About This Teaching
Past sixty, Ajahn Chah noticed his memory slipping: he would mean to call one novice and another's name would come out, as if his brain were quietly announcing its retirement. Elderly people, he said, must learn to be intelligent about their own decline.
Parents needed to be smarter than their children to raise them, but that sense of always knowing best turns into stupidity with age. Old people argue with children and grandchildren, refuse to admit they are wrong, and stir up everyone's emotions. He urged them to look honestly: are eyes, ears, energy and memory as good as before? Reflecting this way is heedfulness; ignoring it is heedlessness, and a heedless person is like a dead one.
In a time without nursing homes, exasperated families sometimes urged nagging elders to go and live at the monastery, even building them a hut, hoping the monks could teach them. Dhamma practice, beginning with humbly accepting the changes of age, keeps family relations free of conflict. Otherwise one becomes "an old child"; with mindfulness one is easy to care for and creates no bad kamma with family.