By Lilly Page
I was watching Oprah recently, a program featuring a few of our
famous stars speaking on aging. They were talking about this whole idea
of what your real age is. One was only 50, so just a baby to
me, the other was 65 and didn’t look more than 55, but the one that
caught my eye was Diahann Carol at 71 years old. Yikes, she looked
fabulous!!!!
I
have always been one to mention my age, as I have always enjoyed
getting older. I intentionally want to give people younger than
Crabby Old Lady took a swipe at life coaches
yesterday. I commented to her that the same might be said of lawyers,
heath care providers and financial counselors. The fact is there are
many opportunistic and unqualified people calling themselves coaches.
While I can agree with her concern, I cannot let her sweeping
generalization impune the work of thousands of committed and competent
individuals.
What I want to point out is that, as an emerging field and
profession, coaching is attempting
I don’t know that I agree with Crabby Old Lady’s idea to vote out the entire Congress in the bi-annual elections on November 7th. But I sure think we should vote and have our experience and wisdom speak.
I also don’t think we should turn ‘Boomers’ into a one-issue
constituency —“aging issues such as social security, Medicare and so
forth”. We should certainly speak if we having something to say about
those issues, but more importantly, we should be taking responsibility
I don’t think that age is personal. I know it feels like it is ‘me’
that is getting older, but I don’t experience myself as older. If
anything, I experience my ‘self’ as being ‘better’ than at any time I
can remember over the past 64 years. I feel more ‘alive’, more engaged,
more present and more satisfied than ever. It is true that my body
can’t run, wrestle or climb as easily as in the past. I make love
By Shae Hadden
Bio
Was talking with a close friend this week, and we were both
acknowledging how much we’ve changed over the last few months. Looking
back, it would seem the circumstances of our lives have forced us to
grow, to expand our individual perspectives to encompass all the
challenges life has offered—from critical illnesses and ongoing health
concerns to business changes, relationship transitions and dramatic
encounters with fear and uncertainty.
Yet
it’s not really the situations
I was having lunch with my friend Lori and her sister Carol, whom I
had not met before, last week. We’re all about the same age, and our
conversation started out very pleasantly. Then after a while, Carol
started expounding in a monotone voice about how terrible it was to be
getting older and how she absolutely hated the aging process. She
talked for 45 minutes in great detail about her aches and pains, her
failing eyesight and hearing,
I was having lunch with my friend Lori and her sister Carol, whom I
had not met before, last week. We’re all about the same age, and our
conversation started out very pleasantly. Then after a while, Carol
started expounding in a monotone voice about how terrible it was to be
getting older and how she absolutely hated the aging process. She
talked for 45 minutes in great detail about her aches and pains, her
failing eyesight and hearing, and her husband’s
I have been working a lot lately with organizations and, in
particular, with their cultures and attempts to change them. Given my
growing interest in the culture of aging, I have been paying a lot of
attention to what people say about how the ‘retirement’ process works,
particularly in the Public Service and other large bureaucracies. The
gist of what I hear is that people do their darnedest to ‘get away’
from all the bullshit, while still ‘hanging
I am 64 years old. Somehow the number seems significant, although I
don’t know why. Everyone I have ever spoken to about age agrees: they
feel a lot younger than they imagined they would feel like at this age
(however old they might be).
It’s almost as if we reach a ‘fork in the road’ age-wise—a
particular moment in time, usually in middle age, when we experience a
total disconnect between what we see in the mirror and what we
experience in our mind. I think
Just finished reading Andy Wibbel’s comments on The Secret,
the latest new internet movie. I pretty much agree that this
extravaganza has high production values, very much along the same lines
as What the Bleep. But the whole time I was watching, I kept waiting to
hear ‘who’ was behind