FootprintsintheWind.com

We may not help the 300 year grandchild elder unless we call it help to blaze a trail or put up another rung on a ladder that no one may ever climb.

:- Doug.

We are not about making or keeping ourselves young. We are about making good of our years, whatever their number.

:- Doug.

The object is engagement, converse. These move us forward, individually and together.

:- Doug.

What are our areas of questions for our vital years? Health, living arrangements, work, agency, communion, variability, powers, capacities, loss of youth, gender differences, retirement, meaning, purpose, spirituality, far-sight, generativity, functionality, engagement, decisions, creativity, involvement, participation, development, reflectivity, individuation, changing, independence, freedom, risk, choice, helping, contributing, engaged, consciousness, caring.

:- Doug.

We have new capacities, new powers in age: how are we going to put them to good use?

:- Doug.

Life in age is possible: what else do we need to know?

:- Doug.

Owing to our rich variability, in age we are each exceptional.

:- Doug.

In my age, I am soaring!

:- Doug.

To age, to be older, is to differ, differ, differ from other older folks, be dramatically other, other, other. Recall that is the meaning of what some used to call the ancient of days: holy, holy, holy.

:- Doug.

What is it we each would develop in our own old age?

:- Doug.

Is it What is aging for?, or ought it be, What can we make of our aging?

:- Doug.

To age is to progress: as we choose.

:- Doug.

What if progress in life were not so much upwards ↗ to the top of some hill, but forwards → to new territory?

:- Doug.

Gross measures and subtle
tell how we’re doing
in youth, muscle, speed, stamina
in maturity, integrality, connectedness,
far-sight, creativity, life in spirit
How does one measure these?
And the mature do not care to measure

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1849

In front of you is a dangerous interface between the daily and the sacred. Will you work to bring life creating forces to community?

Please pass it on.

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What we have is declining growth of youth characteristics and increasing development of new capacities, capacities that hardly have a name.

:- Doug.

We have a new thing: let us put it to use for those who come after.

:- Doug.

Our society currently sees age as a decline of youthfulness. Of course: same as prayer is a decline of separation from the holy, study a decline of lack of knowledge. Youth is also a lack of the seasoning of age. Neither is better: both add to our humanity.

:- Doug.

Vital, vigorous, robust, active, intense with life, lively, spirited, strong, flourishing, hearty, rugged, sturdy, dynamic, zesty. What would be good words to describe old people?

:- Doug.

The freshman gains something but loses something else in the years becoming a senior. So too as she grows to becoming elder.

:- Doug.

Open conversations.

:- Doug.

When we say “I don’t feel old” we mean “I don’t feel the way society portrays old—as failing, decrepit, blithering. We can well feel vital.

:- Doug.

When you pray, do you take notes?

:- Doug.