Ageing: The Great Adventure

By Ken Jones, Buddhist Hospice Trust
Published by Pilgrim Press
Reviewed by Anne Sadie

Ordering information: Pilgrim Press Troed Rhiw Sebon Cwmrheidol, Aberystwyth SY23 3NB Wales United Kingdom Cost is £3.50 and checks should be made out to "K. Jones" Or you can buy two for £5.00. For international purchase email Ken directly at: kennora.jones@tiscali.co.uk

This is a very interesting and thoughtful booklet on how we view ageing in our modern Western consumer oriented culture--as a time when the best of life is behind us and now we must enjoy the "compensations" of old age, which are often seen in a patronizing or sentimental light.

Ken Jones sets against this the Buddhist perspective that ageing is the culminating adventure of life and that our earlier years are simply a preparation for this. An adventure is often scary and unpredictable, demands courage, requires training, skill and practice. He suggests we can make an art of growing old and dying.

Ken presents four themes: Ageing, Physical embodiment, Dying and Celebration. In the first theme on Ageing the author presents the Buddha's teaching on suffering and the way out of suffering, and then gives a definition: Suffering does not mean pain but the profound discomfiture which we experience when all our attempts to remedy or evade pain prove futile. He suggests that our suffering presents us with a powerful incentive to find a way to work with it and transform it or at least make it more manageable.

To this end, we really need to identify or define what it is about ageing that particularly discomfits or frustrates us. What we need to work with is not the cause of the pain, but how we experience it--not what is afflicting us out there but what it feels like in here, in the mind. This is an important distinction and we need to get it clear.

He talks about our cultural fix-it mentality--always looking for something outside to fix it--a medication for the pain, the social services for lack of money or care, and how vulnerable and frightened we become when these are not available.

He also talks about our self-identity, how it is challenged as we face ageing--"OAP", "Retired", back-number identities, the social invisibility of old age, and how we indulge in "geriatric evasion strategies". We adopt various attitudes: we may become curmudgeonly, grudging and cantankerous, or play the "Uncle Tom" role--a jolly old bird or an amiable old codger; or we may become a fusspot struggling desperately to keep everything in place, anxious and obsessive, losing so much and wanting to keep control of what little remains. That's one way.

Or we could turn to the "wisdom of bare awareness", opening ourselves up to the discomfitures (painful experiences of some external affliction, including bodily afflictions) which we have identified and work with them, our physical awareness of how it feels, its physical sensation, its colour, its taste.

He suggests that getting in touch with this is easiest in sitting meditation when the surface of the mind has become still, and deeper feelings can be observed. He talks about the sense of liberation that arises when we are freed of constantly trying to make our condition as we vainly desire it to be, and that this acceptance is a positive liberation not a grudging putting up with things.

Through the wisdom of bare awareness we can transcend ageing as it is conventionally experienced "it is with ageing that this practice achieves its greatest potential, when all the customary evasions to which we may have become habituated in earlier years begin to wear thin and we are obliged truly to confront our human condition."

Under the heading Embodying our Age, the author talks about the attitudes in our culture to our body when we are young and how we can become disturbed by our physical deterioration as we age, even be revolted by it "a once prized exhibit becomes a liability", and suggests that using this method we can bring mind and body together in an healing embodiment "as our ageing body accumulates aches and pains these become not a distraction from cultivating meditative awareness but an ally, strongly holding our attention and keeping us earthed."

When he talks about Ageing in Dying and Death, he suggests that our attitudes towards hoping for a "good death" should be shifted to emphasis on a "good life". He says that in meditative enquiry it is important to distinguish between ideas and personal experience--that Buddhist ideas are an expression of the experience of highly evolved yogins and such ideas can sustain faith.

However, it is easy to forget that they are mere ideas and easy to make them into fascinating and consoling mind pictures--another evasion which can make it difficult for us to maintain a "don't know" mind, open to experience and insight.

He clearly presents the Buddhist doctrine of the two truths and asks: "Is it not strangely arrogant and irrational for us 'to rage against the fading of the light', against our ageing and death, when everything else blooms, fades and dies? Here in the ageing of this embodied self and the prospect of death, when evasion has become so difficult, we are confronted with the great opportunity finally to fulfil our human potential."

Finally, Ken Jones celebrates the ageing process, the self-reliance, deeper tolerance, humour, wisdom and liberation it can bring. "What a pity to have had the good fortune to have lived to be so old and yet to remain trapped in whom we were, without being able to step out into the new life that awaits us." This is an informative, helpful booklet for all of us who suspect we may (someday) face old age, sickness and death!