If we’re sensitive to it, aging prepares us for death.
Growing old and falling apart is nature’s way of teaching us how to release our obsession with form.
It’s humiliating. Old age, sickness, and death are the ultimate insults to your ego, but the best compliments to your spirit.
Even before we enter the actual stages of dying, our body, and even our mind, starts to let go as we age.
We lose our hair, our teeth, our vision, hearing, mobility, flexibility, endurance, memory, and countless other physical and mental aspects of our form.
We lose control, productivity, independence, security, dreams for the future, and even meaning.
Aging is a preliminary practice (Tibetan: ngöndro) for the letting go that is forced upon us at death.
(Source: Holecek, Andrew. Preparing to Die (p. 72). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.)
