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
By Shae Hadden
Bio
No matter what the extent of my commitments, I see ‘balance’ as my ability to be ‘grounded’ and ‘present’. In each moment, I’m doing what I’m doing…and just that. Nothing else. The whole idea of ‘balancing work and life’, as if they are polar opposites, makes no sense to me.
Life is everything I experience.
Work is what I choose to label as work. Pleasure is what I label as ‘play’. Both work and play are made up of the actions I take as I live.
Balancing
I am profoundly grateful today for the gift of life and the opportunity to observe. How extraordinary and beautiful this all is. When we consider how miraculous it is that we are here at all, even the difficulty and pain are exquisite.
If I think about my life, it is utterly amazing that I have survived this long and have had such a wealth of experiences—a cornucopia of the good, the bad and the ugly. Perhaps the greatest gift of growing older is to appreciate ALL of it, the marvelous and the
By Marilyn Kentz
Bio
Last year’s announcement that actress Demi Moore wed young actor
Ashton Kutcher hardly raised an eyebrow, as it would have twenty, or
even ten, years ago. Hollywood celebrities often lead the way when it
comes to national trends, and one trend is becoming increasingly
obvious: women over forty no longer consider themselves “over the hill”.
Whether the rest of the world is on board is a matter of personal
attitude. It’s not about trying to sex it up for some
By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is fourth in a five-part series.
The end of anything must be at least as interesting as the beginning of it, even if we think it’s not a particularly happy ending. As a novelist, the end of a story I’m writing doesn’t always present itself to me initially, and even if I think I’m working toward a particular conclusion, the climax consistently turns out to be quite different than that which I have conceived somewhere along the way. Oddly, I’m as interested in the outcome as I hope a reader might be.The point is not that every story ends: it is that every story has a surprise ending that has everything to do with the way a life has been lived.
As
I contemplate the decline of those once-grand and now-ancient
paddlewheel steamers on the Yukon River, it occurs to me that, in not
many more years, they will be gone almost completely, leaving only a
few rusted pieces of machinery to mark their passing. I wish there was
Thanks to Google, I’ve learned that Valentine’s Day is so old a tradition that we’re not even sure how it began. It probably goes back to pagan rituals that were later “Christianized” around the time of Claudius and probably “commercialized” by Hallmark. Whatever its origins, it is about romance and love and letting the special men and women in our lives know how we feel about them.
For me, Valentine’s Day is extra special because it comes right after my birthday, which for