Throughout my adult life, I’d always been convinced that being old was the most dreadful condition of the human experience. It was not until I crossed the mid-century milestone that I realized I was wrong. Neither old age nor even death is the primary culprit of people’s worries and fears: it is the gradual transformation of the aging process itself that frighten us the most.
The moment I became aware that in the fretful fast-paced tour of terror of the aging process lies the source of mature adults’ anxieties, I embarked on a journey of self-discovery determined to find out how to master the art of aging without succumbing to self-defeating fear of the inevitable. Would it be possible to become self-empowered while the body weakens piecemeal? Could I harness inner strength in the process of increasing physical deterioration, changes in social functions, and a multitude of losses that are intrinsic to aging? After spending an excessive amount of time and energy trying to ferret out the answers to these questions through intellectual investigation and complex gerontological theories, I finally found what I was looking for in the extraordinary simplicity of Zen.
Suddenly, I started seeing both the world and myself from a different perspective, while experiencing life immersed in a mindful state that abrogated my anxieties and fears. Neither a religion nor a philosophy in a scholastic sense, Zen is but a way of liberation from the shackles of the fear of the unknown, which is the crux of the anxiety of aging. I realized that allowing the burglar of fear to infiltrate my mind to steal the quality of my life is like committing a crime against the self. I would not let fear, this cunning thief of peace, get away with the most precious commodity of my life: my time. I would not longer submit myself to the demeaning status of senior citizen. Instead, I was determined to rise above it and become a self-empowered ZENior CitiZEN.
ZENior CitiZEN: Mastering the Art of Aging reveals my transformational process–and how you can do it, too.
