Throughout this blog, I have shared the idea that we can look at age
and aging as a conversation—it is what we say about ‘the way it is’
when we get older—and how we ‘observe’ it affects how we act and,
ultimately, how we experience our age. The power of viewing age as a
conversation is that it allows us to distinguish between our age and
how we relate to our age and the world. It allows us to create meaning,
purpose and possibility regardless of

We’ve all experienced the wisdom that comes with hindsight. It’s easy to have 20-20 vision after the fact, to achieve clarity and perspective on our lives and choices in retrospect. What is sometimes less obvious to us is how much of our day-to-day actions, behavior, moods and feelings are a function of the past.

As I grow older, I find myself appreciating how much of the way I see the world is shaped by my past. When you think about it, this implies that the older I get, the more past I have

We generally think of ‘retirement’ as the line dividing our ‘working
years’ from our ‘not working years’ (or at least, a time when we don’t have
to work for a living). I think retirement is a false distinction, one
that has taken on enormous importance in people’s lives and that can be
a fulcrum for either new possibilities and positive changes or profound
resignation and negative changes.

I think ‘retirement’ is a false distinction because ‘work’ is itself
a false

I started a conversation about procrastination on Wednesday and
planned to do this posting yesterday. I am a day late. I
procrastinated. I never actually say or think, “I am going to
procrastinate”. It is a judgment I make after I don’t do something that
I intended to do. I am sure this is on my mind because of New Year’s
Eve coming up, but it is also a big source of discontent and negative
self-talk for lots of people.

There may be many reasons for why we keep putting off what we say we

I’ve been making New Year’s resolutions for more than 50 years now,
and you’d think I would have learned something about how to do it well
by now. Unfortunately, I am still a beginner at making resolutions—I
continue to “make ’em and break ’em” with more precision and
predictability than the blooming of flowers in Spring or leaves falling
in Autumn.

The lull between Christmas and New Year’s Eve certainly is a great
time to reflect on the year past and the year to come. I

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