Spirituality in the ThirdAge

ThirdAge: When you describe your spiritual path, do you call yourself a Buddhist?

Boorstein:
I am a Buddhist, and I am a Jew. People seem to think that it's not
possible to have two religious paths. My parents were Jewish. I live a
traditionally Jewish life. Twenty years ago, I was encouraged to go to
a Buddhist mindfulness retreat. I was very much inspired and changed
from having heard what the Buddha taught. When I say I'm a Buddhist, it
means, "inspired by the teachings of the Buddha and changed by the
practice of mindfulness."

ThirdAge: What is mindfulness? Is it like meditation?

Boorstein: It is. The practice of
mindfulness is the practice of paying attention in every moment of
one's day. It's the balanced recognition of the truth of the moment.
What's going on right now, how do I feel about it, what are the options
available to me, what will be the wisest course in terms of not
creating suffering for myself or other people?

Mindfulness is also a capacity of mind that everybody has. It
isn't a mantra or a visualization, it isn't about having a mind empty
of thoughts. It's one of those things that we need to remember rather
than learn how to do, which for me is really an important
differentiation. You needn't think, "Uh oh, I can't do this."

ThirdAge: People who are practicing mindfulness often concentrate on their breath. Why?

Boorstein: In the mindfulness classes I
teach, we sit quietly for 40 minutes, then we talk for another hour.
What people are doing when they are sitting quietly is trying to pay
attention moment to moment to their experience. The practice is to try
to stay awake and aware of the breath coming in and out of the body and
the sensations of the body.

ThirdAge: How do you see spirituality changing as we move into our older years?

Boorstein: I was 40 when I went to my first
retreat. Most people there were in their twenties. I had children their
age. I was self-conscious about being old. Now the average age of the
meditating community has gotten much older; I'm 60, and I think I am in
the middle now. There are people in the class who are 80, 90. We're
living longer. People are discovering, especially people struggling
with difficult losses in their lives, that there is some sense of
greater understanding, greater connectedness that they are missing.

We're
in that period of time when we start to lose friends and family, when
our children are growing up and living their own lives, often with
difficulty. One of the real pains of later adulthood is needing to say,
"My child whom I love and care about so much is having this difficulty
that I can't fix as I may have been able to when he or she was
younger." We try to be compassionate towards our children even though
they're not living the way we want them to, and we need to be
compassionate toward ourselves even though we can't give up wanting to
try to change them. People sometimes feel "I can't let go having it the
way I want so maybe this means I'm not spiritual because I can't let
go, because I can't say it's in God's hands or whatever. If I were
really a spiritual person, I could do that."

A fundamental truth of the relational life is that, when people
we care about are in pain, we suffer with them. We do a wonderful
service for ourselves if we have communities where we can tell each
other our pain, rather than saying, "I'm fine, I'm fine" and feeling
spiritually somehow inferior because we're suffering.

ThirdAge: As we get older, we often see
someone we love very dearly who is barely able to function and is
losing physical and often mental abilities. We hear them ask, "What
good am I? I just sit in this room all day." Would you comment on that
from a spiritual perspective, on how we can be helpful, and what will
help us if we lose our own ability to function?

Boorstein: We serve a purpose in people's
lives, no matter how limited we are. When we appreciate how relational
our lives are, it gets easier to get older. My father's second wife had
Alzheimer's quite seriously by the time she was 55. We used to go to a
mall together -- talk about spiritual things! We'd walk around and admire
the clothing and the colors, because you don't have to have a memory to
do that. You can go out to lunch with someone who doesn't have a memory
at all, because you're just having lunch. All I had to learn was how to
do just that moment, as if we hadn't met her before.

It
was good for my children, who were all late adolescents. We all took
turns being there for her. They learned how to relate in a fearless way
to what is an unusual situation. And they also learned about
compassionate response. Sometimes a person feels, "I'll be such a
burden on my family as this gets worse." And there were certainly ways
in which it was very painful and difficult, but also ways in which she
really taught us kindness and compassion.

Later, when my father was quite close to the end of his life, a
nurse burst into tears and said, "I'll miss him so much." She'd known
him only four weeks and in a very compromised situation. She didn't
know that he was a great linguist and a great scholar and a wonderful
storyteller and a great joke teller. I thought, "That's really
wonderful, if we have the capacity to fall in love with human beings
just because they are human beings, not based on their particular skill
or capacity." I learned from that story that the usefulness we serve is
that somebody could love us. That's a great use.

ThirdAge: Is there anything you want to add about ways that we as ThirdAgers can contribute to those around us?

Boorstein: I remember as a child that there
were downtimes in the culture. The stores were closed on Sundays. And
the rest of the week they closed at 5 o'clock in the afternoon. If you
needed something in the grocery, you waited until the next morning, or
you borrowed it from a neighbor. If you sent someone a letter, you had
to wait three days before they got it.

We don't have downtime anymore, and our organism isn't made for
that. Mindfulness is a Sabbath of the mind, a rest from the past and
the future. You can't knit in a hurry, you can't fish in a hurry, you
can't dance in a hurry, you can't make love in a hurry. There are
certain things one does to be present in that moment. Not to get over
it, just to do it.

This is one of the pieces of expertise that older folks might
teach the rest of the culture, because we know downtimes. We can say,
"Let's just go for a walk; let's just sit on the porch and talk." These
are the moments in which one becomes wise. You have to have a little
space to become wise. You don't become wise on the run.

Buddhist author Sylvia Boorstein says, "You have to have a little space to
become wise."