Thomas Friedman’s great op-ed piece about global warming definitively declares that, when faced with making decisions that have life or death consequences, there is, at some point, no more time for procrastinating, debating and analyzing. At some moment, to continue to procrastinate or put off until tomorrow becomes a fatal decision.
I love this idea that ‘later’ ceases to be an option when the stakes are high enough. When this is the case, we are committed—no matter what we choose. It
Moods are central to our lives. There isn’t a time when we are not in one mood or another. For most of us, our moods are organizing how we feel, what we do and how we explain just about everything to ourselves most of the time. For example, can you remember the last time you said, “I am happy” or “I am unhappy” without following the statement with “because”? No, we always have a story for why we are in whatever mood we’re in—whether it is a good one or a bad one.
I often ask
By Shae Hadden | Bio
I’m
intrigued by the popularity of online life expectancy calculators. Like
reading tea leaves, tarot cards or astrological charts, many people
seem to be fascinated with the idea of predicting their future. This
compulsion to ‘know how much time we have’ is closely tied with a
desire to re-engineer our lives to reduce or eliminate aging
altogether. As if each of us has an expiry date that we can scan so we
can know when we’ll be used up!
The concept
I reconnected with an old friend this week online—Dr. Laurie Ford. She has just started a new blog, Chute Me Through Deep Age. It has what seems to be a fairly unique perspective on a theme I had not thought too much about, but which makes a lot of sense. She has focused on the breakdowns associated with late-life aging—specifically, any of the dozens of conditions that can either severely handicap us including everything from
I saw a show on the BBC recently about aging in the UK. There were several very interesting aspects to the story. First, the population in nursing homes has changed dramatically in the past 20 years: previously, most residents were in their 70s and today most are in their 90s. And most are women—not surprising given World War II and life expectancy trends.
The consensus of experts here is that a combination of healthier habits and lifestyles, better medical technologies, and increasing access
By Don Arnoudse
Bio
One
interpretation I have is that I’m just gearing up for what’s next. It’s
a familiar indicator for me to feel restless, a bit irritable, even
fearful as I come to (or beyond) the natural end of a particular phase
and pause in that “white space” between saying “Goodbye” to one chapter
and “Hello” to something new. I never enjoy it, but it is familiar.
As
I get ready to enter my 60s in six months or so, I’ve been thinking
about how I want to age.
One of the things I am noticing as I enter what is euphemistically referred to as my Golden Years is that the nature of time seems to mellow and ripen. On one level, the days pass slower, like watching an Oklahoma ‘hawk makin’ lazy circles in the sky’. On the other hand, the days and years seem to have passed in a flash—that only yesterday I was starting a business and driving my kids to school. I guess it just underscores how elastic time can be and that it is all about how well we live
By Elizabeth Russell
Bio
View the first post in this two-part series.
The conversation about age begins when we are born and continues throughout life. It may be written or spoken. It may come from our mothers (who heard it from their mothers) or it may come from people who have studied other people in order to make profound pronouncements. Whatever the source, it is all conversation. And labels are one element of the conversation—labels we give to everything, labels that carry weight and are endowed, over the years, with meaning such as young, old, immature, stodgy, etc.Those who engage in the conversation don’t make it
up. It is a given, running through all the channels—parents, peers,
school, television, advertising, public and private institutions. From
this conversation we learn there are things we can do at five that we
can’t do when we are seven, responsibilities we have at 15 that we
don’t have at 10, privileges we acquire at 21 we don’t have when we are
17.
Social
For a long time, I have had the point of view that one of the biggest problems of aging in our contemporary culture is that it leads most people towards a ‘state of resignation’. Resignation is the mood we can get caught in when we ‘give up’, when we stop living into the future as possibility. It is the mood of succumbing to the belief that circumstances are bigger than we are. It is a mood of defeat that generates comments like: “Why bother since we can’t do anything about it anyway?”
People sometimes ask me what I mean by ‘the culture of aging’. I can start by explaining what I mean by ‘culture’.
Culture is, first of all, a word. And, like all words, it is a label for some phenomenon, some observable thing or idea. Culture is a concept and a very basic aspect of who we are. It contributes to how we relate to the world and, most of the time, constitutes an opening for our actions. It is a context for our human experience and occurs as a kind of non-stop conversation