Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

I am usually pretty coy about my age; you could call it a lingering vanity. People generally assume I am younger than I am – at Tassajara this summer, someone who has known me for a while through Zen Center guessed ten years younger, which ticked the vanity box alright.

When asked about the discrepancy, I usually ascribe it to a stress-free life. I could equally point to having been active since I was a child; discovering a penchant for endurance sports in my adolescence, and having stuck with running or cycling, or both, since then; or becoming vegetarian nearly forty years ago; or twenty-five years of meditation; or having good genes (my father’s death a couple of years ago was the first of my parent’s generation; his older brother and younger sister are still going, as is my mum, her old sister and younger brother, the oldest pushing past ninety).

In any case, today I turn sixty, and naturally this has inspired a certain amount of navel gazing and reflection. 

By bald external standards sixty is old. I will go with the cliche that I don’t feel old, though I suspect most people don’t feel as old on the inside as they actually are (I was first aware of this discrepancy when reading Proust in college: the narrator asks the daughter of his former crush for lunch, and wonders why people laugh when he asks her if it wouldn’t be compromising for her to be out with a young man, which he of course no longer is – perhaps being child-free meant he didn’t have that gauge for ageing, I remember thinking).

Of course when I was a kid, all adults seemed old. I remember being nine or ten and adolescents seeming old; in my twenties and into my thirties, middle-aged people seemed old. And then, as the saying goes, police officers started looking younger. In 2010 I even became older than the UK Prime Minister. My childhood sports heroes and other cultural notables started dying. Contemporaries started dying.

I have naturally noticed a diminished capacity for the long-distances I used to love to cover, either running or riding. Not long ago I was saddened to realise that if I ever went to live at Tassajara again, which is often in the back of my mind, I would not be able to run the miles of trails over the mountains that I did without a second thought when I lived there twenty years ago, and almost as easily in 2012 and 2015 which were my last three-month visits. In any case, I have not run since the pandemic set in in 2020, and I have doubts as to whether I will ever get that going again.

On my bike, when I came back from Tassajara in 2008, I thought nothing of riding for five hours on a Sunday, which was my only chance to go out while I was living at Zen Center; four hours was a minimum, and at my best I could ride for seven – a hundred miles, or out to Limantour Beach in Point Reyes and back, for example. After I left Zen Center in 2015, I would aim to do a minimum of three hours, perhaps four, and a maximum of five. Although in theory I have more days to ride now, because of weekend roams I rarely go out for as long as I used to. This year I have been trying for two, with occasional three hours, and I think a maximum of four. These things will not return. Living on Telegraph Hill now is keeping my legs pretty strong for the time being though.

I have pretty much accepted these limitations, just as I have come to accept the fifteen pounds that landed in my midriff a dozen or so years ago and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. I am grateful to be of sound enough body and mind, with no health concerns, and overall I am very happy with my life. After my years in London having adventures and travelling around the world, I had an almost equal number of years at Zen Center going deeper within, then a few years of finding my way back out in the world after I left Zen Center in 2015. Now I feel that I have integrated these different parts of my life, the priest and the worldly citizen more completely – I remember the point at which I stopped dreaming disctinctly about people in England, or people here, and everyone started to appear together, with Zen folks and family commingling.

Although I guess I should be thinking of retirement, Zen teaching doesn’t seem like something I need to retire from. I don’t have money saved up, after so many years away from the traditional career path; I have the privilege of expecting some family money to eventually come my way, and I am grateful that in my twenties I began to pay into a BBC pension while I worked there; even a few years of that is literally paying dividends right now. 

I feel like I have a decent work-life balance for my energy levels, a healthy and sufficient circle of friends and acquaintances (in large part due to being at Zen Center with its extended sangha), and, this past year or so, a new love, which gives me much joy, and a deep settledness that I haven’t experienced since I was married more than twenty years ago. Now we live in a sweet apartment in a beautiful part of San Francisco that I still have to pinch myself to believe is my home. I spoke with a long-time friend of the same age back in England at the start of the relationship: she could not imagine having the energy for new romance; it is one of the things helping me feel positive about what is still to come.

As part of slowing down, I realise that I am growing into the second part of my dharma name (in line with how the teacher gives the name – the actual and the potential): Shundo is “the Way of the Fleet Steed,” the younger monk who was running the mountains and always in a hurry. Gennin is “Manifesting Human-heartedness”: when I remember that I don’t have to hurry, and how much I enjoy not hurrying, I have more time and space to meet people kindly and openly. This seems to be the most important thing in life, though I still get impatient when I have to stand on an escalator rather than walking up it.

Ultimately, we all have to learn to deal with the effects of ageing; I know that one day my body will fail me in some way, which I can’t predict, either slowly or all at once, and I will die from it. In the meantime, I hope to keep practising and teaching and being active, and meeting people with as much love and compassion as I can manage.