It occurs to me that we relate to our chronological age as something
that we don’t control. And we spend an enormous amount of time and
energy resisting this lack of control. A friend of mine overheard a
40-something woman recently tell a colleague, “Oh, I figure that I will
be pretty well finished by the time I am 60, so I need to make hay
while the sun shines”. She
was talking about her love life, but it brought home the notion of how
we all

If I could give one gift to my children, I think it would be
“acceptance”. It isn’t too hard to understand intellectually that we
should simply accept life on life’s terms and not try to control what
we can’t really control. Yet, it’s a hard lesson to learn. I think not
accepting may be the source of most, if not all, suffering. When we
live with the view that reality ‘should be’ other than it is, we are
living in a dream (at best) and a state

The more time I spend in this conversation about ‘the rest of your
life’, the more I begin to question the questions. I find I am torn: my
‘gung ho’ enthusiasm to empower seniors to make a difference and to
help midwife a transformation of the aging paradigm from one of decline
to one of possibility and sufficiency encounters a kind of acceptance
(even resignation) that everything will all work out in the end and
that I should devote the rest of my life