Morning Exercise for the Aged

About a third of the residents of the high rise where I live, which is housing for the elderly poor, are Chinese. Some do exercises every morning, instructed by a cassette tape (in Chinese, as if shouted into a megaphone) with a Chinese musical pop background from (I am guessing) the 1980s, every morning since I moved here in 2008. It’s rather comforting actually. It was heartbreaking when the lockdown stopped them from doing their exercises together, and it is a sweetness that now they have resumed. I occasionally join them and am warmly welcomed when I do.

On the advice of one of my Blip friends (you know who you are) I am reading Don’t Be a Jerk, and Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master, by Brad Warner.

My favorite paragraph, so far, from this sage tome is the following: “To me, Dogen seems to be saying again and again and again, ‘Focus on this life. Live this actual day. Pay attention to just this very moment. This is where it’s all happening, not in some future lifetime, not in your next birth or your ‘middle existence’ between incarnations Just here. Just now.' ” (p. 69).