounds—scratching on the roof, or Satchmo growling at something. And so I would go to bed.

  I was taking care of myself. I was collecting kindling and cutting firewood to be ready in case it got cold. I had to fix the water line one time when there was a leak from the water tank, and I was proud of myself for figuring out how to do it. I was cooking three meals a day for myself, because I was eating the kind of food you have to prepare, so when I made a delicious black lentil stew for myself I figured,
“There must be somebody here, otherwise why would I be making all this black lentil stew for her?” I’m a person. I need to stay warm. I need to get water. I need to eat. I’m accustomed to taking care of other people, but taking care of myself turned out to be a satisfying project, too, as if an exchange student, who happened to be me, had come to live with me for a month. I saw that she deserved to be taken care of, maybe even for more than a month.

  The hardest times for me were each day at twilight. Ever since I was a child, I’ve gotten lonesome at twilight. There’s something about that in-between time when it’s not day anymore but it’s not yet night. The day was on its deathbed—I watched it lie down on the brown hills. And up there, alone, what I call twilight sickness came over me. Why was I all alone? It was out of my control; the feeling just came like an uninvited guest. It varied in intensity but there was always a taste of grief at the end of the day.

  The insects sang out—katydids? crickets?—farewell, day; hello, night. I tried to catch the moment when they started their klezmer song but I always missed it. When I first heard them, they were already singing, like the first star, always already shining. I had no one to be at my side “at the end of the day,” as they say.

  I could have tried to distract myself from the twilight sickness, could have cranked up my wind-up radio and listened to KMUD in Garberville, where countercultural country folk were always bashing Bush and so providing a certain amount of company. But the wind-up radio ran down—it was only a stopgap measure.

  So I sat down on my round black cushion in the loft to face the twilight. I vowed to sit there until it was night. Through the tall window, I watched the day give up the ghost. Where the sky met the line of the Yolla Bolly Mountains, I saw a color with no name, between green and pink. I slipped down in the loss of light, and my own life seemed to fade with the day—all I loved was gone; all I’d done was wrong. The dark ate the trees, leaf by leaf.