Aging well
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How do we look?
“Ten years from now it won’t really matter what shoes you wore today, how your hair looked, or what brand of jeans you bought. What will matter is how you thought about yourself, how you lived, what you learned, and where you applied this knowledge.” ~Marc and Angel Chernoff, Marc & Angel Hack Life Everywhere I look, I’m bombarded by ads for products that promise to erase wrinkles, hide age spots, and make me look 10 years younger. Several of my girlfriends have found the courage to let their hair go gray — and they look beautiful — but I haven’t mustered the courage to do the same. It’s human nature…
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Blooming
“One day you will look back and see that all along you were blooming.” ~ Morgan Harper Nichols, author and artist I found today’s quote while preparing for an “aging” workshop I’m leading at a local library tonight. An issue that appeared often in my research is the nagging belief that we “haven’t done enough” with our lives. No matter how accomplished we are in any arena, most of us undervalue our achievements and overlook our daily victories. But if you take inventory of all that you’ve done with your life, you’ll realize that you deserve more credit than you’ve been giving yourself. When you list your own moments of “blooming,”…
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Love and goodbye
“Grief is the price we pay for love.” ~Queen Elizabeth II Watching the beautiful funeral ceremonies for Queen Elizabeth II yesterday, I got to thinking about the many ways that love opens us to the possibility of loss. Throughout our lives, we lose close friends who move away. As we age, our parents slow down. As our kids and grandkids grow up, we feel another kind of loss as we watch childhood give way to adulthood. Each time I wave goodbye — when a car filled with loved ones is backing out of my driveway, or I’m leaving a dear friend at a restaurant — a twinge of sadness tugs…
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Forgiveness
“Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.” ~Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre I’ve been preparing for an upcoming journaling workshop that I’ll be leading on the topic of growing older with courage and grace. In every resource I’ve studied for this program, “forgiveness” is listed as essential to our wellbeing as we age. Everyone struggles with grudges, emotional wounds, or petty grievances. But as Anne Lammott writes in Traveling Mercies, “Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.” Forgiving someone who hurt you doesn’t always mean that the damaged relationship will return to normal — or even resume…
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Storms
“Not all storms come to disrupt your life. Some come to clear your path.” ~Angel Chernoff, Marc & Angel Hack Life Nature has a way of reminding us of who’s in control. Here in southeast Michigan, most of us can recall storms that left us without electricity for days. And in many other parts of the country, major storms have totally devastated the landscape and destroyed homes. Career changes, relationship conflicts, and health crises can also throw us off course or uproot our lives. But as today’s quote suggests, sometimes storms “clear the path” and change things for the better — even though we don’t realize it until we look…
