BY MARK NEPO

As the years go by, the question for each of us becomes more and more real: What does it mean to age into elderhood?

To help answer this question, consider the metaphor of a meteor entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Consider that the more a meteor burns up, the brighter it gets.

As it enters the atmosphere, more and more of it burns away and flakes off—until there is only light. This seems to be our journey as a spirit in a body over a lifetime.

As we hurtle through the years, we are worn of all that doesn’t matter. As experience wears us down and burns us up, we grow brighter. Until at death, we are all light.

And so, the next question becomes: how do we live in a way that helps us grow brighter with time?

Lesson 1 in Elderhood—A Shift of Perspective

The ever-present challenge with getting older is accepting that many of the ways we’ve lived and moved through the world—ways that may have served us well for years—no longer work as we grow into elderhood.

As we enter the vast continent of aging, we are called to shift the way we perceive the world and how we move through it.

A penetrating example is how, for most of our lives, we are taught to look forward, to imagine horizons and then go after them. Yet, along the way, love and suffering make us realize that the gift of life is always where we are.

Eventually, as we age, looking forward is no longer life-giving, simply because the years ahead of us keep diminishing. There is less forward there to work toward. We are ushered, then, into a shift of horizons—which can be disorienting.

Our first reflex is to turn around and look to our past. This is the horizon of nostalgia, but nostalgia only glorifies the past, which doesn’t help us live in the present.

More deeply, we are challenged to neither look solely forward nor solely backward, but toward our elderhood horizon: where we can still work toward dreams and goals, not to get anywhere necessarily, but so we can be more alive for their engagement—now.

Another shift in horizon that comes with elderhood is how the circumference of our daily world shrinks. Our work life diminishes, and we lose our incidental contact with others.

Our active family life grows quieter, and we lose the patterned ways we were called to show up for each other. Our travels become fewer, and we don’t get to meet the unexpected teachers who show up when we’re on the road. The structured ways that we were drawn out of the house start to vanish.

As we get older, we also enter a realm of greater and greater stillness, which issues deeper peace and understanding. Yet, at the same time, we feel the press of a great sense of inertia that makes our daily world smaller. It gets harder and harder to leave the house. And small things, like calling the doctor or calling the plumber, suddenly loom large.

There is one more crucial shift of horizon that comes with the press of utter living, no matter what our age. I first came upon this shift of perspective when in the throes of my cancer experience in my thirties.

We’re taught, understandably, that to survive is to extend the actual duration of time we are here. However, the closer our contact with death, the more precious our moments of living.

And so, how we survive is not measured by the number of years we last but by the depth and breadth of how deeply and fully we are touched by all of life in this moment.

All to say that we must make a concerted effort to once again expand our world as we age into elderhood: to get out of the house, to read in a café rather than always at home, to venture down different roads and to wander into new places, to make a habit of meeting someone weekly, if not more often, and to explore some new interest with each new season.

Lesson 2 in Elderhood—Say Yes to Life

Exploring new interests and expanding our world as we age ultimately depends on our ongoing commitment to say yes to life.

When Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer left his teaching position in Germany to go to medical school in order to start a hospital in Africa, he was saying yes to life. When American poet Walt Whitman decided to be a volunteer medic in the Civil War, committed to treating the wounded of both sides, he was saying yes to life.

When civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that bus in Montgomery, Alabama, she was saying yes to life. And in the Norse tale, when Kalavalah says to the wizard, “No, this time for me,” and breaks the spell she’s been under for nine hundred years, she is saying yes to life.

What does it look like to keep saying yes to life even when the body may begin to say no?

At ninety-five, the painter Alex Katz was still climbing ladders to finish his vast landscapes. And in his eighties, Edward Hopper’s advice to young painters was simply “to work.”

At eighty-five, David Hockney was still painting trees, exclaiming, “The life force pushes [the tree] up! Then gravity pushes it down. But it insists on rising back up!”

When relegated to a wheelchair late in life by surgeries, Henri Matisse developed a long, thin pole by which he would arrange and place his legendary cutouts.

And toward the end of his life, Pierre-Auguste Renoir suffered severe arthritis but continued to paint—taping a brush to his arthritic hand. In 1913, at seventy-two, Renoir said, “I am just learning how to paint.”

Here is one more example of saying a resounding, determined yes to life, as told by Lyra Halprin:

My mother [was] a classical pianist. Mom persevered in the face of sexism of the 1940s through the 1970s and built a robust musical career. Late in life, my sparkling mother taught me by example how to keep going despite aging.

In her eighties, she would still vigorously practice the piano, even though she suffered from arthritic pain. I remember watching her work on a piece by Franz Shubert, one of her favorite composers, and struggling to find comfortable fingering.

“Damn,” she said. “Maybe this will work—ooh, that’s better!”

Her hands were redder and more swollen than usual.

“Mom, doesn’t it hurt when you play?” I asked. She stopped and looked at me over the rhinestone glasses she wore.

“What, you think it doesn’t hurt if I don’t play?” she said.

She started up again, Shubert flowing from her twisted fingers, music filling the house.

This evokes another shift in horizons: that the pain of not playing is greater than the pain encountered while playing. That is, the pain of not being fully alive and continuously learning is greater than the pain encountered while living.

Lesson 3 in Elderhood—Remain a Student of Life

Around the age of sixty-two, the Buddhist monk Faxian (337-422) traveled by foot for two hundred days across the Pamir Mountains in northwest India. He set out with nine others to locate some of the original Buddhist texts. He is said to have walked all the way from China across the icy desert and through many rugged mountain passes.

During the next thirteen years, he visited centers of Buddhist learning and sacred Buddhist sites in Central and Southeast Asia and reached as far as Pataliputra in Central India.

During his years in India, Faxian dedicated himself to learning the language of Sanskrit and transcribed and translated many of the original Buddhist texts, including the Nirvana Sutra and the ancient Vinaya.

He described his long journey in his extensive travelogue, A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms. His memoir offers a compelling record of early Buddhism in India.

With a large number of early Sanskrit texts and his translations in hand, he embarked on a tedious and challenging journey home. After two harrowing years of travel by ship, he finally returned to China, landing on the Shandong Peninsula at the age of seventy-five. His seminal translations enhanced the coherence and reach of what would evolve as East Asian Buddhism.

Faxian is a compelling example of how one can enter elderhood with a willingness to continue learning and exploring—embarking on a walking quest at sixty-two and mastering an entirely new language—discovering his way as he went.

Like so many historical stories, we look back at the heroic journeys with a certainty about the path the inner and outer explorers took, as if they knew where they were going and what they might discover.

But what makes Faxian’s commitment to his quest so inspiring is that he wasn’t sure what sacred texts he would find in India, nor where exactly to look—only an openness to whatever the years ahead might bring.

As the Spanish poet Antonio Machado said, “Traveler, there is no path. The path is made by walking.”

And perhaps that’s one of the deeper lessons of aging into elderhood: to release the need for certainty or safety—and keep saying yes to life as it unfolds.

Ultimately, the goal in facing aging into elderhood is not to beat it, or duck it, or run from it—or even to reframe it or minimize it. The goal in facing aging is to live more fully the closer we get to death—so we can die with no feeling left unfelt, no voice of life left unheard, and no thing in this world left unloved.

Unsurprisingly, this is also a good way to live.

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Mark Nepo is a poet and philosopher who has taught in the fields of poetry and spirituality for over forty years. A New York Times #1 bestselling author, he has published over twenty books, including The Book of Awakening, Surviving Storms, and Finding Courage, and has recorded more than a dozen audio projects.

Mark has been interviewed several times by Oprah Winfrey as part of her Super Soul Sunday TV show and was interviewed by Robin Roberts on Good Morning America. As a cancer survivor, Mark devotes his writing and teaching to the journey of inner transformation and the life of relationship. Translated into more than twenty languages, his newest book offers a deeper unfolding of these insights. To learn more, visit https://marknepo.com/books/fifth_season/

Well Being Journal adapted the above excerpt from The Fifth Season by Mark Nepo. Copyright © 2025 by the author, and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.