I was in a conversation the other day with some friends. It wasn’t long before we were bemoaning the ‘state of the world’. We moved from politics in Washington DC to global warming and the Middle East, then took on the environment, the media and the latest brouhaha about China shooting down a satellite. In a few minutes, we were feeling a bit of despair at the seemingly endless list of intractable problems, most of which are threatening our quality of life—if not the future of our
I am thinking about all the things older people told me over the
years—don’t worry, relax, smell the roses, live life in the moment,
learn from your mistakes, and, above all, love other people and
yourself. Much of my life hasn’t been spent practicing these gems from
my predecessors. It’s been about struggling to do it right, doing it my
way, resisting anything I didn’t like, and (in one way or another)
controlling myself and other people.
Love,
when it appeared, was like a fleeting
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
This has been a tougher-than-usual posting to write. I am not in any way agreeing with the President’s decision to send more troops to Iraq, nor am I attempting to silence the voice of those who oppose or disagree with his policies. I need to make it clear I am writing to my fellow Americans because George W Bush is our president and we live under our current Constitution. I am advocating that unless and until we can learn to embrace and align ourselves with our leaders within our system of
I had lunch yesterday with a great friend of mine who is about my age and one of the ‘most alive’, talented and eclectic people I know. She is interested in everything and everyone and is as passionate about life as one can be. As a cancer survivor, she has been through a lot in terms of health challenges, yet is clear that she is not her body. She has never been more enthusiastic about her future and is an inspiration to all that know her.
We were talking about this blog site and my vision
If we had the means to promote an intergenerational dialogue, what would we talk about?
I think we’d first have to acknowledge that:
• Neither generation has a lock on truth AND
• Neither of us knows more than the other.
While we may have a bit more experience in some areas, younger people know a lot more in others. I learned from my son that he knows a lot more than I do about modern philosophy, about dealing with uncertainty and about participating in
We speak of ‘generations’ as if they are homogenous groupings of like-minded people who see the world in more or less the same way. I don’t know about this. I think there are as many intra-generational differences as there are inter-generational differences. I think that what may be distinct is how the young and the old differ in respect to time. The young have a lot more of it to look forward to than we do. The patterns of youthful enthusiasm, idealism and energy seem
By Vincent DiBianca
Bio
Too
proud to be vulnerable, he wasn’t really "accessible". He never really
knew me or dialogued with me to any extent. He didn’t serve as a
confidant, guide or mentor. We never had a heart-to-heart conversation,
and I never felt particularly safe or connected with him. Maybe this
was just our family. Maybe it was the times. Or perhaps it was both.
I
can tell you that being a granddad in 2007 for me is a very different
experience. Okay, so
I recently saw a CBS 60 Minutes segment about aging. It
revealed, once again, how we view age as a physical state that we can
control with “anti-aging medicine”—as if various ‘fixes’ such as growth
hormones, plastic surgery, erection drugs and myriad vitamin therapies
will somehow put off the inevitable. I am not saying any of these
medical remedies are bad. In some cases, it is neat to be able to do
things at 80 that most 80-year-olds aren’t
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