Fear Of Old Age (The Guidelines of Vedanta)

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Vedanta maintains that sorrowing over old age does not make it any better. To deny it is artificial, and attempts to escape it are futile. Vedanta asks us to wake up to this reality and face it, and gives the following guidelines:

Make Old Age a Part of Life.

Old age is one of the natural phases of life. Yet many elderly people continue to imitate the ways of younger people. As Carl Jung so rightly said: 'For the most part our old people try to compete with the young. In the United States it is almost an ideal for the father to be the brother of his sons, and for the mother it is possible to be the younger sister of her daughter." Those who want to avoid old age must be ready to die young. Those who try to forget it will be taken by surprise when it comes. Acceptance of the fact and preparing for it beforehand is the wisest counsel. The realities of life are not tailored to our wishful thinking and imaginations. We may aspire after boundless promise and glory yet must accept life with all its hazard and horror.

Anxiety is an essential ingredient of existence. It cannot be eliminated from life, but can be made to serve the purpose of life. Human existence has two characteristics: Finitude and freedom. The sense of finitude creates existential anxiety, while freedom produces fear and anxiety because of the sense of responsibility it generates. When we try to escape from freedom, we turn away from our authentic potentiality and possibility. And when we avoid the anxiety of freedom, we are forced to lose ourselves in the crowd and become part of the mass life. Morbid preoccupation with past youth in order to avoid the anxiety of old age is a great hindrance to the growth of personality.

Youth and old age, like pleasure and pain, birth and death, light and darkness, are inseparable companions. To have one without the other is infantile and absurd. Yet people have wanted the one without the other. The journal The Economist, in an article in the December 23, 2000 issue, writes:

Are you hoping for a long life? Thought so. Are you looking forward to growing old? Thought not. Man has wanted one without the other for thousands of years, and has invariably been disappointed. Cleopatra is said to have bathed in asses" milk to stay young and beautiful, but did not live long enough to find out if it worked in old age. The Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon was more famous for his search for the Fountain of Youth than for discovering Florida in 1513. He never found the rejuvenating spring that the natives had told him of, and died from a poisoned Indian arrow a few years later.

The legend of the Fountain of Youth may have originated in northern India. It had reached Europe by the 7th century, and was widely known there in the Middle Ages. When Lucas Cranach the Elder was 74, he painted a famous picture of the miraculous spring, with wrinkled old women going in at one end and young beauties coming out at the other. Writers have constantly imagined worlds where people lived to prodigious ages while holding on to their youthful looks and vigour by various means, mostly foul.

Oscar Wilde"s Dorian Gray kept a picture of himself in the attic, on which his excesses were visited while he himself remained ever young and handsome—though the arrangement, and Mr. Gray, came to a sticky end. In the real world too, people are prepared to try all kinds of disgusting things, from mud baths to injections of monkey glands, in the hope of staying younger longer. Yet nothing has worked against the process of aging. The end result of all efforts has been utter disappointment.

About the author

Swami Adiswarananda

Swami Adiswarananda, the Minister-in-charge of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Centre, New York, USA, is a senior monk of the Ramakrishna Order. He is a well-known thinker and contributes articles to various journals.

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