Alan Watts once said, "Now I’m a grandfather, and so I am no longer in awe of grandfathers." If I liked this 20 years ago, when I first heard it, today it teases a secret I feel obligated to share with my young brothers and sisters.
Old people like to say we've gained wisdom. We have better judgment; a longer view. Our superior familiarity has brought us perception and patience. We're slower to inflame, whether with anger or passion.
But the truth is, we're just tired.
Reviewing my twenties, I'm astonished by the heat of my prejudices, my penchant for assigning the role of villain to so many in my environment, my disrespectful impatience.
But I also remember how instinctively willing I was to break eggs, confront hypocrisy, power over and through impediments. Get crap done.
That irritated authority. And that brought pain. And, in surprisingly short order, that produced dread.
Eventually I slipped into idle middle-aged cowardice. AKA that "philosophical perspective" old people are so proud of.
Which is why humanity remains mired to the shoulders in solvable problems. Because our seniority gave us the power to hamstring those younger, and our terror of consequences, the motivation.
So now old people peeve me a lot more than they did before I was one. In my youth I took it for granted that their self-vaunted wisdom must be grounded at a least a little in reality.
And it is, a little.
But mostly it's just self-serving fear and laziness.
Let us meditate upon this uncomfortable truth:
When age brings humility, that's probably wisdom.
When it brings self-satisfaction, that's probably a learning disability.
Old age is an excellent time to practice don't-know-mind. You know, that thing we seldom embrace in our rhetoric and voting record. Because our task is to accept that we had our chance, and that the courage, vision, determination, and primal strength of the young is what we need now. Their willingness to rise to a challenge, even if they get a few things wrong. Even if – nightmare of senescence – they incur some personal damage.
This is their evolutionary role, their responsibility, their crucial contribution. Worry not, unproductive ones: they too will stumble into their day of wan platitudes; their age of weary wisdom.
But for now, they must bring – and we must honour – the dauntless insight of their youth.
Because someone has to actually do something around here.
(Classic meme courtesy of Alex Leo and Wikimedia Commons.)
"I am become Time, the destroyer of worlds."
Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita
(A variant Hindu translation of the Oppenheimer quotation more famous in the West.)
(Photo courtesy of Robert Couse-Baker and Wikimedia Commons.)
(The age of this robin's nest, blown out of the tree in a recent windstorm, can be estimated by the strand of baling twine incorporated in its construction. It's been at least 2 decades, maybe more, since the area where I found it was agricultural.)
Appearing also on My Corner of the World.
Insight from a sangha-mate on Mastodon (appropriately enough):
One of the most important ideas to sit with – amid the convulsion of climate change – is that Earth was not made for us.
That idea flies against many religions, but also appears in secular settings, with even activists thinking of Earth as a sort of organic machine, a spaceship, a system that’s carefully balanced in absolute ways.
Those metaphors have power, but they’re ultimately unhelpful. Our place here is precarious because we don’t 'belong' in any cosmic sense.
We’re just here.
(Photo of a well-worn dinosaur path in Colorado courtesy of James St. John and Wikimedia Commons.)
(For my money, the American robin [Turdus migatorius]
has the most beautiful eggs in the woods, and we often find large pieces of their intensely blue shells discarded on the ground after a successful hatching. Sadly, that's not the case with this one, as something has chiseled a hole in it and sucked out the contents. Squirrel is my guess, though other suspects include crows, Steller's jays, or even rats. A greater expert than I could no doubt finger the miscreant by the size and shape of the perforation.)
Appearing also on
My Corner of the World.
As non-Vajrayana Western converts to Buddhism will tell you, we have a slightly awkward relationship with Tibet. Not that we have any real bone to pick with our Tantric brothers and sisters. It's mostly just a difference of style. Practice models in the three other common convert denominations – Zen, Vipassana, Theravada – are pretty stripped-down, with Zen probably being the most "gorgeous" of the very Puritan lot. Tibetan forms, meanwhile, are downright High Church.
More prosaic is the simple fact that the Dalai Lama is the only Buddhist most Westerners can name, and since our media regularly imply that he's the "boss of Buddhism", we're all generally believed to owe him fealty. Thus, non-Buddhists are often surprised to learn that I don't really follow the guy's news – he's fine as far as august spiritual figures go, but carries no greater weight with me than the Pope or other sincere religious celebrities.
Similarly, Tibetan Buddhist stereotypes often pass for Buddhist, full stop. Yet I rarely chant "om"; I don't own a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead; my Zen teaching embraces transmigration (which I don't necessarily buy, either) rather than reincarnation; and therefore we don't believe past masters can inhabit children.
All of which to say, non-Tantric Neo-Buddhists tend to know fairly little about that tradition or its teachings.
So I was grateful when a fellow Mastodonian shared a particularly provocative passage from Tilopa, an Indian sage whose wisdom looms large in Tibet. Upon further exploration I learned that the posted lines are actually the heart statement of the great Tantra master's programme.
The interpretation presented can be traced to Alan Watts, and reads as follows:
No thought, no reflection, no analysis,
No cultivation, no intention;
Let it settle itself.
Certainly a Zen-friendly sentiment, in that we-say-these-things-a-lot-but-never-do-them kind of way. And other translations found elsewhere enrich the context:
Don’t recall.
Don’t imagine.
Don’t think.
Don’t examine.
Don’t control.
Rest.
A bit more Soto in flavour than Watts' Rinzai-esque lines, perhaps, consisting of nuts and bolts exhortations ("act this way") rather than a self-absent explication of phenomena. But taken together – as is usually the case with these two schools of Japanese Zen – they bring greater insight.
And finally, this fraternal take:
Let go of what has passed.
Let go of what may come.
Let go of what is happening now.
Don’t try to figure anything out.
Don’t try to make anything happen.
Relax, right now, and rest.
(Both of the non-Watts translations quoted here are the work of Tibetan Buddhism teacher Ken Mcleod.)
So I'm paying this forward, as a particularly valuable meditation for Zenners, regardless of source.
Because it's not just good stuff, it's Zen stuff. And also good Zen stuff.
(Tableau of Tilopa courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
(Encountered this cedar while walking along the bay a few weeks ago. The distinctive scar is symptomatic of bark collecting by local indigenous persons in search of raw material for making baskets, clothing, and other practical items. And this time, if you look closely, you'll also see that someone has sketched a rough cartoon of an aboriginal man in charcoal on the debarked surface. Perhaps a portrait of the bark-harvester himself?
I've happened upon cedars like this in remote places since I was a kid. Always gives me a certain satisfaction to know that the First Nations are still out there, still being themselves, in the face of everything.)
Appearing also on My Corner of the World.
Alan Watts once said, "Now I’m a grandfather, and so I am no longer in awe of grandfathers." If I liked this 20 years ago, when I first heard it, today it teases a secret I feel obligated to share with my young brothers and sisters.
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