Everything Changes

“Once, after a lecture, someone asked Suzuki (we all called him “Roshi,” which means “old teacher”), “Roshi, you’ve been talking about all this Buddhist stuff, but frankly I can’t understand anything you are saying. Can you say one thing about Buddhism that I can actually understand?” Suzuki waited for the nervous laughter to die down and then quietly said, “Everything changes.”

[…]Once, when I was about twelve, my father came into my room holding a book. He was in his forties at the time. “I want to show you something,” he said. The book was an autobiography of the poet Robert Graves. On the front cover was a photograph of Graves as a young man: black-haired, handsome, and full of vitality and hope. My father turned the book over to show a photograph of the present-day Graves: hair white, face wrinkled, eyes shrouded in sorrow. “Look at this,” my father said, turning the book over and over, showing me the startling transformation of youth to old age and back again. “You can’t understand this,” he said. He dropped the book on my bed and just as suddenly as he had come into my room, he turned and left.

I had not said anything. I sensed my father’s awkwardness and the poignancy of his effort, but he was right. I didn’t really understand, any more than I could understand Suzuki Roshi when he spoke of enjoying his old age. Now, at sixty-four, I do understand and thank my father for his long-ago effort. The old understand the young better than the other way around. My father wanted to reach out across the gulf separating age from youth and tap me with the magic wand of this hard-won knowledge, but he couldn’t. He could only show me the two photographs and wish the best for me as I set off on the journey to adulthood. When Suzuki said “Everything changes,” he could just as easily have said “Everything ages.” That is what my father was trying to show me…

I was still in my twenties. I had come to a small Buddhist temple on a busy San Francisco street to hear a lecture by Shunryu Suzuki. At the time, Suzuki was in his sixties, and most of the people in the room were in their twenties and thirties. During the question-and-answer period, someone asked, “Why do we meditate?” Suzuki answered with a laugh, “So you can enjoy your old age.” We laughed with him. We thought he was joking. Now I realize that he was being honest. He had been ill the whole previous winter and was still coughing and wheezing months later. Physically he hadn’t been feeling well, and yet his whole demeanor radiated contentment. He was clearly enjoying his old age. I now think that Suzuki was actually letting us in on a great secret, one that the young cannot truly understand: It is possible to find enjoyment in the gift of each moment and each breath, even in the midst of difficulty. Suzuki died not long after that. It was only then, as details of his life came out, that we discovered how full of tragedy that life had been. And yet he did not show it or let it defeat him. He met what life handed him with kindness and a ready smile. His example has been a lifelong inspiration for me…”

Aging is an ideal time for the cultivation of the inner life: a time for spiritual practice. Why it should be so is captured in that image of the old Robert Graves that I still vividly remember. Graves’ white hair and lined face seemed to tell my father a story of loss, one that he was already experiencing in the disappointments of his own middle age. But I saw something else, something that made me want to open the book and read. The face of the old Robert Graves seemed to me to be the face of a wise person, one who knew something important. I wanted to know what that was and how he had gained it. As I turned the pages and followed Graves’ life story from youth to full adulthood and finally to old age, I caught an inkling of what it takes to live a rich and complete human life from start to finish. And now that I myself am closer to the end of my life than to the beginning of it, I realize that my reading of Graves’ story so long ago was the beginning of my study for this book…”

~ Lewis Richmond, Aging as a Spiritual Practice