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What is the slant of the line of human development through age?

:- Doug.

I invite us to think about growing older and what it could mean for the species.

:- Doug.

Act your age but act
This is your time
To be for the generations

:- Doug.

Perhaps retirement has been bad for us. We are no longer engrossed and absorbed in something or someone in life. Elder playpens, honey-do lists, and pastimes only go so far. Then we are bored and we drop out of life. Life drops out of us.

:- Doug.

For me, a vital old age means working For the Grandchildren. I think that’s ultimately what we’re about in working for affordable housing, organizing against gun and gang violence, and baking cookies.

Does that cut out the person who can only sit and pray? By no means, get going with it. The person who has difficulty thinking and operating the spoon? I suspect not: they might have feet in both worlds, something to convey us along, if we would hear.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1847

Not knowing is profound. Not knowing is respect for something higher. Not knowing is respect for something other.

Please pass it on.

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Consumerist-oriented lifetime care communities are not communities—they are people who are the same, and centered around debility and decline. What keeps us going? What engages us? What questions will give us something to put our minds and spirits to work?

:- Doug.

The issue is not that we don’t want to grow old: it’s that we don’t want to buy into culture’s picture of age as decrepitude. We would live a vital old age.

:- Doug.

Despite it all: Alive.

:- Doug.

Risk
Involve
Stir

:- Doug.

Ultimately we cannot get through to another. We can only open ourselves totally. Trust. That’s when we might get miracles.

:- Doug.

Aging is simply more complex than imaginable.

:- Doug.

Tell us a time you felt really heard.

:- Doug.

Is the essence of what we want for the grandchildren that they each be more and more their real self? That comes by conversation, poetry, wholeness, and love.

:- Doug.

You never see yourself grow—but you do.

:- Doug.

We no longer are tabula rasa: we have written upon our slate.

:- Doug.

We have what we have experienced, plus perspective.

:- Doug.

What is it like to be your age?

:- Doug.

Aging is moving on.

:- Doug.

What are those new capacities after 60?

:- Doug.

Choose to move
choose to live

:- Doug.

Move or die!

:- Doug.

I no longer wish to die in my sleep: instead in the midst of life, riding a renegade mustang.

:- Doug.