When the Music Fades

I wanted to cry, but I had to laugh. Sitting in a sound proof room at my local Costco, the results of my hearing test in plain view on the computer screen, the evidence was incontrovertible. I need hearing aids.

            It seems that all those years playing in rock and roll bands has finally caught up with me. And all that loud music in my headphones and ear buds. And some staggeringly loud rock concerts, like X at the Arlington Theater in Santa Barbara, circa 1982, to this day, the loudest concert I have ever attended. And that’s saying something.

            And the fact that I’m 60 years old. That isn’t exactly helping.

            I didn’t notice anything dramatic, just steadily increasing difficulty following conversations in loud places like restaurants, bars, or parties. I found myself reading lips. You do what you have to do. I’m fine one on one in a quiet place. I only play the TV slightly louder than Lori does. And the background music of TV and movies sometimes seems to drown out the dialogue. Uh oh.

            All the little things were adding up. Word discernment, loss of higher frequencies (you know, women’s voices).

            Anything taking my world away from me is going to get a fight. I started reading everything I could find online, even though most of it is written by people trying to sell you hearing aids. Still, I began to realize that this was a much more complicated process than I thought. It wasn’t simply that the world was getting softer. I was hearing it differently, as well as less. When the dialogue in a movie seems too soft in relation to the background music, you know you’ve got more than volume problems. Turns out there are many different kinds of hearing loss. As one of my friends put it, you don’t hear with your ears, you hear with your brain. Your ears are just the microphones. All of the signal processing occurs in the brain.

            So I walked into my local Costco one Tuesday afternoon and talked to the receptionist at the Hearing Aid Center. It just so happened that there was an opening the next morning. So there I was at 10:00 A.M. ready for whatever’s next.

            But I wasn’t. Ready I mean. I started to feel overwhelmed. Would I really need hearing aids? Hearing aids are for old people. Really old people. Is this the beginning of the end? Maybe I was being a little over-dramatic. But still. Once you make the switch to hearing aids, there’s no turning back.

            But I was tired of asking Lori to repeat half of the things she said. Not nearly as tired of it as she was I’m sure. And a conversation I’d had with an old friend, the artist Douglas Schneider, kept ringing in my ears, so to speak. He’d led a life pretty much like mine – hard living and loud music. Too many long nights on stage in the deafening din of rock and roll clubs. That whole invincibility thing. Except it turns out we’re not.

            He paints to music in his studio in Oakland, California creating big, brilliant, beautiful works that fly out of high-end galleries in San Francisco and New York and into the hands of a growing cadre of discerning collectors. Like me, he knows he lives a charmed life – not an easy life, but a charmed life. There’s a difference. And that by grace and love and dumb luck he found his way through the crazy years and into a beautiful middle age. But then the music started fading. He noticed a certain dullness. He went and had his ears checked. When he got hearing aids in an instant the world sparked back to life. The brush work on the cymbals of his Coltrane records suddenly emerged from the dark. It’s not that everything was louder – everything pulled into focus and was restored to its proper proportionality.

            I wanted that.

            So I stepped into the soundproof booth. After a long series of detailed tests my hearing specialist showed me the results. Mild to moderate hearing loss, especially in my left ear, especially in the higher frequency range.

            In the meditative stillness of the hearing test a long-forgotten memory arose. When I was about seven or eight years old a neighbor boy threw a firecracker at me. Not a run of the mill firecracker, an M-80, a small stick of dynamite. I didn’t see it coming. It detonated in the air right next to my left ear. In a flash I was knocked off my bike and everything went silent, except for the ringing. A small trickle of blood came out of my ear. Parents were involved. A doctor visit. It’s blurry.

            Ever since then my left ear hasn’t worked so good. Whenever I strain to hear something I cock my head like a dog, turning my right ear in the direction of the thing I’m trying to hear. Now I remember why.

            So it’s no surprise that the high frequency capacity of my left ear is nearly gone. But even without that incident, the die is cast. I am losing my hearing.

            Hearing loss, like alcoholism, is a regressive disease – it never gets better, it only gets worse. Unless you do something about it.

            And here’s the most interesting part – if you wait too long to get hearing aids, no matter how effective your new devices are at delivering the proper frequencies to your ears, your brain is no longer capable of processing them. A kind of brain apathy sets in. In other words, you still won’t hear. Remember, you hear with your brain, not your ears. The average person waits ten years between the first experience of hearing diminishment and getting hearing aids – far too long. The damage is done.

            This was chilling news, a new, sick twist on use it or lose it. It turns out the brain is not just a machine waiting for the right signals. It is a living, responding, conscious organism that evolves and adapts in conjunction with its environment. Take away the surrounding environment and the brain’s usability fades. This is why hearing specialists strongly recommend getting hearing aids sooner rather than later – to keep the brain’s hearing centers fully engaged and active at all frequencies.

            I don’t have hearing aids yet. I’m going to go see a real audiologist and get tested again. But I’ll probably buy my hearing aids at Costco. Word of mouth is good about their product and service, and as everybody knows, their low cost and return policy set the industry standard. Their main product tucks right behind the ear with a tiny, clear plastic tube into the ear canal – virtually invisible – and goes for about $1,600 a pair. Or you can spend twice that much for even fancier models with all kinds of additional features like full device compatibility. But whatever you do, if you even suspect minor hearing lost, go get a free test. And this is doubly true for all of my professional musician friends. Don’t jeopardize the most important instrument in your quiver, your ears. And don’t jeopardize your relationships either. Those beautiful people you share your life with are really sick of you saying, “What?” all the time.

            There are rustling leaves and lapping waves and the sound of the wind on raven’s wings overhead. We’ll all be gone soon enough. But until then, I don’t want to miss a thing.

Winter is Coming

Lori and I have been working with a financial adviser on our retirement plan. We’ve been facing down a whole host of decisions regarding risk assessment, asset management, and prudent reserves. We’re not rich – we both work for the government. We’re about as middle class as they come. And in about ten years we’ll both be leaving our jobs and joining the wonderful tribe of Retired People. We hear they’re nice. We hope we fit in.

            You find yourself pouring over charts indicating that you will be eighty-years-old in 2038 and ninety in 2048, if you make it that long. We set up our plan so that we’ll be stone cold broke by the time we turn 98. If we make it past that we’ll just have to go out and get a part time job. Walmart door greeter or something.

            It’s been a revealing process. You lay yourself bare. Our financial advisor knows more about the details of our private life than all of our friends put together. It doesn’t work if you keep secrets. Think about it. Like the forensic accountants currently dissecting the Trump family’s bowl-of-spaghetti financial entanglements with Russian oligarchs, your financial planner is going to go over every penny of income and expenses with a fine-toothed comb – all your habits, foibles, obsessions, and weaknesses will be dragged out into the light of day. Sometimes when I’m in his office I feel like it would be easier to stand on the conference table and take all of my clothes off.

            One of the surprises about financial planning – it’s a lot like philosophical self-examination. You have to come clean about who you are, what you have, and what you want. You have to clearly articulate your values – what matters most, what matters least, and what doesn’t matter at all. You have to be assertive and direct, but you have to be humble and willing to be led. You have to be very, very clear on what you know and what you don’t know. If you get that wrong, everything goes wrong. When in doubt, which will be most of the time, take the advice.

            Naturally, (and I say naturally because this is the same boat the overwhelming majority of us are in), we haven’t saved enough for retirement. These next ten years are going to be austere as we try to close the gap, or more austere than I’d previously imagined.

            There are two mistakes people commonly make in their retirement thinking, and I was making both of them. One, I assumed that once you retire your expenses go down. Wrong. Most people spend more when they retire than when they’re working. They start traveling more. And of course, later in life, healthcare costs skyrocket. And two, I forgot to account for inflation. Ten, twenty, and thirty years from now, things are going to cost a lot more. Think of how much a gallon of milk, a gallon of gas, or a movie ticket cost thirty years ago – they’ve nearly tripled. This is why your savings will lose 67% of its value over a thirty year span.

            And this is why working with a professional financial planner, preferably a fee-only planner, is so important. A fee-only planner charges you for their services like a dentist, a plumber, or an attorney. All other types of financial planners earn money on commissions from the investments they steer you toward. In other words, you can never be sure that their investment advice is untainted by self-interest. Are they pushing investments that are best for you, or that yield the highest commission for them? Despite their best assurances, you never really know. I’m not saying that commissioned sales people are inherently deceitful – I’m sure they’re mostly wonderful folks – but their business model is ripe for abuse, most of it beneath the surface and hidden from view.

            The other way that estate planning is like philosophy is that you have to face the fact that you are going to fade away and die, and a good financial planner, like a good philosopher, is going to help you do it as consciously, joyfully, honestly, and compassionately as possible. In both endeavors – financial planning and philosophy – the goal is to embody the principle of no-harm: no harm to yourself and no harm to anybody else. Only when you honestly, courageously, and unflinchingly face the fact that you are going to grow old and die can you rightly set your affairs in order to maximize benefit and minimize needless suffering.

            Another benefit of financial planning is the way it challenges and changes your relationship with your stuff. As you grow older you begin jettisoning excess baggage, if only out of kindness for the friends and relatives who are going to have to endure the miserable task of emptying your house or apartment when you’re gone. Show them a little love. Get rid of all the extra crap right now, the stuff you could easily live without. You’ll be shocked by how much bigger your home feels, and how much freer you’ll feel.

            But the biggest benefit of estate planning by far is the way it lifts guilt, shame, and worry off your neck. You no longer have to regard the future as a dark, menacing cloud full of uncertainty and danger. You know that no matter what happens, you’ve seen to it that you will be financially supported throughout. Your affairs are in order. Your investments are safe. Your insurance is sufficient. Your tax strategies are maximized. In the event of your death, your spouse is taken care of. And in the event of both of your deaths, a calm and rational process unfolds for the dispensation of whatever assets remain. You just don’t have to stay awake at night worrying about that stuff anymore. How much is your peace of mind worth?

            And all of this for only a few thousand bucks. It is money well spent. I only wish I’d done it sooner. I feel like grabbing every twenty and thirty-year-old I know and forcing them to make an appointment with my financial planner. But I know I can’t. It’s not my place. But because of the miracle of compound interest, a tiny monthly investment into retirement savings over a forty year span is a gazillion times better than even the most aggressive savings plan begun in one’s forties or fifties.

            With all that being said, it’s never too late to take what you’ve got and make it better. The only thing holding most people back from hiring a fee-only Certified Financial Planner (CFP) is fear and shyness, two things I know a lot about. Thankfully, my life-long philosophical training and hard-won life experience convinces me of one simple, unimpeachable truth – problems don’t get better by ignoring them.

            Facing the fact of one's own impending decline and death, facing the facts of one's own spending habits, and facing the fact that your years of denial and avoidance have yielded little but frustration and anxiety, you finally pick up the phone and start the process. It's going to hurt. But not nearly as much as the alternative. Winter is coming. And even the squirrels know how to hide nuts for later, when all the trees are bare.

   

Growing Old

Growth is inherently painful. To grow is to fall apart. New forms arise from the debris of the old. What was must die, so that what is can be. And we are always growing, even when we are growing old. This is why in the First Noble Truth Buddha taught that life is suffering. To be alive means to grow, and growth means change, and change hurts.

            Unless you accept change, embrace it even. Then your pain is transformed into awareness. The Second Noble Truth of Buddhism lays bare this process – that our suffering and dissatisfaction are principally caused by our resistance to what is. We suffer because we refuse to accept that life is not controlled by our arbitrary and self-serving demands. We don’t get what we want. We don’t get to stay young. We don’t get to not die. Once we accept the fundamental impermanence of all forms, including our own, a peaceful serenity illuminates the path ahead. The Buddhists call this nirvana.

            Nirvana is a compound Sanskrit word: nir a negating prefix, and vana meaning air that is moving, like wind or breath. Nirvana, often translated as “to blow out,” as in extinguishing a candle flame, is really just a way of saying stillness. It is a state of consciousness free from the agitation of self-centeredness, craving, and fear. In nirvana we are awash in gratitude, wonder, loving-kindness, and acceptance. Because we want nothing, we receive everything.

            To age consciously means to understand the full cosmic process that coming into being and going out of being entails, not from the perspective of a single organism, but from the God-perspective. Being born is a death sentence. No matter your afterlife belief system of choice, these forms – these awkward, aging bodies – are not long for this world. If you have anything pressing to do, I would get to it now. You don’t know how much longer you have.

            In the Phaedo, Plato’s dialogue about the final hours of Socrates’s life, we see Socrates’s friends gathered around him as he calmly faces execution by means of a long, cool drink of hemlock. As his friends fret, wail, and moan, Socrates remains the model of serenity and acceptance, like the hub of a wheel around which everything spins madly. They ask him how he can be so cool and composed in the face of death. He explains that the philosophic life is “training for dying,” and that in many ways he has been practicing for this his whole life. The lover of wisdom, Socrates argues, works hard to root their existence into something deeper, something truer, something more abiding than these fleeting forms. We don’t really know what happens when we die, he says, and it might be better than this mortal life. How do we know? We don’t. So it’s irrational, he argues, to fear death.

500 years later Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius further amplified the burgeoning Stoic doctrine of acceptance. “Frightened of change?” he asked. “But what can exist without it? Can you take a hot bath and leave the firewood as it was? Eat food without transforming it? Can any vital process take place without something being changed? Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash. So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain, but simply viewing it as one of the things that can happen to us. How you anticipate the child’s emergence from its mother’s womb; that’s how you should await the hour when your soul will emerge from its compartment.”

I never really liked that Dylan Thomas poem, the one that says “Do not go gentle into that good night…rage, rage against the dying of the light.” I prefer the stance of Buddha, Socrates, and Marcus Aurelius – to welcome aging and death like any other change – an opportunity to practice slipping the noose of attachment and sliding into the vast and boundless space of sacred realization.

[This piece was originally appeared in my column "A to Zen" in the September/October edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]