As I grow older, I worry I will keep getting crankier and harder to be around — assuming, of course, I was any fun to begin with. Will I sink further into my own head?

Or is there still time to grow wiser, warmer, more useful to the people around me?

I have had times that hardened me. Early childhood was hard enough, to say nothing of adolescence. When I started meditating back in 1980-

those first few years were largely about discovering just how closed off I had become.

My newsfeeds are full of longevity hacks and the cultural obsession with curing aging altogether, as though growing old were a defect rather than a fact of being alive. 

The poet and Zen teacher Norman Fischer offers a different arithmetic. When you are, say, seventy, he writes, this means you are also sixty, fifty, forty, thirty. They are still there, inside you.

That landed for me. Forty-some years of meditation practice have been, in large part, a slow education in stopping the fight against my own age. 

I am majoring in the willingness to stay open, with a minor in moving through life without becoming bitter.

Hardening against the world has always felt safer than staying open. Somewhere in my emotional archaeology, openness came to feel risky. But I feel the cost of it, whatever the history behind it.

I notice how practice allows me to feel certain pains without being flooded. I also notice relief, intimacy, and joy arising more freely. Everything changes, Fischer says. That’s the good news. What still surprises me, after all these years, is that nobody produces these feelings.

Practice simply makes room.

Over time, practice has nudged my reflex to defend, blame, and harden. Nudged. I pause a little more before reacting. I try to listen more carefully. I am somewhat less convinced by my snap judgments.

Fischer calls this training the mind to embrace what is hard instead of trying to get rid of it, the beginning of a path toward growth, happiness, and real resilience. My housemate might word this differently. 

And I am a little more patient with growing old, most days.

This is a kind of power, though not the loud kind. I have watched it work — a genuinely soft person in a tense room, a non-defensive person when anger is in the air. Something shifts. People soften without quite knowing why.

“Ultimately it is upon your vulnerability that you depend,” the poet Rilke writes.

The older I get, the more I suspect wisdom has nothing to do with invulnerability. Fischer warns that when there are no more questions, we stop maturing and merely age.

I started this piece wondering if I would just keep getting crankier. That is still possible. Maybe it only means I am still asking.

The cushion keeps pointing the other way. So far.