Adjusting Reality
Some mornings when I wake up I don't want to get out of bed. Here's how that feels. I don't want to start moving my aching joints. I don't want to put my body into clothes. I don't want to be faced with filling my day.
I know that old people have an increased occurrence of depression. I learned it as a statistical fact when I studied gerontology in social work grad school. It was a disorder to be cured with meds and therapy.
Now I know it in a more intimate way. It's not a dis-order. It's the order of things.
What normal person wouldn't be sad at the aching joints, slower movement, decreased energy, added weight, lack of purpose that accompany old age?
I remember a time when I thought every ache and pain was fixable. Now I assume that no ache and pain is anything other than a natural part of aging. Sort of like never getting enough sleep.
There are still some mornings that I spontaneously feel that joyful feeling that used to accompany pretty much every morning. But mostly if I want to feel joy, I have to put in some effort.
My work involves encouraging my yoga and meditation students to practice positive thinking, gratitude and affirmations of their innate beauty and goodness. And I believe it. I have a private studio and in any given semester there are about 30 women who spend time with me in yoga poses and meditation.
To prepare myself for this role, I've spent thousands of hours over the past 10 years reading and listening to some of the finest teachers in the world. I've spent days at a time on retreat to enrich my practice and teaching. These hours and days have been among the most enjoyable in my life. Little did I know that they would prepare me for one of the biggest challenges I would ever face - that of being old.
When joy doesn't come simultaneously in the morning, I consciously bring my attention to my piriformis (lower back) where I was experiencing significant discomfort for weeks and encourage myself to enjoy the lack of pain there now. I move on to my left thumb to notice the absence of the pain I felt there for over a decade. There's still a twinge but my thumb is almost 100% functional again.
Once I've concentrated on the positive things going on with my body (the default is focusing on the negative, right? And there are plenty of those.), I move on to the emotional and intellectual positives in my life instead of going to the (many) places where anxiety about my sharpness arises, regrets set in and the glare of all the things that could be way better paralyze my heart.
You get the idea.
I remember a scene from Russell Crowe's tremendous performance in "A Beautiful Mind" when the brilliant but schizophrenic John Nash opines that his mind has always enabled him to solve every problem but now his mind IS the problem. My self-confidence and belief that everything in my life could always be fixed did not prepare me for this time in my life when so much cannot be fixed. In fact, it created a dissonance that meant spending much of my 64th year in suffering from the famous 2nd arrow - the first arrow being inevitable in life (shit happens) but the second being optional (our reaction to the first arrow).
As much as I would like to think of being old as Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi did and about which he wrote so well in his book, From Ageing to Sageing, I don't. My world doesn't seem to have a natural place for sageing. Most of the time I don't feel much like a sage and in my personal life there don't seem to be people looking to me to fill that role for them.
As much as I would like to be the accepting, unafraid, wise old crone, filled with equanimity and inner peace, genuinely and spontaneously finding pleasure in the fruits of a lifetime spent in altruism, learning and spiritual development, I spend much more of my time working on getting going in the morning and filling my day with activities which reassure me of my worth.
It's a work in progress.
