There’s no aging. There’s just this moment. There’s no future. There’s no past. There’s no “I was young, and now I’m old.” This is all comparison. This is all an illusion. This is all the symptom of a mind that can’t focus on reality and is always comparing this to the past, my life to someone else’s who’s better.

Be grateful for this moment as it is. Don’t worry about some other moment. Don’t compare it. Just make this moment the best moment it can be, the most peaceful, joyful, grateful, full of love, and your future will take care of itself.

There are only two ways you can age: 

1. hating it or 
2. loving it. 

If you have anxiety about it, if you’re afraid of it, if you’re worried about it, if you’re fighting it with all your might, it’s going to be difficult.

If you embrace it, if you love it, if you have fun with it, if you can make jokes about it and make it the best aging way you possibly can, you’re going to love it.

Can Aging Be the Happiest Time of Your Life?

Aging can be the happiest time of your life. If you nurture your capacity for happiness every single day, every day, you can be happier than the previous day.

If you keep running away from yourself and chasing happiness in things, pleasures, experiences, or personal beauty and youth, you will get more and more miserable every single day.

So many supermodels are self-conscious, full of anxiety, full of stress, full of depression. They can’t stand it. There’s nothing connected to happiness in youth and beauty, often quite the opposite.

You don’t have to be obsessed with whatever the world tells you you should be obsessed about. You don’t have to value the things that other people say are important.

Youth and beauty don’t make you happy. They don’t keep you warm at night. They don’t hug you back. They oftentimes make us so attached to something that gives us a feeling of superiority and pride that, when it is gone, we suffer immensely.

What Do Wrinkles Really Mean?

There’s nothing ugly about a wrinkle, except that someone said it is in an advertisement to sell us cream.

We could look at every new wrinkle as, “Oh, there’s more wisdom. There’s extra strength.”

What you are is so much deeper than this constantly changing body. It is the eternal, ever-present, unchanging consciousness. It is not of this physical dimension. It is not subject to the laws of space-time.

It is that deepest sense of yourself that perceives the mind and body, which creates an illusory sense of self. Someone who feels like their sense of self is disappearing with every wrinkle is actually getting closer to the spiritual truth and realization that they were not their youth or their looks or people complimenting them and being proud of having a pretty body that they didn’t create.

You are not your body. You are not your brain, which is your body. So you’re not your thoughts, you’re not your emotions. These are just the things you witness, and it’s a false sense of self. It does not exist in reality.

It is a biological process, the briefest flicker of a life form, a bunch of molecules recycled into a human being for the blink of the cosmic eye.

If you think that is you, then life is meaningless. Life is horrible. Life is terrifying. And, you know, we’re all going to die.

If you realize that those molecules will continue existing, that consciousness continues existing, that this universe will go on and will exist for eternity in some form, then there’s no death. There is no fear. There’s no attachment to something that appeared in a mirror for a short time.

Why Are We Afraid of Aging?

Our fear of aging is a mix of many things. It’s the fear of pain, disablement. We live in a society that idolizes and worships beauty and youth and equates the two.

And that is one of the biggest fallacies we all believe, that there is only beauty in youth. Because what is more beautiful than the wisdom of a person who’s lived, the experience, the strength one develops, the often, hopefully, compassion and nurturing tendency that we develop as we get older and take care of the next generations of living souls?

There are a lot of beauty products, a lot of money to be made in keeping us anxious, depressed, stressed about wrinkles and gray hair. And that is part of the trick that we don’t have to fall for.

If you are obsessing about aging and death, if you cannot stop thinking about it, and it’s making you sad, and you’re worried about pain that’ll come and losing all your friends and loved ones, what you have to realize is that you are living in a mental story.

It is all a mental story. There’s not even anything wrong with pain. There’s not even anything wrong with loss. These are illusions that we fall for because we think there’s an objective truth in this world.

Pain is nothing to fear. Illness is nothing to fear, and loss is nothing to fear. Loss is proof that you loved something or someone. Illness is proof that you had life and knew health and well-being. And pain is just proof you’re alive, and you have feelings.

It’s all fine. It may be uncomfortable. It may be undesirable, but it is not bad.

What is Really Causing Suffering?

If you are afraid of death, afraid of getting older, if you don’t want to live long because of disability and invisibility, all of your suffering stems from the same problem.

It doesn’t matter if you’re fixated on aging and dying or loneliness or financial worries or some mean person in your life or politics; you are not loving life. You are comparing something to something else: old age to youth, rich to poor.

These things do not prevent anyone from being happy. They are just the object of focus for an unhappy person.

Any human can be happy in any situation, and they can be unhappy in any situation. It has nothing to do with any aspect of our life.

The trick of the mind is to blame something else: the universe is bad, life isn’t worth it. These are not the real truth. The truth is, you are not open to loving this universe, loving each other, and you would rather hate and resist what is reality.

You don’t have to change reality. You have to change your relationship to it.

What Does Aging Gracefully Mean?

To me, aging gracefully is about becoming more loving, more nurturing, and more confident and comfortable in your own skin than when you were a young person, figuring out who you are.

It is very cool, as you get older, to understand more about yourself and to have that kind of real confidence that comes from being unapologetically yourself.

Can Spirituality Prepare You for Aging?

I wouldn’t want to age without spirituality. I feel like spirituality prepares you for aging.

That practice of sitting on a meditation pillow or sitting in a chair and meditating is like embracing what old age will be like and breaking through that impatience, that frustration, that discomfort and difficulty with stillness and quiet, and finding the peace and joy in simply existing.

If you have practiced the art of being, the art of being happy without any need for external situations, excitement, pleasures, luxury, companionship, then you are going to love every second of your life and every second of old age.

Is Time Really Slipping Away?

How do we deal with the thought that time is slipping away? Only if you compare this moment to all of the moments in the past and all the potential moments in the future.

Time is not a bank account that you’re running low on. You don’t own any of it. You are not promised one more moment.

All your job is to make this moment the best moment it can be. That’s it.