Embrace Your Aging

Who is that little girl? We all have one inside of us. Sometimes I’m more aware of her than at others. Sometimes I wish I knew her better than I do. All the same, I do know she is by my side, all the time. So, who is she, and what is she up to now? We all have childhood memories, some good, some not so good. Some memories are indelible, while others seem to require extra work to retrieve. Sometimes it seems pretty clear how a childhood event impacted us throughout our lives;

What is it that I really need? After spending many hours in reflection, reading, talking, meditating and who knows what all else, I am finally able to perchance solve this puzzle. My needs are sometimes hard to identify-- at times shifting and at other times so continuous that they feel like background noise rather than an entity that deserves attention. The place for me to start is my need base, which has been defined by my prior life. When I was working fulltime I needed to

My friend told me that she recently had a death dinner! A Death Dinner! Her idea was to invite friends over to talk about how they want to die. The amazing thing is that she had eight friends willing to join her in a conversation that NO ONE wants to have. Yet, it is a conversation that we all need to be starting, whether we are a healthy 60 year- old, a disabled 70 year -old, a terminally ill 80 year- old, or a frail 90 year -old. Death can be around the corner for any of u

Not too long ago I wrote about one of the challenges of getting older: Who am I now that I don’t have a business card? I described the loss inherent in giving up a life -long career and talked about exploring values, interests and meaning in order to find a new place in this unchartered territory. As I return to this issue, I am now more intrigued by the idea of continuity of identity rather than loss. Recently, motivated by the new year, I decided to take a step back and thi

Another opportunity to change! How is it that with the new year we imagine all the ways we will be different NEXT year? We could make that decision to change on March 1 or May 15. The possibility is always there, and yet, with the turn of the page of the calendar, the new year just feels like the right time to make that personal change that has been nagging at us for months. It’s also the time of the year for reading articles on how to keep the new year’s resolutions and why

Happy New Year! Another New year! It seems that the older we get, the faster the years go by. I remember thinking during graduate school in the 1970’s that the George Orwell dystopia book “1984” was both dooming- and far off. It was actually only a decade away. Time is short! Now I hear about the future impact of climate change, new self-driving autos or predicted demographics for 2025 and it feels like they are talking about tomorrow. When I look back on the years that I hav

Well that was a bummer! Things don’t always go as planned. I’m wondering, as we get older, do we run into more road blocks and curve balls, or is it just that I can’t remember all of the challenges I had to overcome or redirect when I was younger? In any case, here I am, today, overcoming one more bump in the road. I stopped to talk with my neighbor this morning when we were both out walking. Given that I hadn’t seen her in a while, I wondered how she was doing. To my surpris