Category Archives: aging

Unremarkable

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Eve Baker writes, in Paths in Solitude (pp.10-11):

The solitary is the bearer of the future, of that which is not yet born, of the mystery which lies beyond the circle of lamplight or the edge of the known world. There are some who make raids into this unknown world of mystery and who come back bearing artefacts. These are the creative artists, the poets who offer us their vision of the mystery… But there are also those who make solitude their home, who travel further into the inner desert, from which they bring back few artefacts. These are the contemplatives, those who are drawn into the heart of the mystery. Contemplatives have no function and no ministry. They are in [that] world as a fish is in the sea, to use Catherine of Siena’s phrase, as part of the mystery. That they are necessary is proved by the fact that they exist in all religious traditions. Contemplatives are not as a rule called to activity, they are useless people and therefore little understood in a world that measures everything by utility and cash value. Unlike the poet they do not return bearing artefacts, but remain in the desert, pointing to the mystery, drawing others in.

I have known since childhood the power of solitude, of lonely places; and I have always been most at home alone in the grey wind, without a destination or timetable, or sitting by myself in a sunlit garden, watching the tiny velvety red mites threading their paths on a warm stone bench. For the longest time I believed that these things would only be attainable, as an adult, if I were to live in solitude, and I had not the resolve or the leisure or the foresight to plan out such a life for myself.

But now, as a retired person and a contemplative, I am doubly useless. This is a blessing found at long last, after a life spent trying to thread my way through the necessity of work, the yearning to create, and the far deeper call, often hidden even from myself, to the contemplative way. Oh, for most of those years I managed to maintain – as much despite myself as wholeheartedly – a contemplative practice. But these days I find myself in sympathy with Uchiyama Roshi:

We shouldn’t imagine that life after retirement has to be miserable or impoverished. To be old is also one of our roles. When we’re young, our role is to work; upon retirement, we take up another role. Since we have less income, we should simplify our lives as much as possible. That is the way to fulfill the role of an old person. We should not judge it miserable, but just devote ourselves to that particular role. We function through our roles and exert ourselves in our occupations as a role. Finally, dying is one of our roles.

From Tending the Practice Ground, Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, Tricycle Magazine, November 2025

Eve Baker writes later on in the book I quoted above (p.105):

Solitude is of course an interior disposition, which external solitude confirms and strengthens. One can be quite solitary in the midst of a crowd, and one’s opportunities for solitude during the day are not necessarily those when one is entirely alone, but times when one’s attention is directed inward and away from the distractions which surround us. The mind can go flying about, following one stimulus after another, captive to a dozen things which grab our attention. The secret is to look beyond these things by focussing upon the one point, which is God… Like falling in love, it is a process where we are taken beyond ourselves into an unknown world.

As contemplatives, we are not here to lead anything. Most of us are not even here to teach anything to anyone. We are here to live our ordinary lives in quiet places. Our solitude is so often a merely interior solitude, so that we cannot even claim the romantic status of some kind of hermit.

Here we are, unremarkable, at the edge of the mystery. The endless ground lies open before us, and we walk down to the nearest shop with our little bag, and our comfortable old shoes. This is all we are; our little sisters and brothers the sparrows chirp to us from the hedge, and the rain is coming on, again.

Is it possible?

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Is it possible, at this very moment, to do what we may not have ever been able to do before, which is to look down at the shape our life has made and—suspending all judgment, throwing away every possible frame—simply marvel that this is the shape that my life has made, this and no other?

Noelle Oxenhandler, What Is the Shape of My Life?, Tricycle Magazine, Winter 2025

To sit with this question, simply as it is, may be not unfamiliar when applied to the breath, to the sitting body, to the sounds outside, or to the sunlight on a blank wall or closed eyelids. But it is less familiar when turned, as Oxenhandler does here, to oneself. It is a strange and disorienting practice, with a dzogchen quality, like a wordless pointing-out instruction, about it somewhere. Something appears like a bright skein on the velvety dark of the stream, a shape of purling water, nothing else.

Recently I have found myself drawn into just such a practice. It is not something I choose. It rises up through the usual pattern of unbidden thoughts, and asks for space at least to be, like a map drawn on glass. There is nothing dramatic about it, no sense of “my life flashed before my eyes” – and yet it is there, a kind of Tube map of a lifetime, glittering behind closed eyelids. The least attention, and a pattern enlarges, a stream of cause and effect reveals itself, and is – what? – forgiven? Something like that. An act, yet again, of grace, anyway. There is no judgement here, no impulse to improve anything. It just is as Noelle Oxenhandler suggests (ibid.):

[T]hrough the ups and downs, the joys and heartbreaks of my own… life, there is something I have always been seeking that is beyond any conditions, that is not defined by the particular shape my life has made, by the roads either taken or not taken. In a way, it might be called a kind of negative capability toward the past, an unknowing of the known—in the sense of refraining from any judgment as to whether what happened was good, bad, something to be regretted or celebrated, whether all together it made the shape of a life that “worked out” or “didn’t work out.”

On the map beneath the glass there is nothing even to heal. The lines and stops stand out against the dark, and my breath comes and goes. There is no story here, just a pattern in the quiet. Nothing to conclude. The bright pattern stands against silence, as it is.

[First published 20/11/2025]

Quietly

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This body is undeniably growing older, gradually disintegrating, moving toward its eventual disappearance, like a wave merging back into the ocean, which it never actually left. This growing up and growing old—like the ocean rising, cresting, and falling—is a movement in time, and time turns out to be a kind of imagination, a way of conceptualizing or thinking about what is happening. The only actual reality is the eternity of Here-Now, this one bottomless moment, from which we never depart, except in imagination, and that imagining only happens now…

As the body ages, I become in some ways more limited. I know, for example, that it’s too late to go to medical school, and I know that there are many people and places dear to my heart that I will never see again. That vast realm of future possibility is closing down and shrinking. And as I wrote about in my last book, Death: The End of Self-Improvement, that limitation is actually a blessing. It forces us to find freedom and fulfillment right here in this very moment.

And indeed, I feel increasingly unlimited in a deeper sense. I’ve been freed from the seductive allure of future possibilities. I’ve been brought home. I find myself ever more deeply appreciating the simple moments of love and joy in everyday life—a few words exchanged with someone I pass on my morning walk… the gorgeous song of a bird and my own heart leaping with joy on hearing it and another bird responding, the three of us somehow dancing together in a field of love… sitting later in my armchair, seeing the shadows of a flock of birds passing quickly again and again over the walls of the buildings across the way, shadows flashing out of emptiness and vanishing, and each time, the heart again leaping with joy, while the green leaves on the red bud tree outside my window shimmer in the light and the breeze. How simple it all is.

Joan Tollifson

Increasingly I feel that Tollifson is right, here. Growing old, I have been brought home in some strange way. Without entirely withdrawing, in the eremitic sense, from life and community, I seem to have found a peace in the midst of things that I had not expected to find.

How much of this rest and quietness of heart is down to aging, or to good company; how much is due to practice, and how much to sheer grace I have no idea. I don’t really know if those distinctions make any sense, even in their own context. I do know that I would not exchange these days for any, or all, of the days of my youth.

The last light of evening between the trees is a soft lilac grey, a colour beyond imagining, that will last only minutes now. The fringe of ragged cloud above is darkening moment by moment, and the birds have gone quiet, even our neighbours the seagulls who breed and roost on the buildings across the road. After what seems like weeks, the air is cool and damp. There is more rain on the way.

Gifts of hiddenness

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As I grow older, I’m struck more and more by the heroic effort ordinary people are making every day: the people here at the retirement community where I live who are walking with walkers, recovering from strokes or falls or dealing with Parkinson’s or MS…

Many of us noticing the time it takes now to do things once done quickly and the enormous effort to do things that once seemed easy and some of us requiring help with our most intimate tasks. So much we once took for granted is gone. And the gift hidden in this, as I’ve said before, is that we are brought home to right here, right now, just this, just as it is—finding the beauty, the joy, the freedom in the midst of limitation.

Joan Tollifson

Epicurus’ phrase, lathe biōsas, “live in obscurity”, is coming more and more to describe the way I find myself not only living, but being profoundly grateful to live. Growing older comes of course with all the limitations Joan Tollifson describes, but just as she says, it is full also of hidden gifts; gifts of hiddenness, in fact.

Like Tollifson, we too live in a retirement community, and many of the friends we made when we moved in here ten years ago are gone now, whether dead, or just moved on to a care home. We are among the youngsters here, I suppose, and we are still relatively capable. But to live where achievement, acquisition, progress is no longer expected is in itself a blessing. There is no need to explain, no need to prevaricate. Contentment is not seen as a character flaw.

In such a setting, the freedom to study, to practice, to write comes easily. Silence and stillness are gifts too, and as precious in themselves as the soft scented air of evening through the window, the little sounds of birds settling in for the night, the soft tapping of my keyboard. To be alert to the infinite in the tiny moment, the limitless ground beneath each breath; these are mysteries within the plain fragments of passing time that no one would suspect who didn’t live among them, obscurely and at peace.

Under the hood

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The Socratic Question, ‘What sort of person should I be?’ – and its variants, ‘What kind of life should I lead?’ ‘What values shall I live by?’ ‘What shall I aim for?’ – asks any reflective person, at any point in life, to pause and consider what really matters, and as far as practically possible to live according to the answers. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus pointed out that a person might be struck by the force of this Socratic challenge even in the last hours of advanced old age, and at that moment ‘begin’, as he put it, ‘to be wise’. It is never too late.

It might strain optimism to think that a philosophy of life could be arrived at early, in the sense that a youth might consider Socrates’ question, come to a decision, and thereafter live in conformity with that decision. Yet although it is never too late to consider one’s philosophy of life, neither is it ever too soon.

AC Grayling, Philosophy and Life: Exploring the Great Questions of How to Live

As I’ve mentioned here before, I came to my interest in philosophy very young – probably between the ages of 14 and 15 – during an extended spell in hospital. I don’t suppose it would have occurred to me then to frame my growing interest in terms of the Socratic Question as explained by Grayling in the quote above; but I was acutely conscious of a need to find out for myself what went on under life’s engine cover. There must, I was certain, be something that made it all go, some intrinsic power or energy behind everything; something that made sense of my earlier – for want of a better term – mystical experiences as a child recovering from a long illness. Academic philosophy, I soon discovered, was not the way to find out.

This longing to look “under the hood” – AKA metaphysical inquiry – has stayed with me all my life. It was the reason for my early interest in Buddhism and Taoism; for my tentative experiments with psychedelics. It was the reason I turned for some years to writing poetry. It was most certainly what drew me – apart from the felt need for a context, and a justification, for practice – to religion; and, paradoxically perhaps, it is what – out of a need to remain close to my own inner experience – has led me out of formal religion altogether.

My life has perhaps been a sequence of beginning again. Some might see this – as I have myself, often enough – as indecisiveness, or even faithlessness. But actually it has been, I now see, anything but either of those things; it has been a process of trying to be true to what I have actually encountered in practice – in stillness, in looking under the outward appearance of things, under the surface of my own apprehensions.

Now that I am getting close to the age of Epictetus’ imaginary example, I am just beginning to realise that just beginning is the necessary condition of insight. I first read Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind many years ago; it seems to have taken me more than fifty years to start to get a handle on what the title means. Now, perhaps, I have learnt to sit still.

Impermanence

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I realised not long ago that I have tended for most of my life – albeit unconsciously – to reckon the worth of things by how long they are likely to last; and this despite the fact that so many things I love and whose presence gives meaning to my own life – small plants, lively insects, the changing skies, the seasons of the year – are ephemeral by their very nature, and they last only moments, days or weeks or months, before reaching an end implicit in their merely being what they are. I love humans, too, I realised, for who they are not for what they might achieve; and humans don’t last long compared with trees, or with the rock formations that are such striking and ancient companions of ours in this part of the country.

The worth of something, as I had unthinkingly valued it, is its essence: the thing that exists, persists, being the thing itself. It is an illusion: phenomena, any phenomena, are empty, surely, of any such essence. They are merely what they are, and that in relation to all else that is, to the shifting patterns on the bright skin of the stream, “the ever-transforming patterns of the cosmos as a whole.” (Reninger) It’s clinging to this idea of essence that gives rise to our constant craving, our helpless longing for permanence that is the growth-point for the whole tragic enterprise of human pride – the error of Ozymandias.

We are frail, and temporary, and lovely; we are precious as all life is precious, and our loveliness, like the loveliness of all that lives, is in our fleetingness. The points of light on the sparkling water last an instant – their beauty is in that. Death is implicit in being born; life would not be possible without it, and it is a loyal friend to the living. All we need is to sit still, and watch the emptiness of separate things; the delicious freshness of impermanence itself will come by like the scent of flowers through an open window in summer. Death will come and sit on the end of our bed, and fill his pipe, and talk to us of life; and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

Mistakes

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Part of the wisdom of spiritual soulful self-presence is to be able to let certain aspects of your life alone. This is the art of spiritual noninterference. Yet other aspects of your life call urgently for your attention; they call to you as their shelterer to come and harvest them. You can discern where these wounds are in the temple of memory, then visit them in a gentle and mindful way. The one kind of creative presence you could bring to these areas is compassion. Some people can be very compassionate to others but are exceptionally harsh with themselves. One of the qualities that you can develop, particularly in your older years, is a sense of great compassion for yourself. When you visit the wounds within the temple of memory, you should not blame yourself for making bad mistakes that you greatly regret. Sometimes you have grown unexpectedly through these mistakes. Frequently, in a journey of the soul, the most precious moments are the mistakes. They have brought you to a place that you would otherwise have always avoided. You should bring a compassionate mindfulness to your mistakes and wounds. Endeavor to inhabit again the rhythm you were in at that time. If you visit this configuration of your soul with forgiveness in your heart, it will fall into place itself. When you forgive yourself, the inner wounds begin to heal. You come in out of the exile of hurt into the joy of inner belonging. This art of integration is very precious. You have to trust your deeper, inner voice to know which places you need to visit. This is not to be viewed in a quantitative way, but rather in a gentle, spiritual way. If you bring that kind light to your soul and to its wounded places, you can effect incredible inner healing.

John O’ Donohue, Anam Cara (with thanks to What’s here now?)

I have found recently that this process of discovery and forgiveness is something that has been happening, unbidden, in my own practice. Memories arise, and arise again, despite the usual recourse to the breath. Something like O’Donohue’s “inhabit[ing] again the rhythm you were in at the time” seems to take place of itself, and somehow through this sequence of arising and returning a healing appears to take place. For me, certainly, this is not a willed thing, by the way; it happens (I use the word advisedly) within the flow of practice, not in place of it.

I am aware of the tentative nature of my own words here. (Interestingly, I only stumbled across the passage from Anam Cara on the ‘What’s here now’ blog some time after the process had established itself, and found John O’Donohue’s description uncannily close to my own experience.) This is a delicate process, and not a thing I could ever have envisaged, still less willed, consciously for myself. (Initially, it appeared no more than a distraction.) The normal turning back to the breath, despite the sometimes overwhelming emotional energy of these memories, seems to accomplish something very like O’Donohue’s sense that “[i]f you visit this configuration of your soul with forgiveness in your heart, it will fall into place itself.”

The mistakes and their wounds of the past are unavoidable anyway. They happened: no amount of regret will change that. In any case, they were part of the sequence of cause and effect we have come to inhabit merely by the accidents of our birth and our place in history. The love that is inherent in the mindfulness of our practice was always waiting for just this chance; now at last it can do its own work of bringing us to rest.

Einzelgänger und Einzelgängerin

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Einzelgänger (f. Einzelgängerin) is one of my favourite German compound nouns. It’s usually translated as “loner”, though Google Translate also offers “maverick, rogue, nonconformist”. Literally of course it means “single walker” – and that comes closer to the way I always think of it. There’s almost an eremitical flavour to it…

By nature I seem to be an Einzelgänger myself, though it has taken me a while to develop the courage of my convictions on the matter. In spiritual matters, of course, there is always the strong, and conventionally approved, temptation to declare oneself a member of some religion or other, and of some tradition within that religion. Worse, one may become – especially in most Buddhist traditions – someone’s disciple. I’m not at all certain the guru/disciple (teacher/follower, etc.) relationship is always a healthy one, hallowed though it is by long use. Sam Harris writes:

One of the first obstacles encountered along any contemplative path is the basic uncertainty about the nature of spiritual authority. If there are important truths to be discovered through introspection, there must be better and worse ways to do this—and one should expect to meet a range of experts, novices, fools, and frauds along the way. Of course, charlatans haunt every walk of life. But on spiritual matters, foolishness and fraudulence can be especially difficult to detect. Unfortunately, this is a natural consequence of the subject matter. When learning to play a sport like golf, you can immediately establish the abilities of the teacher, and the teacher can, in turn, evaluate your progress without leaving anything to the imagination. All the relevant facts are in plain view. If you can’t consistently hit the little white ball where you want it to go, you have something to learn from anybody who can. The difference between an expert and a novice is no less stark when it comes to recognizing the illusion of the self. But the qualifications of a teacher and the progress of a student are more difficult to assess.

It may well be that for some people there are those, further along their own chosen path, who can wisely and compassionately provide the most helpful and literally enlightening instruction. Perhaps it depends to some extent on how closely that path happens to conform to one already mapped out – Vajrayana, perhaps, or traditional Advaita Vedanta. But more to the point, I honestly think, is simple temperament.

We are used by now to the way people may be broadly divided into introverts and extroverts, more precisely perhaps into the 16 personalities of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. We may even have stumbled across Elaine Aron and her concept of the highly sensitive person. I think perhaps we should recognise the Einzelgänger or Einzelgängerin as a distinct personality type in themselves. I don’t mean by this a literal loner, nor a hermit in either the religious or the colloquial sense; but a contemplative who finds that they are temperamentally unsuited either for formal membership of some church or meeting, or for the particular relationship of personal discipleship.

I truly believe that I have discovered more, about myself and about the way things are, in the last few years outside of any formal commitment than I had in decades inside. Of course I am getting old, and some might say – with at least a grain of truth perhaps – that this is all a function of age. But it doesn’t feel as though it is just that. It actually feels as though I have finally found the path I should have been treading all along. I only wish – in a manner of speaking, outside the constraints of cause and effect! – that I had had someone to explain this to me long ago: which may be the whole point of writing a blog like this.

‘Satiable curtiosity*

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It seems to me, as I grow older, that one of the really essential things to cultivate in oneself is the continued sense of curiosity. I am lucky enough to have been born with more than my fair share of it, and to have been brought up by a mother who encouraged me in it.

I have never been able to see an insect without wanting to know its name, its taxonomy, its place in the world; and the same goes for most things I encounter, from the tiniest and apparently least significant creatures to things of cosmic proportions, like the scintillations of Sirius in the night sky. (I cannot tell you how delighted I was eventually to read that Sirius is actually a binary star!)

I am doubly fortunate that getting older seems to have done nothing to dim this insatiable hunger of enquiry in me. Richard Dawkins once wrote:

Isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?

It wasn’t until I spent an extended period in hospital, in my teens, that I had the freedom to begin to realise that the natural directtion of this curiosity of mine was philosophical, even metaphysical; and I was in my early twenties before it became clear that it was only really happy in what I learned to call “spirituality”.

Practice is the place where spiritual curiosity finds its home. For far too long I thought that there must be some religious significance to this, but in fact there is no need for such a hypothesis. The wonder of isness itself is quite enough. Lawrence M Krauss:

The one experience that I hope every student has at some point in their lives is to have some belief you profoundly, deeply hold, proved to be wrong because that is the most eye-opening experience you can have, and as a scientist, to me, is the most exciting experience I can ever have.

I feel like this almost every time I sit down to meditate, and it is one of the inexhaustible delights of the journey, the heart’s own song in the velvet fathomlessness of what actually is.

*”Satiable curtiosity” – from Rudyard Kipling’s The Elephant’s Child

More on faith and belief

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Last month I wrote a post quoting Alan Watts:

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

The more I think about this, the more crucial it seems to me for the non-religious contemplative life. Religion, as defined in Wikipedia, “is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion.”

Spirituality, on the other hand, is perhaps best defined by Sam Harris:

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

Waking Up

Faith is often used (and Sam Harris is sometimes guilty of this) merely as an alternative word for belief, whereas Watts’ definition seems to me far closer to the mark: “an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown.” This is precisely the kind of faith I find I need to continue with a contemplative practice, which is almost by definition “a plunge into the unknown”: the psychonaut casting off from the shores of consensus (conditioned) reality. (In this context, it is worth remarking that in a theocentric society, religious belief is consensus reality!)

18 months or so ago, I wrote,

As I have found myself increasingly at variance with institutional religion, Christian, Buddhist or whatever, and increasingly sceptical of its value either in the life of the spirit or in the life of society, so my naturally eremitical inclinations seem to have strengthened – dramatically so since the enforced isolation in which so many of us found ourselves during the earlier months of the recent pandemic. The opportunity for online fellowship and collegiality of one kind or another changes our expectations of community and communication almost daily.

As I grow older, and gradually (if sometimes inconsistently) settle into a life outside any religious framework, in companionable solitude, married eremitism, call it what you will, I find I am relatively happy not calling myself anything in particular. Ethically, I am a humanist; spiritually, it’s harder to say. While I will always be grateful to the institutional teachers I have encountered over the years – in my case mostly within the Christian contemplative tradition – I am happiest just getting on with it. The path, or whatever it’s called, is its own place. Names separate; in the ground itself there is no separation.