FootprintsintheWind.com

What does the idea of retirement represent for you? Freedom? Travel? Play? Doing your real living? Doing your real reason for being here? Concentrating on grandchildren? On your mission? A second career?

:- Doug.

He’s the 100% righteous man—he’s always right, everybody else is always wrong.

:- Doug.

What is the idealized heroic act you’d like to do? Write an inspiring story about this act.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1679

Seldom will you get an answer more profound than your question.

Please pass it on.

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How do we find and experience the marvelous?

:- Doug.

What kind of fireworks do you like best? What might that tell you about what end of life you’d like to live?

:- Doug.

What’s important at end of life? Living it!

:- Doug.

The 17 Caring Questions get at the edges of life.

:- Doug.

The brain makes a fog
That slows mind’s clarity
Maybe Alzheimer’s cuts the fog?

:- Doug.

Losing our brains to Alzheimer’s
Keeping our minds—what we do with our brains
We explore spirit beyond the brain’s fog

:- Doug.

The beyond is too “large” to hold in a word
Yet we must hold it our palm
Each day called to satisfy with touch or taste

:- Doug.

We each need a beyond of which we are part; and to see ourselves special heroes. These two can tug together: to see ourselves special heroes in the larger beyond.

:- Doug.

A man told me that at his age he and his friends talk about these end of life questions, but “It is too early to make any decisions.”

Well, not really. Now is the time to figure out personally, What do you want to do before you die?

And medically, How do you want to live the last paragraph of the last chapter of your life: hooked to bleeping machines, or in your home, or at your cabin in the woods? Do you want to be alert, or in la la land, or alert with pain at a bearable level? Do you want the last person you see be a doctor or nurse or your spouse or child or pet? These kinds of decisions then are the key ones.

These decisions will help people who love you make the specific choices when time for reflection is short.

:- Doug.

End of life conversations are not difficult; they are just ones we think we are not ready to have.

:- Doug.

End of life is not hard choices, but good ones: joy, meaning, love.

:- Doug.

Life is not a choice of open or closed.

:- Doug.

Heroism is not off or on.

:- Doug.

What are the roles of elders? Mentor, encourage, grace, guardian, ….

:- Doug.

So our task is to raise the level of personal heroism we can tolerate.

:- Doug.

We are each about as heroic as we can stand.

:- Doug.

We the cause of me
a web, a sea

:- Doug.

This is an exploration together of what it can mean to be human.

:- Doug.

Floating in a web
all of us are a-spinning
I release my grasp

:- Doug.