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DEEPER LESSONS

This practice helps us cultivate joy. The Buddhist term for joy is mudita. It means more than just appreciating what makes us feel good. It includes the happiness we feel in connection with other people’s joy and good fortune. This quality of joy is not hard to feel when the other people are those we love. For example, we can easily share our child’s happiness with a new toy. What happens, however, when someone we dislike or are jealous of is given something we want for ourselves, such as public acclaim or an award? Can we feel joy in their joy? This is not so easy.

Have you ever noticed how the mind focuses on what is wrong—wrong with us, with people around us, with our work, and with the world? Our mind is like a lawyer reading the contract for “my life,” always looking for flaws or contract violations. The mind is magnetically drawn to the negative. Just look at the news. What holds readers’ or viewers’ attention is natural or man-made disasters, wars, fires, shootings, bombings, recall of potentially dangerous toys or cars, epidemics, and scandal. Why is our mind attracted to the negative? It’s because the mind doesn’t have to be worried about the positive things that might happen. If good things come to pass, well, that’s wonderful, but the mind quickly puts these aside. The mind’s concern is protecting us from the negative, the dangerous.

Unfortunately, this means that negativity begins to color our awareness, often without our even knowing it. If we aren’t aware of this subtle downbeat bent of our mind, it can grow unnoticed, leading to dark states of mind such as fear and depression. To counteract this tendency, to turn away from the mental habit of subtle negativity, to become more content with the life we are living, we need the antidote of mudita.

Final Words: Maezumi Roshi always admonished us, “Appreciate your life!” (He meant both our everyday life and our One Great Life. They are not separate.)

40

Signs of Aging

The Exercise: This week, bring your attention to signs of aging in yourself, in other people, in animals and plants, and even in inanimate objects. How do we know something is aging?

REMINDING YOURSELF

Post the word “Aging” or pictures of an old person in relevant places, particularly on the bathroom mirror.

DISCOVERIES

This exercise generates a lot of insights and lively discussion at our monastery. When we pay attention, we see signs of aging everywhere. Fruit rots, flower petals wither and fall, buildings sag, cars rust. After about age thirty, young people report being dismayed that their body does not perform as well or heal as fast as it did when they were younger. I remember twisting my ankle and still feeling twinges and instability there a month later. I was indignant. Why wasn’t my body doing what my mind wanted it to do, as it always had before? I still expected pain to disappear overnight, as it had in my teens.

A thirty-year-old reported that he didn’t like being called a “man.” His mind said, “No, my father’s a man, not me.” He didn’t like noticing a few gray hairs. Many young people admitted resistance to “growing up” and assuming any degree of responsibility for this complex, fast-moving world. The choices seem bewilderingly endless, and the possibility of actually making a positive difference seems slim.

At about age forty, people realize that their life is at least half over. They might take stock and ask, “What unfinished tasks do I want to accomplish while I still have power in this mind and body? What dreams do I want to throw overboard?” After about age fifty, many people report that they look in the mirror and are surprised to see their parent or even grandparent staring back at them. How did I get so old? They are startled to look down and see wrinkles on their hands. (They appeared while I wasn’t looking!) Or they are dismayed when they can’t open a stuck jar lid or they “hit the wall” (of fatigue) hours earlier in the evening.

One woman in her seventies said she avoided looking in the mirror because