What Makes My Life Good?

My hair is thinning.

It probably started a couple of years ago but has taken me until just recently to finally accept. As a young adult I would alter my hair length seasonally: on the first day of spring I would buzz it and keep it short until the first day of autumn, when I would allow it to grow out over the colder months. I’ve been thinking it might be time for something similar again but the thought of it never growing back has given me pause.

What’s most surprising to me isn’t that my hair is thinning, but my response to it. Rather, my denial of it for so long. One of the reasons for shaving my head seasonally was to both acknowledge and embody the impermanence of things while also renouncing concerns with my physical appearance. But it’s one thing to do this when your hair will grow back, quite another when it might not.

It was of course much easier to accept and appreciate the impermanent nature of things when I was in control. Renouncing my preoccupation with my appearance was easy because my decision was easily reversible—stop shaving my head and my hair would grow back, thick and curly. Now though, it’s much more difficult to embrace impermanence when the situation is (likely) permanent.

Prelude to Death

I do wish that I were more carefree and unconcerned with the process of aging. But the responsibilities I have, among them caring for my disabled brother, make me much more anxious about getting older than I otherwise would be. Caring for him is already challenging enough and hastening my physical decline more than I want to admit, but how much harder will it be to care for him as I myself become less able?

My thinning hair is, from one perspective, a fairly trivial matter. But accepting that reality makes me also think about less trivial things. Things like the process of aging and our assumptions about it, the transformations we undergo throughout our lives, and our contingent and dependent nature.

Like many people, my preconceived and unexamined notion of aging is that it is a gradual and relatively even decline in ability, beginning sometime in middle age, losing things we once had but never gaining anything in return. Viewed this way aging becomes merely a prelude to death, an indication that youth, growth, and life itself is behind us.

While aging certainly involves not insignificant losses, maybe there is another way to view the process of getting older. Not as the beginning of the end but as a series of transformations that we are always in the middle of.

What Would I Have To Resent?

In chapter 6 of the Zhuangzi there is a story about four friends that immediately came to mind when thinking about life, death, and the aging in between.

Master Ssu, Master Yu, Master Li, and Master Lai were all four talking together. “Who can look upon nonbeing as his head, on life as his back, and on death as his rump?” they said. “Who knows that life and death, existence and annihilation, are all a single body? I will be his friend!”

The four men looked at each other and smiled. There was no disagreement in their hearts and so the four of them became friends.

All at once Master Yu fell ill. Master Ssu went to ask how he was. “Amazing” said Master Yu. “The Creator is making me all crookedy like this! My back sticks up like a hunchback and my vital organs are on top of me. My chin is hidden in my navel, my shoulders are up above my head, and my pigtail points at the sky. It must be some dislocation of the yin and yang!”

Yet he seemed calm at heart and unconcerned. Dragging himself haltingly to the well, he looked at his reflection and said, “My, my! So the Creator is making me all crookedy like this!”

“Do you resent it?” asked Master Ssu.

“Why no, what would I resent? If the process continues, perhaps in time he’ll transform my left arm into a rooster. In that case I’ll keep watch on the night. Or perhaps in time he’ll transform my right arm into a crossbow pellet and I’ll shoot down an owl for roasting. Or perhaps in time he’ll transform my buttocks into cartwheels. Then, with my spirit for a horse, I’ll climb up and go for a ride. What need will I ever have for a carriage again?

“I received life because the time had come; I will lose it because the order of things passes on. Be content with this time and dwell in this order and then neither sorrow nor joy can touch you. In ancient times this was called the ‘freeing of the bound.’ There are those who cannot free themselves, because they are bound by things. But nothing can ever win against Heaven—that’s the way it’s always been. What would I have to resent?”

Zhuangzi, Watson trans.

Here (and elsewhere), the Zhuangzi offers a view of life and death as a series of transformations. Seen this way, aging then becomes simply one way of grouping those transformations—the ones that occur in the later part of our lives. The transformations we experience don’t begin with our birth and peter out by the time of our death and they aren’t more frequent in the beginning of our lives and less frequent at the end of them: they are ongoing and never ending.

In this view the process of aging is not unlike adolescence or early childhood, other periods of rapid change when our transformation is most apparent to ourselves and others. One day you don’t have any hair, then suddenly you have a lot of hair, and then eventually you lose it again. But it’s the privileging of just one transformation over the others that is problematic. It is what strengthens the idea that aging is merely a loss of ability and a slow march to death, and it builds resentment towards the transformations that do occur later in life.

Unlike our cultural tendency to privilege the transformations of youth, Master Yu accepts and embraces the natural transformations of his aging body. His humorous musings about what he will be transformed into next plus his comment about having nothing to resent suggests a radical and capacious view of life and its processes: the transformations that occur in the process of aging not only engender more transformations, they are constitutive of life itself; aging—which is to say transforming—is life.

Daoing New Daos

Although Master Yu refers to the “Creator” that is making him all “crookedy,” that translation can be a bit misleading. It is important to note that despite the language choice by this translator, interpreting “Creator” to refer to purposive and intentional agent—like a god—is not the best way to conceive of it.

The Chinese characters translated “Creator” by Watson are zao wu zhe 造物者. In his own translation, Brook Ziporyn points out that later in the story this phrase and its implications itself transforms. The phrases zao hua 造化 (“the Process of Creation-Transformation”) and zao hua zhe 造化者 (“Creation-Transformation”) are used later in the story to refer to both the source of transformation and Transformation as that which creates.

The important point is this last one: Master Yu is suggesting that he is participating, through transformation-as-aging, in the process of creation itself. As Ziporyn puts it:

The Dao is the ceaseless generation of new perspectives. It is the purposeless production of purposes.

In other words, the dao endlessly creates new daos, churning out new ways of being in the world, new ways of perceiving, new courses to follow—new ways of daoing. Aging is the process of transformation which is itself the process of daoing/creation. So what is there to resent?

Aging Is Life

There is a natural anxiety that comes from the realization that you can no longer do things with as much ease as you were once able to. It’s even more natural to be worried about your ability to care for others when you are increasingly unable to care for yourself. But my resistance to the reality of my situation—not just my thinning hair, but all the other ways in which my increasing age has made itself known—turns out to be a resistance to the source of life and transformation itself.

From one view, the process of aging is a prelude to death. This view limits the creative transformations that are constitutive of life and fosters resentment and denial. An alternative view sees the processes of aging as a symphony of endless transformation. Aging is life itself in this view.

If, as the Zhuangzi suggests, the Course produces endless courses, then anything that resists that process, the process of transformation, is resisting life. By denying the reality of my aging body, and more specifically seeing it as a sign of death rather than life, I’m actually hastening my own demise and cutting myself off from the source of life, creation, and transformation. Accepting and embracing my aging body and its endless transformations nourishes and cultivates life.

Immediately after Master Yu finishes speaking in the story above, Master Lai becomes ill. In response he says:

What makes my life good is what makes my death good; that I consider my life good is what makes me consider my death good.

Zhuangzi, Ziporyn trans.

In the same way, what makes my growing good is what makes my aging good; that I consider my growing good is what makes me consider my aging good.