Meditation and Growing Old and Gratitude

I started meditating about four years ago.  My friend Blanche Moss told me about a free 1/2-hour weekly class at the Hammer Museum in Westwood.  It's put on by the Mindful Awareness Research Center, part of the med school at UCLA.  Diana Winston leads most of the classes, but there are others as well.  Besides the class, I meditate at home, about three or four days a week, 1/2 hour at a time.

It's difficult to put into words the impact that this practice has had on me, difficult to describe.  But I believe it is real.  Of course, some or all of these changes might have taken place over these years without the meditation, but I doubt that.

When I was working, it would have been impossible for me to try to set aside a half-hour on any day to meditate.  I was just too busy with what I thought were the things in my life that I either had to do, or wanted to do.  First was work, at least eight hours per day, plus the commute.  Then all the other stuff of life as I lived it.  So, I feel grateful that I have lived into my retirement (almost eight years now) and found this practice, and been able to stay with it as much as I have.

In addition to just paying attention to the present moment (easier said than done), the leaders at the Hammer often emphasize other "qualities of the heart"; one is gratitude.  This has been very helpful for me.   I have witnessed other people expressing gratitude in their life and have felt envy of them, because I rarely felt it.

Now I frequently ask for it in my meditations and I sense it more than ever before (not a very high bar, in my case).  Gratitude for my life, my body, living as long as I have, my senses, my mind, Nadine, our home, our cat Ketsl (now gone), our children and grandchildren, our brothers and their families, cousins, friends (several gone now), my teachers, and the wonder and beauty of the world that we (temporarily) get to inhabit.  Also, gratitude for the many advantages I have been given in life, and the way that turns in my life, that seemed bad at the time, have worked out for the best.  And I feel gratitude that I have found gratitude.

As I think of this, I feel sorrow for friends whose lives have been cut short much too early in their lives.  Especially Peter Hawes, a Dartmouth classmate who I did not know well until later in Pasadena, and Tom Smith, a neighbor and friend in Newport Beach.  I imagine that they felt much joy in their lives, but I wish it could have lasted longer for them.  But I am grateful for having known them.