How to Grow Young
We all hope to grow old slowly, and we do have some choice in the matter. The biological age of a smoking, drinking couch-potato could easily be 10 or 20 years older than his ‘real’ age. Conversely, a middle-aged athlete can feel, look and actually be a decade younger than his years.
Yet whether they age quickly or slowly, both the athlete and the couch potato are still getting older. Is it possible, on the other hand, to actually stop the ageing process and even turn it back? Can we become younger again in body, or in spirit, or in both? If, as well as getting older, we are also suffering from illness or depression or a major loss, will we ever feel young at heart again?
We know that it is possible. We see TV programs like The Biggest Loser, where big, blobby people lose a quarter of their bodyweight and train to become superfit over a few months. They become years younger in a biological sense. Those people are effectively reborn. They are in a position to start their life anew and, as viewers, we hope they do so. If they can, we feel that we can too.
Similarly, the newspapers avidly search out and give us the latest heart-warming ‘Triumph over Adversity’ story. We love them because of their archetypal quality. They remind us that, beneath our daily discontents, we have a primal will-to-live that can fight back against any catastrophe. We see it in the tearful resolution of Iraqi and Lebanese parents, their towns and lives carelessly ruined by Western politicians. We see it in the stroppy defiance of little girls and boys, who are willing to take on the world.
Unfortunately, that will-to-live lies dormant in most of us. Short of a disaster to trigger it off, we tend to grow older and sicker and sadder with the years, by infinitesimal fractions. We may know what we need to do to be young again, but it is hard to awaken the passion until we are forced to it. We may see ourselves heading for a stroke or burnout or diabetes or some frightful illness, but it is so hard to get off the train before it crashes.
There is no mystery about making the body young. It usually comes down to weight loss and exercise. The only mystery is why we find it so hard to do, and why so many people put their hope in miracle diets instead. Weight loss, for example, is all about ‘calories in, calories out’ regardless of the diet. If you eat more calories than you burn, you put on weight and vice versa. We can extend the life of laboratory rats by a third (i.e. 20 years for humans!), and improve their health, just by drastically reducing their calorie intake. There’s nothing complicated about this.
Of course, we still need to eat well and to exercise. As we age we lose muscle and lung capacity. We reverse ageing if we increase our percentage of lean muscle mass, and increase our lung capacity. If you can breathe deeply for just a few minutes each day while you walk, the results can be astonishing.
Simple as weight loss, exercise and breathing are, people usually have to wait for the train crash before they see the light. Hence the amazing comments you often hear: ‘My illness (or marriage breakdown or bankruptcy) was the best thing that ever happened to me’. Or ‘my cancer was my greatest teacher’.
All this seems natural, even inevitable. The yin has to go to the limits before the yang returns. Many famous thinkers – The Buddha, Osho, Nietzche, for example – went through intense depression before their illumination. St John of the Cross had to pass through the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ on his way to God. In Zen there is a saying that ‘the deeper the anguish and confusion, the greater the awakening.’ As Neil Young puts it: ‘They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn.’ And we could add: no darkness, no dawn.
We can always make little improvements to our lives, but rejuvenation is altogether a different matter. If we’re smart and determined, we can pre-empt the train crash. To do so, we have to attend to the mind and soul as well as the body.
As any gardener knows, renewal starts with the knife. What can you cut out of your life to give yourself time and space to recover and reflect? To revive an ageing fruit tree, you first prune out the deadwood and the decay. You even cut out the healthy, living branches whose growth is excessive or unbalanced. A gardener will tend to chop everything back at least half, in a way that seems savage to a non-gardener. Of course, an overpruned tree can die, but timid pruning won’t work either.
Spring cleaning is a human way of cutting out deadwood. We throw out the books and magazines we’ll never read again, the clothes we won’t wear, the important papers that are no longer important, the electrical gadgets and decorative items that we never liked.
We can reclaim our time by pruning out certain activities. How much do we really need to watch television, ‘to stay informed’ about the latest twitch on John Howard’s nose, or to keep up with the gossip in Hollywood or in the family? We are often suffocated by Himalayas of trivia.
To give yourself time to recover and repair, you may have to work less. You can’t busily hurry towards a new life, and avoid paying the price. If your future is mortgaged to the bank, or to your hopes for wealth or retirement, you’re bound to grow old fast. It is much healthier to be time rich and cash poor than vice versa.
It’s also important to prune out those people who are deadwood in your life. It is amazing how much of your energy they can drain away, for no benefit to anyone. You can bring light and space into your life by shedding the useless friends and troublesome relatives and unnecessary acquaintances, as much as you can. The price of being polite and sociable can be very high. For many people, their lives starts anew when they leave behind the single bad friend, relative or spouse that is killing them.
The great hermits know the profound value of being anti-social and solitary. If you want the gods to talk to you, you need to stop talking to others for a while. Yet you don’t need to become a monk or live in an Indian ashram. The quality of your inner silence is more important than the outer environment. In reality, you can be mentally alone any time you are physically alone, if you know how. So can you be ‘alone’ as you walk to the shops, or do all your family and acquaintances mentally come with you?
Of course, many people have solitude, a simple life and time to think but they can still feel old and worn. The real problem lies deeper. As William Empson said:
“It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
. . . . . From partial fires,
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.”
Even if we are happy with our lives, the inevitable losses, disappointments and regrets leave a residue behind. We never start each day afresh. Consciously and unconsciously we replay the past, dragging a semi-trailer of half-digested cogitations behind us. And we wonder why we feel so tired.
To fully regenerate, we can't just try harder and do more good things. Renewal is more a matter of looking back, rather than pushing on. We need to unearth the buried waste, bring it into the full light of consciousness, and gradually dissolve its negative impact on us. This is the subtle, inner work that therapy, meditation and self-awareness attempt to address.
In this process, you may get an unexpected insight. You don’t need to make your life new, because it is always new anyway. This moment in time, with its particular complex of sensations, thought and emotions is unique, and will never come again, just like this. If we can clear the debris of the past, and tone down our worries for the future, we really see the present with something like the eyes of a little child again.
Our undigested memories make us older than we need to be. In Japan I saw ancient cherry trees propped up with crutches to stop them collapsing. Old as they were, the spring blossoms that emerged from those geriatric trees were as fresh and lovely and innocent as they had ever been. We can be young at heart at any age if we see that present is always young.
To summarise, here are some suggestions.
Lose excess weight. All of it, if possible.
Increase muscle mass. Stretch the body.
Breathe to your full capacity for at least a few minutes a day.
Ruthlessly prune out the dead wood.
Spring clean all year round.
Avoid vexatious people as much as possible.
Give up the activities that waste time or exhaust you.
Give yourself time and space to reflect and feel.
See and disarm the detritus of the past.
Put the future in its place.
Listen to your inner voice.
And love the moment. It’s all you’ve got.