Quotes from Susan Moon

parents dead. Can't backpack, can't do hip hop. Who am I, really? Now I get to find out.

Hiding inside this well-meaning phrase is a deep cultural assumption that old is bad and young is good.

But even the venerable Zen teacher Robert Aitken Roshi, in an interview about being old—he was in his eighties at the time—admitted with a laugh, "I often feel like a young person who has something wrong with me." It

Wabi-sabi" is a Japanese expression for the beauty of impermanence,

The nearer I get to death, the more alive I feel. The more I consider my own mortality, the less afraid I am of dying. And the older I get, the more readily I can put myself aside.

I keep driving, slowly, hoping I'll remember where I'm going before I get there. So far I always have. Zen

I have learned some things about pain through my sitting practice. If I move to adjust my posture prematurely, the pain will chase me wherever I go, but if I just sit still when the pain starts, it often goes away, or recedes into the background.

At first, I made a list of the difficult things that I was experiencing myself, like memory loss, sore knees, and fear of loneliness, and I set out to write an essay about each one.

wanted to teach myself how to get old without getting bitter. Then, as I kept on getting older, other things happened, both wonderful and painful. I became a grandmother, my mother died, and I kept on writing. Not only did I write about the things I didn't like that were happening to my body and my mind, I also wrote about how my relationships were changing because of age.