What Fifty Years of Practice Taught Me About Aging

I did not expect to be this old. That sounds strange, but I think it's true for a lot of people. When you're young, old age is an abstraction — something that happens to other people, in the future, in a way that doesn't quite apply to you.

And then one day you're in your seventies, and you're looking back at fifty years of Buddhist practice, and you're thinking: huh. So this is what it looks like.

Buddhism includes aging in the four fundamental sufferings — birth, aging, illness, and death. Not as a punishment or a failure, but as a fact. One of the things the practice has done for me is help me look at that fact honestly, without either minimizing it or catastrophizing it.

Aging is real. Things change. The body that carried you through your twenties and thirties and forties is not the same body you have now. Energy is different. Recovery is slower. The list of things you can no longer do grows, gradually, over time.

That's true. And it's also not the whole story.

Here's what nobody tells you about getting older: some things genuinely get better.

The capacity for patience. I was not a patient person in my thirties. I am considerably more patient now. Not because I've achieved some spiritual ideal, but because I've lived long enough to see that most of the things I was impatient about didn't matter as much as I thought.

The ability to distinguish what's important from what isn't. This is related to patience, but it's slightly different. When you're young, everything feels urgent. Everything feels like it matters. After fifty years, you develop a kind of triage — a sense of what actually deserves your energy and what doesn't.

The willingness to be wrong. I mentioned this in the post about family life, but it applies here too. Getting older, if you're paying attention, involves a lot of revising your previous positions. That's not comfortable, but it's growth.

Nichiren Buddhism doesn't treat aging as a problem to be solved. It treats it as a stage of life with its own particular opportunities and challenges.

One of the concepts I've found most useful is the idea of "winter always turns to spring." The teaching is that no matter how difficult the current season, transformation is always possible. Age is not a sentence. It's a chapter.

Daisaku Ikeda wrote beautifully about aging — about the dignity of a life fully lived, about the particular kind of wisdom that only comes from having been through things. He passed away in November 2023 at the age of 95, having spent decades writing and encouraging people around the world. That example still matters to me.

I want to be honest here: I haven't figured aging out. There are things about it that I still find genuinely difficult.

The losses. Friends who have died. Capacities that have diminished. The sense, sometimes, of time running out. These are real, and the practice doesn't make them not real.

What the practice does is give me a way to be with them. To sit with the grief without being consumed by it. To keep asking: what is the cause I'm setting right now? What am I doing with this moment?

That question doesn't get easier with age. But it gets more urgent. And urgency, I've found, is a form of clarity.

If I could go back and talk to the version of me who was just starting this practice, I'd say: the long game is real. The things you do consistently, over decades, compound in ways you can't predict from the beginning.

Keep chanting. Keep being honest. Keep showing up, even on the days when it feels like nothing is happening.

Something is always happening. You just can't always see it yet.

This post is adapted from themes in my book Fifty Years of Buddhist Practice, available to read free as a flipbook. No sign-up required. Also see Inspiring Videos — short videos on aging, illness, and thriving in later life.