12.08.2023 Face to Face With Our Aging Selves   We’re all getting older — but some of us appear to be aging a lot faster than others these days.     That’s all thanks to Tik Tok’s new “Time Travel” filter, which — despite its ability to make some users cry as they watch the lines on their face deepen and their hair go gray before their eyes — has become the latest TikTok craze. As the Washington Post tells us, the app had already racked up 1.4 million shares by Thursday.      Reactions are decidedly mixed: “I hated it. I looked all worn out,” reports a seventeen-year-old. But there is value in looking into the notional future: by reckoning with our reality, we might just come to terms with it. The app gave one youngish user “a new perspective”; after using it with her partner, she could “imagine the relationship lasting into their old age.”   Such new perspective is where Buddhists, and Buddhist wisdom, are way ahead of trend. Helping us reconcile ourselves with aging, illness, and death — in short, impermanence — is one of the things the dharma has always done, and so potently.      So this Lion’s Roar Weekend Reader presents three articles that do just that. As with the Time Travel filter, you might begin to perceive yourself differently. May that be so, and may you be pleased by what you see.      — Rod Meade Sperry, Editor, Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Guide Aging: Everybody’s Doing It Susan Moon on the benefits of growing old, and why we should embrace aging. What a miracle that my body is still here, that my heart is still beating away after all this time. Come to think of it, I wonder how many beats my heart has beaten so far. I do a little calculation, multiplying my pulse rate per minute, by hours, days, years. I come up with a number a little over one billion, give or take a hundred million. Wow! Thank you, heart. ADVERTISEMENT Touch of Grey   There is a sacred dimension to growing old. In the face of aging and dying, says Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle, we can call upon practice to sustain and inspire us.   In today’s Western culture, we face many challenges to honoring the inner life, to shifting down from a fast-paced, accomplishment-oriented lifestyle to a more contemplative interiority and time for practice. We may not realize the extent to which we’ve been conditioned by the Western model, subtly driven by the compulsion of doing over being — a subtle addiction in itself.   The Wisdom of Aging with Grace Even though we might try to accept the fact of aging, many of us dread getting older. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn to age gracefully. And what if the aging process naturally leads to insight and wisdom? Here, Sam Mowe and Jane Kolleeny explore these ideas with Zen teacher and writer Norman Fischer.   Even though your body is aging there is something else that doesn’t age at all: the life force. As long as you are alive there is a steady force of life in you. You may have more physical and intellectual strength at 20 than you have at 70, but you are equally alive at 70. Your appreciation of the fact of being alive doesn’t diminish. But when you are 20 you are so wrapped up in your problems you don’t notice this fact of being alive. You take it for granted. At 70, you notice, and are more grateful.   LION’S ROAR PROMOTION