One of the great gifts of our later years is the possibility of authenticity, or what Margaret Fuller called the radiant sovereign self, which comes from growing out of fears into wholeness.
Most of us met when we were in our vigorous thirties and forties. We were smart, energetic, and moving up. But now our energy was abating and we weren’t moving up anymore. Our conversations were about...
I do it for the relationships. I like to spend my time with people who are trying to make the world a fairer, kinder place. I’ve been in groups like this since college, and they have made me happy.
Freedom is the ability to make conscious choices in accord with our deepest values. It is the opposite of reactivity, which we could define as acting on every whim, impulse, and emotion that we experi...
For newcomers from slow cultures, time is a river that flows through their lives. They have no abstract sense of time. Refugees who have been on sun, seasonal, or Circadian-rhythm time find the change...
Dear sisters, I hope that we can experience bliss. I want us to sense how big life is—how intense, joyful, painful, complicated, and beautiful our lives can be. Let us embrace everything. This can be...
As we go about our troubled and sometimes frenzied lives, in this time of the Great Acceleration, we have close at hand ways we can move out of the time zone of our current century and into a transcen...
Realized that this cactus with its withered arms symbolized what my life would be. It would consist of thorns and fruit, pain and beauty. My body would age; my soul would expand.
We can take responsibility for our attitudes and focus on our strengths and our joys.
To truly recover, one must find a deep sense of purpose and meaning.
Our Western mental health system is dependent on verbal expressiveness, self-disclosure, and a belief in individualism. It splits the personal and the professional, the sacred and profane, and the min...
Newcomers need people from their own culture to orient them to America.
Most refugees end up on welfare. In feet, all of the refugees I know do 3-D work—difficult, dirty, and dangerous.
Most discussions about memory in older people concern deterioration and loss, but such discussions miss an important phenomenon. Our minds become less cluttered and more concerned with essentials. We...
Good stories build good lives. When we are lonely we can remember our good times with loved ones, a blazing sunset, or our sixtieth birthday dinner when everyone told us precisely what they loved abou...
Feeling grateful is not a moral injunction, but rather, a healthy habit that we can learn to employ with greater frequency.
Developmental psychologist Bernice Neugarten made this distinction between young-old age and old-old age. As long as we can do most of what we want to do, we are young-old age. When our health fundame...
Coalition members learned to make our points via stories. It is impossible to argue with a story that simply reflects the experience of the storyteller. People like stories and remember them. They cre...
As a general rule, I don’t talk long to climate change deniers. From sad experience I have learned that it is impossible to change their minds.
Working together, we were experiencing what Nelson Mandela called the multiplication of courage.