As I look back, I think of my own grandmother, who made some of the biggest adjustments I ever saw a human being make. I came to the conclusion that she was able to make them partly because, with advancing age, you accept the blows of life more philosophically. In fact, you accept life, which is perhaps nature’s way of preparing you to accept death. It seems to me that when people grow old, death gradually becomes part of the natural scheme of life. Death is unnatural when it comes to the young, but with age it is normal and inevitable and, like everything else that has been inevitable in life, becomes easier to accept.

All this is a natural part of the aging process, in which you find yourself with less to do and more opportunities to eat your guts out regretting everything you have done.

As we grow old...the beauty steals inward.

Deep healing and emotional maturity begins when you turn your attention inward.

We might at first label the body’s simple need to focus inward depression. But as we practice going inward, we come to realize that much of it is not depression in the least; it is a cry for something else, often the physical body’s simple need for rest, for contemplation, and for a kind of forgotten courage, one difficult to hear, demanding not a raise, but another life.

Growing old can mean more than slowing down; it can be a time of truly growing down and incarnating further. Because the inner genius that tries to incarnate through us will keep calling for us to awaken further until we come to the end of our life adventure.

Deep healing and emotional maturity begin when you turn your attention inward. The ability to see yourself as you move through the ups and downs of life, without running away or suppressing your feelings, enhances your understanding of yourself.

Death seems simply to be a return to that unknown inwardness out of which we were born...the truly inward source of one's life was never born...Outwardly I am one apple among many. Inwardly I am the tree.

Spiritual practices help us move from identifying with the ego to identifying with the soul. Old age does that for you too. It spiritualizes people naturally.

Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive, that you understand going to die, and you live a better life because of it.

But old age, to begin with, has something in common with death. Some face it with indifference, not because they have more courage than others, but because they have less imagination.

We also notice, at the other end, how the shadows of old age are lit more and more from the invisible world.

Since mentally healthy human beings must grow, and since giving up or loss of the old self is an integral part of the process of mental and spiritual growth, depression is a normal and basically healthy phenomenon. It becomes abnormal or unhealthy only when something interferes with the giving-up process, with the result that the depression is prolonged and cannot be resolved by completion of the

As I give thought to the matter, I find four causes for the apparent misery of old age; first it withdraws us from active accomplishments; second, it renders the body less powerful; third, it deprives us of almost all forms of enjoyment; fourth, it stands not far from death.