Photo by Julie B Adler

The year is 2026 and we can’t time travel yet. That’s the stuff of sci-fi fantasy; Einstein’s postulates; Back To The Future one, two, and three.

But I have.

Some might dispute my claim. ”Returning to the place of your youth after fifty years isn’t time travel.” Some might philosophically explain, ”You can’t step into the same water twice.”, or, more Felliniesque, for those who remember Fellini, “Life is an absurdular, circular fountain, you’ve just gone home. It’s not time travel.”

To me it is. I’ve found a new city sitting on roofs and foundations of an old one as in Paris, or Sicily, or innumerable other locations. Routes and cityscapes fixed in my mind and bones from hungry peregrinations around the city during my early residency are altered. While I was gone, Kendall Square expanded. The Seaport, other whole villages, neighborhoods within the city, arose, changed the scale, block the sun. Washington Street, the Financial District, are dominated by featureless monstrosities, punched between and onto human scaled buildings with embellished facades that denoted civic and personal pride.

The faces on the street are unfamiliar. The languages issuing from the mouths of couples, kids, and groups are unknown to me. They can’t know me either, but they stop me. Taking in the red wool coat that reaches to my ankles to repel the chill, they recognize that I am not of this city, colorful in the colorless cohort, different. The strangers, comfortable in the city, compliment me on my coat, my giveaway, the sign of a traveler.

During my past residency, assassinations, wars, classmates killed or in danger of being killed dominated our concerns otherwise consumed with school and friends and finding a place in the world. The events created shock waves one after another after another. A conviction to take action arose. It manifested in a giant wave of students and others marching down Commonwealth Avenue and onto Boston Common. Distrust of the powerful, fear of the reaction, raised tension. Parents, partners, some friends, warned us not go, but the strength of community carried me and the others to a peaceful demonstration of hope and values. We marched. We worked. We believed. And change happened. Slowly.

Back to the future, now. More war, more killings, and more marches. The faces of the marchers are older now, maybe the remnants of the phalanx that engaged in those long ago demonstrations. The tension is the same, distrust, fear. The outcome, this being the future, is uncertain.

Share

Subscribe now

Photo by Aditya Menon on Unsplash

I hate the word “retirement”. It carries so much baggage. People assume they know what you mean when you use the term, which limits inquiry and the opportunity for a deeper understanding.

Retirement often gets interpreted, especially by younger people, as a giving up, a resting on one’s laurels, an absence of striving for personal growth. It’s as if you’re one step closer to death. This is not the experience of my friends who are no longer working. A negative, visceral reaction to the word retirement is, in itself, often an obstacle to people moving forward to the next phase of their lives. In fact, the connotations and associations with the word retirement were holding me back from leaving my work as a lawyer. “I still feel vital and I love being engaged,” I said to myself. “I don’t want to give up or be complacent. I’m not ready for that.”

In confronting this dilemma, I searched for a better term than retirement for describing my post-work experience. The word “Jubilee” popped up. I really wasn’t sure what it meant, so I looked it up and found the following definition: “A special anniversary celebrating 25 or 50 years of an activity” or “according to Hebrew law, a time of emancipation and restoration.” I have added my own words to this definition: “a time of opportunity, creativity and discovery.” Recasting the next phase of my life as Jubilee was thrilling. I became very excited about embracing a time of increased emancipation, discovery, and creativity.

As I pondered Jubilee, I wondered what creativity might mean for me in this phase of life. My most compelling conclusion was that creativity during the Jubilee phase involved doing new things, especially pursuits that expanded my boundaries and challenged my comfort zone. I committed to pursuing activities that I previously had determined I didn’t have the time or the necessary skills to accomplish. I came up with three goals initially: playing a stringed instrument, doing puzzles, and learning to be a good cook. Embracing puzzle work came easily although I wasn’t very good at it. My morning puzzle time has been both fun and challenging. Learning to play a stringed instrument was a different matter. I had taken guitar lessons in my 50s and the only thing I learned was that my fingers could not successfully form a chord. For my Jubilee party, my wife gave me a ukulele and a series of lessons. She had been told the ukulele was a lot easier to play and I could move on to the guitar if I was so inclined. I struggled mightily at first, but with the patient support of my wonderful instructor, I made progress. Slow and steady progress. Now, while I’m no virtuoso, I can competently play a variety of songs. I often choose old songs that have special meaning to me. Learning to be a better cook never got off the ground. My wife and I agreed to maintain the status quo for both of our benefits.

To thrive in Jubilee, it was necessary for me to reevaluate the goals and activities that had defined my previous adult life. I needed to emancipate myself from many of my previous ways of thinking and behaviors. I explored who I am at this stage of my life and created a way of being that is compatible with my current true self and that makes my heart sing. After much exploration, my current approach to this stage of life can be summarized by the mantra: “I seek engagement that is not stressful.”

Once I began to understand who I am and what I want in Jubilee, I had to engage in a discovery process of building a new way to be in the world. I visualized my life as a mosaic filled with many tiles of different sizes and shapes that represent different aspects of my life. In the past, two huge tiles- my career and my family- filled up most of the frame with other important activities around the edges. Now that I am not working, and my children are adults, there is room for many more tiles of different sizes, shapes, and colors. While I remain committed to my part-time practice as a life coach and to spending time with my grandkids, my mosaic remains spacious and I can experiment with different combinations and levels of engagement. I work hard to free myself from the voice in my head that tells me what I “should” do and offers other limiting messages; my goal is to focus on what my heart desires consistent with whom I am now.

In my working life, I felt motivated to do things on a grand scale with the potential for a big impact. In Jubilee, a profound part of recreating my life is the discovery that doing small things that have a more immediate impact and reward give me the most satisfaction. I volunteer in my grandkids’ school which is very diverse, racially and economically, and where there are very few volunteers. Working with individual kids or small groups of students has felt very rewarding. I leave the school feeling energized and excited about my next sessions with the students. In the past I would not have been satisfied to work on such a small scale. I would have aspired to create a new program for the school and use my energy and contacts to recruit an army of volunteers. While I recognize that such a large project would be very helpful, and while my brain encourages me to do it, my heart informs me that such a project is not a good fit with my true self as it exists today. I much prefer the smaller endeavor of working with individual students. There are certainly times I need to engage in self-talk to stave off those grandiose thoughts and stay true to who I am today and what feels fulfilling. I am a work in progress and sometimes I struggle and fall short.

I am blessed with good health, great friends, a fabulous family and financial security. Together they comprise a solid bedrock for this stage my life. I recognize that I have the privilege to follow my heart. I appreciate that my wonderful circumstances provide an opportunity to make Jubilee such an exciting and enriching time in my life.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Photo by Rebecca Robak with permission from and thanks to the photographer

It’s January. It’s cold. The barren branches and shriveled bark of the maples cast scraggly shadows across the rocky ledge, now hidden beneath a heavy tarp of snow. There are no bluebirds to be seen.

In August, a black bear swatted down two of our bluebird houses. It tore the wood into ragged pieces and gobbled up the hatchlings. Our daughter had refurbished the houses with sturdy metal poles, put hinges on their doors to make them easy to clean, and secured anti-squirrel protectors, like aluminum umbrellas, on the poles. Last year, she had added the third house, lining them up in a row where my husband could see them from his reading chair. After the bluebirds began again, with a new batch of eggs in the third house, the bear leveled that one too.

Our daughter believes she can find bear-proof poles. I caution her that it’s nearly impossible to defeat a bear that weighs three hundred pounds and stands six feet tall after it has developed a taste for newly hatched chicks.

A few days ago, a bear whacked down our neighbor’s bird feeder. Bears prowl through our neighborhood during the summer months, but in January, they’re supposed to be hibernating.

It’s January. It’s too cold for bluebirds to be flitting about. Too cold for Minnesotans to be protesting in the streets of Minneapolis.

I’m proud to have grown up in Minnesota. Proud of the way they’ve braved the arctic winds to stand up for justice after federal agents killed two citizens while pursuing undocumented immigrants. A mother of three young children. A man who worked as a registered nurse for the V.A. Each only thirty-seven years old. The shootings took place near Augsburg College, now Augsburg University, the campus where I earned my undergraduate degree.

I’m proud of the Minnesotans who stand up for their neighbors, no matter their race, faith, or origin. Proud of our neighbors and friends in Berkshire County who have joined the protests and vigils. Proud to know that their voices are united in a powerful chorus that has reverberated across Minneapolis and towns and cities throughout our nation.

When spring arrives, the bluebirds will return. They will perch in nearby trees and warble soft chirping songs while they wait for our daughter to set up the birdhouses.

My husband and I liked to watch the bluebirds as they disappeared into the houses with blades of grass protruding from the sides of their beaks, and a few weeks later, filled with beetles and bugs to feed the newly hatched chicks. For decades, he was the one who had built the houses and repaired them every spring.

But during the last several years, he has stopped watching the bluebirds. At eighty-eight, dementia has erased those memories. He will not notice that the houses are gone. He will not miss the patches of blue the bluebirds had splashed into our days.

A week ago, a bobcat snuggled up beside the glass door that opens into our neighbor’s kitchen. She snapped a photograph of their housecat, which looks like the bobcat but is half its size, as it sat on the opposite side of the door and stared at the bobcat. I sent the photo to my son, who has two cats that never leave their house.

“The bobcat may have that nice thick body from snacking on housecats,” he texted back.

It’s cold. Too cold for the bluebirds. They’re staying warm by huddling in cavities and hollows in tree trunks. In the spring, they’ll wait for our bluebird houses to reappear. This year, their vigil will be in vain.

The bluebirds will perch on the branches of the crabapple tree as they wait. I will sit beside my husband and wonder about bears and bobcats and the armed agents prowling our streets.

Leave a comment

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Photo by Resume Genius on Unsplash

Years ago, I worked with a young woman who told me that her goal in life was to be a lawyer. Her father and grandfather had been lawyers, and she was determined to follow in their footsteps. She was distressed that her college grades were not as high she had wanted, and her scores on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) were also not what she would have liked, even after taking two courses and studying with a coach.

She had been told she could probably get into a “good” law school, including the one that her father and grandfather had both attended, but not one of the top ones. She wasn’t happy about this advice. When I asked her what made it so important to go to the schools she could get into, she said, “I just don’t want to be second – or third – best. I want to be at the top.”

She was hoping that therapy could help her raise her exam scores.

“How do you think therapy can help?” I asked

She wasn’t sure, but she insisted that I help her get what she wanted.

I said, “We can work on any anxiety you have about test-taking, and we can explore any unconscious reasons you might have for not doing better on the exam. But there’s nothing we can do to change your grades from the last four years, and nothing we can do to change the admissions regulations.”

She burst into tears. “I have to get into a top law school. I won’t survive if I don’t.”

I told her it sounded like she was having trouble adjusting to the possibility that she wouldn’t be able to achieve her dream in exactly the way she had in mind. She shook her head.

As we talked, it became clear that she was dreading being disappointed. We did work together, for a number of years. Over time, this young woman gradually learned that while failing to achieve her goals could be painful, disappointment could be tolerated. Not only was her “failure” manageable, but it was sometimes a door to other possibilities.

I have been thinking about her recently, probably because I have heard from several people that their lives have not been what they expected. When I ask them to tell me more, they often talk about their disappointment in others, in themselves, in the world, and in the life they have lived. And I have been wondering if disappointment, or at least the way we handle the experience, is different as we age.

The reality is that there is no way to make that kind of generalization, in my humble opinion. But in my own experience, and in my work, I have come to think that the answer is a complicated “yes and no.”

When I was in the psychoanalysis that was part of my training to become a psychoanalyst myself, my analyst would ask about an experience, “Was it what you expected?”

I often answered that it was much better than I had expected. Because he was a psychoanalyst, he wanted to look more deeply at my answer, and gradually we discovered that I tended to protect myself from disappointment by lowering my expectations of anything I undertook and any person with whom I had a connection.

It was a good way of protecting myself from the frustration and pain of having my desires thwarted, and I still use it to some extent today. But with his help, I learned that having such low expectations could interfere with my willingness to take chances, to try new things, or to open myself up to the unknown.

Along the way, I also learned to cope with disappointment. I had to learn that unmet expectations were not the end of the world. Like my client, I also had to learn that I could recover from the hurt of disillusionment, the pain of rejection, and the frustration of a project that failed to live up to its potential. And I discovered that when I accepted these feelings, the failure of one dream could lead to the beginning of different aspirations.

I suspect that these lessons come to many of us as we age. We deal with loss of loved ones, failure of our bodies, and plans gone awry on a regular basis.

But are we more comfortable with these disappointments than we were in the past? I have a friend who has turned every disappointment into a different success. He spent several years working on a book that never took off, and he was indeed frustrated and sad about the failure of his dream to become a popular author. But he let it go, moved on, and in his late seventies began a start-up business that, while not a roaring success, kept him engaged for several more years and offered work to a number of young people during a time when traditional paths of employment were blocked to them.

When I asked him if he dealt differently with his disappointments in the Third Age than he had when he was younger, he said, “I probably always had a ‘get up, dust off your pants, and start again’ attitude. But these days, I feel like time is more limited, and if something isn’t working, it’s a waste of precious hours to sit and brood about it. So maybe I’ve got even more skin in the game now. I’m not going to let a setback stop me from living.”

In my work, I see many people who are disappointed by others: spouses, children, folks at work. And I have changed my approach with them. I take a more focused stance, asking them much the same question my friend asks himself.

“Do you really want to spend all this time focused on what you didn’t get or aren’t getting? Wouldn’t it be better to try to move forward, maybe in a different way, to get satisfaction in another way in your life?”

Another friend told me that disappointment still hurts, but she has learned that it can force her to change her attitude and her approach. She was disappointed and sad when her daughter failed to send her a gift one Mother’s Day. “But then I had a talk with myself, and reminded myself that she was a very giving daughter in many ways. So what if she missed one day?

“I’m so glad that I had that conversation with myself, and didn’t send her a nasty text, which I had thought about doing. The next day she called me, horrified that she hadn’t called or sent me anything. She said she had thought Mother’s Day was the following week, and that my present was on its way.”

My friend forgave her daughter immediately. “I’m not sure I would have been able to just sit with that disappointment years ago,” she told me. “Something is different now. I’m more patient, more comfortable with myself and with my family…I don’t know exactly what. But it is different.”

Disappointment, I have learned, is a matter of accepting the unpredictability, healing your injuries, and taking a step in a new direction. Easy to say, not so easy to do. But maybe easier when you’ve lived through enough dissatisfaction to know that there will be more pleasure at other times

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

.

Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@gettyimages

Dear friends -

I'm trying an experiment. This month I'm asking you to read my “Aging Without a Map” post on Medium. Click here to read it. Please let me know how it goes!

Many thanks!

Diane

Photo credit: Gabriel Soto on Unsplash

My friend Marguerite just came back from an adventure trip to the Everglades in Florida. I expected her to be raving about it, but she wasn’t. What she said was that she had been anxious from the minute she left her apartment.

“I’m not used to traveling on my own,” she told me. “So I don’t know, I just felt anxious about everything, from getting my luggage up and down the stairs on the subway to finding the right terminal at the airport. And probably because of the anxiety, I got a migraine that first day. Then I worried that I’d be miserable the whole time!”

Marguerite, many years my junior, is no stranger to travel. She and her boyfriend, with whom she lived for twelve years, have been all over the world. They broke up two years ago, however, and Marguerite has been slowly putting her life back together.

“It’s not really true that I haven’t traveled alone,” she said. “I’ve flown by myself to see my mom in San Francisco, and I’ve visited friends in Europe. But this was different. I knew from the beginning that it was going to be hard for me.”

So why was she doing it? Why put herself through this much anxiety and discomfort?

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how hard it is to stretch our psychological and emotional muscles, as well as our physical muscles as we get older. Marguerite is still in her late forties, but I think the anxiety she felt for the whole trip reflected the tightness in her psyche’s musculature.

What does that mean? Maybe a physical example is the best illustration.

About a year and a half ago, I began to have sharp pains in my shoulder. None of my usual techniques seemed to help. I used Arnica, then Advil, and finally Aleve, all of which provided temporary moderation of the pain, but did not end it. Massage provided temporary relief. Yoga and Pilates seemed to irritate it.

I finally went to my doctor, who sent me to an incredible occupational therapist. With her help, I changed how I sit at my computer, lowered my keyboard and mouse, and got a new computer chair. She showed me how I’d been misusing my arm and abusing my shoulder on a daily basis and gave me exercises to correct the misuse.

Recently, as often happens when pain diminishes gradually, I realized I had been pain-free for some time. But when I went for a follow-up appointment, the therapist told me I was holding my shoulder tightly, as though still trying to protect it.

“You don’t need to hold it anymore,” she said. “Try to stretch it just a little bit each day.”

The five-night canoe trip through the Everglades was Marguerite’s attempt to stretch herself through the emotional vulnerability that came with the end of her relationship.

The group was going to paddle and hike for miles each day and sleep in shelters along the way at night. The tour company organizing the trip provided meals, guides, and a ride to and from the airport.

“I was nervous about meeting people, living with them for five days, sleeping in the outdoors, and dealing with snakes and alligators,” she said. “I do a lot of canoeing and kayaking and hiking, so I wasn’t worried about the physical activity. That part just seemed like a good challenge. I love being on the water, and I’ve always wanted to spend time in the Everglades, so that was a huge draw. And this tour company has a terrific reputation.”

Despite much planning on Marguerite’s part, the trip didn’t begin as she had imagined. A problem erupted with the transportation from the airport to the starting point of the trip. But to her relief, she met up with other members of the group at the airport.

“Everyone was frustrated, but we were all in the same boat, and we were looking forward to the trip, so it was a good bonding experience.”

The migraine intensified, which sometimes happens when she’s under stress.

“I had taken my meds, so I headed off the worst part; but I wasn’t fully okay that first day and night, and I was worried that it was going to stay with me the whole time.”

The first night, she barely slept.

“Every time I dozed off, some bird or reptile or animal made a sound, and I jerked awake. I was sure they would creep into my sleeping bag with me. But the morning was absolutely, stunningly beautiful. I went for a short walk while most of the rest of the group slept. It was peaceful and glorious, and I was so glad to be there.”

The food, she said, wasn’t great. Still, she had plenty to eat and was fueled for the days’ activities.

The Everglades were as wonderful as she had imagined.

“And the people,” she said, “were great! I was probably the oldest person there, but everyone was kind, caring, and interesting — and grateful to be part of this excursion. But I didn’t stop feeling anxious till I got back home.”

“Are you sorry that you went?” I asked.

“Oh no,” she said. “I feel like I stretched something in my psyche — in my whole self. I used muscles — real ones and psychological ones — that I didn’t know I had, but that’s only part of it. It’s as if my sense of myself expanded outside my normal boundaries. Does this make any sense?”

It made total sense to me.

We often hold onto old habits and comfortable experiences in order to protect our vulnerabilities. But a little daily stretching can make a huge difference psychologically as well as physically.

A trip like Marguerite’s is not exactly a “little” stretching. But I am trying to do new things in small ways, just to keep my psyche flexible. Last week, for instance, I went to a holiday party on my own, without my husband.

I don’t do parties, if I can help it, and I can’t remember attending one without him in the almost fifty years we’ve been together. I did make sure that a friend would be there, so that I wouldn’t be completely on my own. But it was a huge party. We were each other’s “safe base,” but we also went our separate ways for a large part of the time.

Maybe it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but to me, attending that party solo was like trying to stretch the shoulder that has hurt for so long. I was nervous about trying and happy to have done it.

I don’t think I’ll be rushing to look for other such opportunities, but my psyche doesn’t go into panic mode when I think about it now. And I’m looking around for something else that takes me outside my psychological and emotional comfort zone. Something that’s a good stretch.

Leave a comment

Share

Photo credit: ahmet-kurt-Qqw_p9-LYKg-unsplash.jpg

I have recently been talking with friends, family, and clients about the surprising hardships of caretaking, something many of us suddenly are facing as we age. When we’re young, if we think about aging with a partner, we tend to have lovely images of growing old together, sitting in our rocking chairs, holding hands, looking out on a lovely view. But often, in this unmapped time of our lives, we suddenly discover that we are on different paths. We’re still holding hands, but we have to stretch and sometimes one of us is holding the other up across rocky, difficult terrain.

David Kessler, a brilliant clinician who specializes in grief and mourning, described the “invisible grief” related to caregiving this way:

“The person you love is still here, but not in the same way. And you’re still here, but changed in quiet, hard-to-explain ways. That change can feel confusing, even when it’s wrapped in love. Sometimes, nothing feels quite solid.”

It’s crucial that we caregivers take care of ourselves as well as our partners, but that’s not always a simple task, especially when any self-care reinforces our sense of loss.

That’s what happened to me when it became clear that, because of an injury, my husband could no longer ride a bike. We had biked together for 45 years. Not being able to do it was a loss for both of us.

I’m not a hiker or runner, but gentle outdoor exercise has always been one of my favorite self-care activities. He encouraged me to go biking by myself or with a friend, but it wasn’t the same without him. We had a rhythm, a way of riding that worked beautifully. No one else was an acceptable substitute for me. And doing it alone felt too…lonely.

I was lucky. He stubbornly insisted I figure out something to do, and when I said I might like to do some more stand-up paddleboarding, he began looking for local rentals for me. (Love, Loss, and Stand-up Paddleboarding). He came with me and sat in the boathouse, reading and chatting, while I spent an hour on the water. But paddleboarding was a good activity only during the summer months.

I love yoga and Pilates, but with my husband’s encouragement, I reached back into childhood for an old joy that I could revisit in my Third Age.

I was horse crazy for much of my childhood, despite never having seen one in the flesh. I devoured Marguerite Henry’s series of books, starting with Misty of Chincoteague, and graduated to Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka and sequels. Like so many girls my age, I adored Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty.

But my parents were struggling financially, so riding lessons were out of the question for me. Until one of the customers at my dad’s clothing store offered to barter with him: riding lessons at the stable he owned in exchange for clothes.

My lessons consisted of being put on a horse, shown how to hold the reins, and told not to let the horse know if I was afraid. Maybe there was more, but that’s what I remember.

I rode whenever I could despite being thrown, bitten, and kicked more often than was probably good for me. I always got up and back on the horse. Eventually the stable went out of business, which ended my riding time, leaving me with a lifelong, complicated relationship with horses. I was a fairly skilled rider, adored riding, but was also always afraid of them. As an adult in NYC, I rode occasionally in Central Park, but it was expensive and, as I now realize, dangerous. I went out alone, even though I didn’t know the horses, didn’t wear a helmet, and didn’t tell anyone where I would be riding. In my forties, with a young child at home, I ended my riding career.

I had sometimes imagined revisiting my equestrian dreams, but this time with a kind, supportive instructor. But even if such a person existed, was it a good idea with my aging body?

Again, as he had when he found a place for me to paddleboard, my beloved husband took over the caregiving for a little while. He pushed me to find a stable where I might get lessons, and he even went with me the first time. The Blue Rider Stable in Egremont, Massachusetts, turned out to be a therapeutic riding stable whose mission, as they write on their website, is “to offer a holistic educational environment in which people and animals can safely interact and, through their mutual therapeutic experiences, broaden the scope of their lives.” They also work with individuals with a wide range of therapeutic needs, from trauma to neurodifferences and physical disabilities.

They explained to me that horses are herd animals and work better in groups, so they have created a system of group lessons that feel like individual ones.

Since I began riding with them, I have met other older riders whose early experiences left them with the same conflicting anxiety and longing that I felt about horses.

They also have youngsters in an internship program, where they learn to ride and care for the animals and, simultaneously, to operate as a team with other young people. In the years since I started with them, I’ve had the great joy of watching some of the early learners become guides for newcomers. The growth around that stable is powerful.

I have learned much about group dynamics as my teachers explain something that is going on in the herd or between two or three of the horses. They also include donkeys in their stable, which provide a calming influence and protect the herd from predators. This is important because the animals sleep outside in the woods around the stable.

These women and the horses quietly and empathically provided emotional support when my caretaking job got harder after my husband was seriously injured in a fall a couple of years ago. They made riding simple for me to keep up my practice, despite changes in my schedule, living situation, and availability.

I’m thrilled to report that I no longer feel anxious when I get on a horse. I’m still learning, but I can catch, groom, and get a horse ready to ride these days, an amazing boost to my self-confidence. I always leave there happy.

But the stable recently had a bizarre incident. A skunk got into the riding ring and attacked one of the horses. One of the donkeys fulfilled his job and kicked the skunk and knocked it unconscious. The skunk was discovered to have rabies. Although the herd has all been vaccinated, they are required to be quarantined for 45 days.

The stable is suffering from lost revenue and the cost of vet bills and vaccinations. Although I miss them terribly, I’m lucky to have my yoga and Pilates while waiting for them to reopen. But many other riders, who count on them for connection to the world, are suffering from the break.

The staff is taking good care of the animals, none of which are showing any signs of illness. They’re providing “horseless” activities for many of their riders, since the public is not allowed to have any interaction with the horses. I wish I could give something back to them in this time of need, but the only thing I have to offer is to spread the word. If you feel inclined, I’m including the link to their GoFundMe page. Please don’t feel pressured. I won’t know if you contribute or not. I’m just putting it out there.

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions.

https://gofund.me/78435ef58

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Photo credit: Rodion Kutsaiev for Unsplash+

Diane Keaton’s recent death was, for me, not just a reminder of my own aging, but also of the troubled and private world behind the person we see in front of us. Perhaps movie stars and famous people of all sorts are particularly vulnerable to this duality of selves, but social media contributes to and perpetuates the split image that has been part of how we humans represent ourselves for a very long time.

We have now been told that Keaton died of pneumonia, but the secrecy initially surrounding her death reminded me of a story I heard years ago. Struggling with the clear evidence of encroaching Alzheimer’s, a woman in her seventies quietly committed suicide. The family explained her death as an accident, but it turned out that she wanted to spare them, and herself, the pain of what she had been through with her own mother, who had also had the disease. Why couldn’t that courageous decision be made public?

One answer, I believe, is shame. There is still, sadly, a stigma surrounding Alzheimers, so some people don’t want anyone to know that they have a family member with the disease. Also, we tend to feel shame about not being able to protect a loved one, and we want to protect them and their privacy, at least, after their death.

When I first started working with clients with eating disorders in the early 1980s, I heard frequent tales of girls who had grown up with the idea that they had to look pretty and seem happy, no matter how much they were suffering inside. Families fought violently, but silently, behind the walls of their homes. They did not want neighbors to know about alcohol and drug problems, infidelity, money issues. They wanted to present a beautiful, blissful façade to the world. Clients told me they sensed that they could be addicted to drugs or sex, spend money they didn’t have, shoplift (as long as they didn’t get caught), and be in abusive relationships, as long as they looked good to an outside observer.

Although this dictum sounds horrible, isn’t it in some way what we’ve all been doing for many years? Whatever was going on underneath, whoever was suffering and however they might have been struggling, we preferred to “put on a happy face” and pretend all was good. And for some of us, of course, things were good. As long as we didn’t look too closely at what wasn’t working for everyone else.

I wonder if, in some ways, what is happening in our government is a sign of the crumbling of a façade many of us have unwittingly perpetuated. Now we are wondering if our democracy wasn’t as great as we thought. Capitalism worked for some but not for others. Underneath the shiny image of the United States as a great, successful, and benevolent masterpiece of a country was a seething mass of pain, anger, and rage.

As some of you know, I run study groups for other therapists around the US (what did we do before we had videoconferencing???), where we read articles and discuss issues that help us think about our work and expand our knowledge, in order to help our clients better manage their lives. These groups are a wonderful way for clinicians from different parts of the country, with different practices and skill sets, to share their own feelings and get support and encouragement from colleagues.

Recently, we read an article by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas on the topic of “bewilderment.” The term, which the dictionary defines as a feeling of being perplexed and confused, perfectly captures what many of us are struggling with on a daily basis. Most of us don’t like this sense of confusion at all.

But Bollas tells us that without being confused, or bewildered, we cannot learn or change or grow. We simply go on being the self we present to the world, without paying attention to possibilities that are not already in our view. In other words, we close ourselves off to anything except what we think we know already.

If children refused to be confused, they would not learn to walk, talk, ride bikes, play games, think, or find friends. They try to find order and meaning, sometimes in charming and sometimes in irritating ways. Think of a five-year-old who has learned to play a game and simply will not play if you try to alter the rules – except when he starts to lose, and he suddenly makes a change in the very regulations he has been guarding so assiduously.

Bollas thinks that our inability to be confused, or bewildered, also makes it hard for us to know ourselves. If we have to have all the answers ahead of time, we can’t reflect on who we are, what we believe, and how we want to live our lives.

There could be many reasons that Diane Keaton’s death isn’t being explained to the public. She deserves her privacy, even in death. My mind simply was trying to make sense of something that left me bewildered, so I connected the dots in a way that gave me some closure. But it isn’t necessarily right at all.

I’ve been trying, in different ways and with different degrees of success, to live with “not knowing” in my professional work and in my personal life. It has gotten easier as I’ve aged. But it’s still uncomfortable.

But I think that allowing ourselves to be bewildered and confused, along with all of the other emotions we’re feeling these days, is a better path than assuming we know. Because we don’t. We don’t know how this happened. We don’t know why. We all have ideas, but we must acknowledge that some of those ideas may or may not be right.

Being bewildered doesn’t mean passively accepting our fate. Genuine, deep, and honest self-reflection is filled with nuance, contradiction, and confusion. If we keep our minds open, and especially if we try to share our confusion, doubts, and disorganized insides with others, we have a better chance of living up to our own values and beliefs. Allowing ourselves to be bewildered makes room for the inescapable nuances in our beliefs, contradictions in our thoughts, and confused ideas that our own mind doesn’t want to acknowledge.

When we make room for nuance, contradiction, and confusion, we can stop looking for one “right answer” and start growing again.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Photo credit: Shutterstock id# 2411994537 photographer: Roman Samborskyi

When I first let my hair go gray, I noticed an odd change in my personality. I’ve always been a person of strong opinions, but when I was younger, I tended to be somewhat tentative about expressing them to strangers or in crowds. (My family, of course, will tell you that they never saw that timidity.)

Along with my gray hair, however, I developed a much less circumspect attitude in the world at large. I’m not talking about the “my way or the highway” or “if you don’t agree with me you can’t be my friend” kind of discord that we’re seeing these days. I’m talking about the ability to express my opinion, even if it isn’t going to win friends or make people like me.

My new attitude first appeared while I was walking with my friend Cynthia in New York City’s Central Park, when a couple of teens playing inline hockey on the walkway accidentally hit my leg hard with their puck. I picked up the puck and put it in my pocket. The kids skated up to me and asked for it back.

“Well,” I said, “first give me your names and addresses so I can have my lawyer contact you in case my leg gets worse.” They looked at me in horror. “Well, it’s kind of dumb to be playing this kind of game on a public path filled with old ladies and little kids.”

“If we promise to go somewhere else to practice, will you give it back?” one of them asked.

“Sure,” I said, “but I still need your info in case I hear that you just went to another busy spot in the park and injured someone else.”

“We’ll go to the skate park right now,” said the other teen.

I gave them the puck back. Cynthia laughed when they left and said, “I can’t believe you did that. Who have you turned into?”

“My grandmother,” I told her.

Grandma dyed her hair blonde until she died at the age of 86, so my new attitude obviously didn’t have anything to do with the color of my hair. But it felt to me like it did. Research has shown that societal attitudes towards gray hair vary widely, but that we all bring our own beliefs to the table when we encounter someone with gray hair or turn gray ourselves.

Some deeply hidden part of me must have believed that becoming gray gave me permission to be more ummm… hopefully not aggressive, but assertive. But other, more accessible, parts worried that I was courting disaster by opening up more discord in my life.

So when I was at a webinar recently in which the respected innovator in infant and child development, Dr. Ed Tronick, was interviewed, I was fascinated to hear him saying that he believed discord was crucial to healthy development. His theory of “rupture and repair,” based on years of observation of parents and young children and infants, is that we would never learn to manage disappointment, hurt, and difficult interpersonal experiences if we didn’t have moments of discord and disharmony.

The research tells us that the repair of these ruptures is an extremely important component of the learning process. If there is no opportunity to make things right, we become depressed and/or anxious or both. We lose our sense of agency or competence in the world, or we never develop it in the first place.

I wish the interviewer had asked Dr. Tronick how he thought this concept was playing out in the world today, when we are all clustering with folks who believe the same things we do. I remember as a kid hearing my parents argue about the presidential election of 1956. My mother was a staunch fan of Democrat candidate Adlai Stevenson, while my father was planning to vote for Eisenhower, the Republican candidate.

I can’t say I loved the arguments, but I did learn that two people who love each other can have strongly divergent opinions. I recently started reading the book, I Love You but I Hate Your Politics by a former classmate of mine, Jeanne Safer, who describes herself as “a liberal Democrat married for thirty-nine years to a senior editor at National Review, the leading conservative journal of opinion.” Safer’s goal in writing this book is to let people know that it’s possible to have serious political discord with someone you love. She promotes civil, safe disagreements, and, like Tronick, healthy reparation and connection.

My recognition that I could disagree nicely, even with someone who hit me in the leg with a hockey puck, seemed to emerge around the time that my hair turned gray and my psyche adjusted to being an older person.

I just wish I knew how we could all learn that lesson much earlier in life.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share

Photo credit: Shutterstock #2180240221

Shortly after my forty-third birthday, I took my watch to the jeweler to be cleaned, since I could no longer read the little date in the box on the side. This was, of course, before the advent of digital and apple watches with big faces and clear numbers. The jeweler laughed and said the watch face, including the date, was completely clean and told me not to worry, it happened all the time to his over-forty customers.

“Get your eyes checked,” he said. “It’s probably time for you to get reading glasses.” Since I’d been wearing glasses since fourth grade and was familiar with the reality that eyes change over time, I was okay with the recommendation. In fact, I realized that I’d been squinting when I read for a while, so maybe reading glasses made sense. My eye doctor confirmed that it was time.

But that was just the beginning of the slow process of dealing with my eyes getting older. First my watch, then printed words. When I complained to my ophthalmologist that even my distance vision had gotten blurry, he laughed.

“For far-sighted folks like you,” he said, “the changes in vision can be hard to take. You’re used to really clear vision for everything except what’s up close. But now your eyes don’t adjust as easily and the distance starts to get a little blurry too. it’s a hard shift. But there’s nothing wrong with your eyes. The changes are normal by products of aging.”

Even then, I wasn’t too upset. Aging is a normal part of life, I told myself. And I reminded myself that I was still relatively young! But, of course, no one stays relatively young for long.

In the shower one day, I dropped my razor, which, as it had done a million times before, fell apart. I usually just picked it up and put it back together. But this time I was horrified to realize that I couldn’t see where the little pieces fit with each other. Worried that I was going to slice a finger on the blade, I got out of the shower, found my glasses, put the razor back together, and finished showering. After that incident, I considered just wearing my glasses into the shower, but that wasn’t a particularly optimal solution. Now I only buy one-piece razors.

My friends and I sympathized with one another as we exchanged reading glasses for bifocals and then, bifocals for into progressive glasses, with their multiple lenses for each eye.

I was lucky. My eyes and brain adjusted quickly, and I love my glasses these days. Although I don’t love the fact that I can’t read a word without them anymore.

Still, I can read when I’m wearing them, which is a great blessing. And I can afford to buy them, which is another great blessing. I have clients who can’t afford new glasses, although they know they need them. But they seldom complain. They have other issues to deal with, which feel much more important.

I have never heard my friend John, who has been blind since birth, complain about not being able to see. My brother Rick, who could barely see his hand in front of his face when he was a child, also never complained about his vision. Only when a teacher told our mom that he needed glasses did she learn how bad his vision was.

She told me, when I was an adult, that she would never get over his excitement when he went outside with his new glasses. “I didn’t know that you could see the leaves on the trees,” he said with wonder.

So, for many reasons, I don’t think I should complain about my aging eyes. I should be grateful that they still work and that I can see quite well, even if I’m developing cataracts and have a “predisposition” for glaucoma. Even more, I am grateful for the medical field, which is constantly upgrading glasses and discovering clever ways to deal with these problems of mature eyes.

But still. I do complain. I join in the “organ recitals” with friends, as we compare notes on current illnesses and physical complaints. I think it’s okay. Maybe even more than okay. The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut wrote that hypochondria is a way of making sure all the parts of the self are still there. Body complaints as we get older do the same thing. They let us know that we still exist. Our joints may be creaky, our muscles less flexible, and our brains and eyes and ears less functional, but our complaints remind us that we’re still here. And complaining with friends means they’re here too. Nothing wrong with that.

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Photo credit: shutterstock ID #2441070157 Photographer: Arina P Habich

I’ve never had anything against stairs. But as we get older, stairs take on a new significance. Friends tell tales of slipping, of breaking a collarbone or a wrist on a fall on stairs.

After my husband’s backward tumble from the third step of our son’s home a little over two years ago, my relationship with stairs became more fraught.

It’s not that I don’t like them, exactly. My home office is on the second floor of my small Cape Cod house, so they are an important part of my daily life. Without them, I couldn’t get to or from work. But instead of easily making my way up and down, a cup of tea in one hand and my phone in the other, as I had done for years, I now faced them with the trepidation of an aging body. Also, I was pretty sure they had gotten steeper after my husband’s accident.

I’m a psychotherapist, so I told myself it was natural to have a little post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). My husband’s tumble cracked and chipped bones and created serious bleeding in his head. He was in the hospital trauma unit for a week and inpatient rehab for another month. Outpatient rehab is ongoing. He didn’t talk or eat for a long part of that time. We weren’t sure that he would survive, and if he did, how much brain function he would have left.

He did survive, and he has amazed all his doctors with his recovery. He needs a walker to get around, and his ability to process some information is a little wonky, but at the age of eighty-five his memory and ability to think and hold conversations about complex topics surpass that of some of our younger friends and family.

I still have a problem with stairs.

Like almost everyone I know, everything that happens in my life these days is colored by worries about the state of the world and the state of the country in which I live. I can’t help but think that my stair anxiety reflects my anxiety about these issues. I am deeply concerned about the impact of climate change on my grandchildren. I ache when I think about the men, women, and children starving in Gaza and the war in Ukraine. Closer to home, because I volunteer my services as a psychotherapist to individuals and families applying for asylum, I am frightened with and for my clients, who hide from ICE agents and all of whom know someone who has been detained and/or deported.

Fears about the outside world color our internal anxiety. As I made my way up and down the stairs to my office, I grip the banister tightly. One day I caught myself counting the steps. “Only two more to go,” I told myself. If only I could see the end of the trauma in the world as easily.

I tell my psychotherapy clients that we have to take care of our personal fears if we are going to try to act on these other concerns. I remembered the day a friend’s young daughter taught herself to go up and down the steps to their front porch, many years ago. This child has grown into a woman of great intelligence and courage, characteristics that were already apparent when she was two years old.

All of us were focused on her older sister, who was learning to ride her bike without training wheels, so no one was paying attention to the younger child’s efforts. Wanting to make sure she was safe, I moved over toward the stoop, but she was so intensely engaged in her work that I thought it would be better for me to keep watch but stay out of her way.

First, she crawled up the three stairs, turned around, and bumped her way down on her diapered bottom. She did this a few times. Then she crawled up, reached over to the bars going up to the railing, pulled herself up, and carefully holding on, walked down the steps.. For the next fifteen minutes, oblivious to the rest of us, she practiced going up, down, and up again. Not once did she look to anyone for applause. She was simply working at a task that she wanted to master, what therapists call developing a sense of agency, the feeling that we can have an impact on ourselves and on our lives. Helping clients develop a sense of agency is one of the primary goals of most psychotherapy.

I decided it was time for me to face the demon of my stair anxiety. Following my young friend’s example, I would master my fear by practicing.

I have pretty good balance, thanks to years of ballet, yoga, and Pilates. As I walked down, another memory floated into my mind, a ballet teacher reminding the class to stand tall as we balanced, trying to feel energy going into the ground through our standing legs and feet and up to the ceiling through the top of our heads. Keeping a hand lightly on the railing, when I reached the bottom step, I turned around and went upstairs the same way. After repeating the exercise several times, I felt strong and competent and in control of my own life. And suddenly, the stairs seemed to have gone back to their original slope.

Could I apply that same technique to the world around me? I haven’t figured it all out yet, but I am already making a difference in my work with asylum seekers. I know that alone I can do little, but that small steps can lead to great change. One of the benefits of my age is that I’ve seen those changes, in the clients I work with and in the country in which I live. Although they may happen slowly, I believe they will happen again.

By joining local grassroots groups, adding my voice and financial contributions to national and international organizations, and talking and sharing thoughts, ideas, plans, and feelings with others, I am taking whatever small steps I’m able to manage. The magnitude of the problems is daunting, and none of us can overcome these problems alone. But working together, remembering and building on our own strengths, and supporting the strengths of others, step by small step, we can master the stairs.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Photo credit: Marilyn Peterson Haus

Dear Friends –

My apologies for the lag in time since my last post. Lots has been going on. I’ve been working hard to complete a new project, but I recently hit a snag, so I’m taking a break from it and getting back to some of the things I’ve let go while working on it. My husband and I also just had our own adventure. We took our first solo trip since we returned from a wonderful trip to Barbados the week that the world closed down for the pandemic.

We spent eight wonderful days in Santa Fe. It’s not true to say that it was a solo trip – we were with friends and family – but we managed the eight hours of travel, changing planes, and all of that on our own. We have always loved traveling together, but after his accident in the spring of 2022, I didn’t think we’d ever be able to take a long trip for pleasure again.

But we did it! I’ll be writing more about that experience, but today I want to share something else.

Last night we went to the opening of a new play, called “The Best Medicine,” by Robin Gerber. At the age of sixty-two, Robin became, as she puts it in the play, “a reluctant caregiver” to her husband who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Ten years later, she writes in the playbill, “desperate to do something for myself,” she decided to take a stand-up comedy class.

“The Best Medicine” was about both of these experiences: being a long-term caregiver to a man she loved, and doing something completely new and off the beaten track for herself.

The play was at times touching, at times inspiring, and at times painful to watch. But it reminded me that caregiving is, for many of us, an unexpected and often unwanted part of aging without a map. It also reminded me that, while it’s often a lonely experience, we’re not alone in going through it. I started thinking about all the people I know who have become reluctant caregivers, not only of spouses, but also of grown children and aging parents.

This was not part of the plan, but we manage, each in our own way. Because I think it helps to know that we’re not alone, I’m going to start posting stories of how people have creatively managed being thrust into the caregiving role. If you have a story you’d like to share, please send it to me at fdbarth@substack.com. If you don’t hear back from me within a week, please let me know in the comment section of this post, so I can look for your email.

In that light, today’s post is another beautiful contribution from my friend Marilyn Haus, who is a longtime caregiver for her husband.

Warmly,

Diane

Facing the East

by Marilyn Peterson Haus

The tree swallows swoop in, darting and dipping and diving, in a battle to chase the bluebirds away. Their backs are as blue as those of the male bluebirds, but their breasts are bright white instead of rusty red. They zigzag and loop in arial acrobatics above the row of three birdhouses, determined to claim the one on the right. The bluebirds fight to defend the one in the middle, where the female is brooding five eggs, but the swallows consider that house to be part of their territory. By the time the turf war ends, the tree swallows have seized the house on the right, and the bluebirds, forced to abandon the eggs they were brooding, have moved to the house on the left.

Our daughter Naomi had given the house on the right to my husband, George, as his 2025 Christmas gift. She had met the bluebird requirements as she constructed it – a wooden box with drainage openings and ventilation gaps; an entry hole one-and-a-half inches in diameter; a slanted roof that overhangs the front and sides. She measured to be certain it was twenty feet away from the house in the middle and rotated the entry wall until it was facing the east.

“It’s amazing there are any bluebirds,” she had said as she sank the pole into the ground.

She had placed the three houses where George is able to see them from his reading chair, but he no longer remembers that they’re there. I can see them when I stand in front of our kitchen stove. During the frigid Berkshire winters, I watch the bluebirds fly in to sit on the perches for a brief time, as if to make certain the houses will still be available for their spring rentals. I watch them disappear into the holes with clumps of dry grass sticking out of the sides of their beaks; count the number of eggs as they appear; study the wide-open beaks too large for the scrawny, naked necks; and when spikes pop out of the tiny wings, I watch them grow into long, shiny, blue feathers, ready to lift the fledglings into a nearby tree.

Two weeks after the birds have ended their high-speed rivalry, I tap the side of the swallows’ house before sliding my phone’s camera above the deep nest. The female shoots out of the hole like a bullet. When I photograph the bluebird, she doesn’t move. She’s become accustomed to my weekly photoshoots. Soon my pictures reveal five blue eggs in the house on the left and six white ones in the house on the right.

Two-and-a-half weeks after the birds start brooding their eggs – more than enough time for both batches to hatch – I ready my camera to photograph the little featherless blobs with bulging eye buds.

But instead of hatchlings, I find chunks of wood on the grass where the swallows’ house had stood. The metal pole is bent into a sharp elbow, jutting up from where it had been cemented into the ground. The hinged wall has been ripped from the house. An empty nest lies beside it. No sign of newly hatched swallows. The pole for the house on the left lies flattened on the ground. The house, torn apart. There are no baby bluebirds to be found. Only the middle house remains, untouched, on its pole.

The metal baffles that Naomi had fastened to the poles kept squirrels, snakes, and racoons from climbing them and eating the contents in the house. But they did not deter a bear.

After I tell Georgs that a bear has smashed the houses, I show him the wreckage. We stare at the twisted poles, the pieces of shattered wood.

“Maybe it was the wind,” he says.

When I glance at the house in the middle, I notice a small beak protruding from the entry hole. I slide my camera above the nest.

The bluebird is sitting on her old eggs.

Two days later, she is still sitting on the nest. I wipe my eyes as I study my photograph of the tiny bird huddled inside the house. What comfort can a bird find by trying to hatch unhatchable eggs? Why am I so distraught over one bird’s tragedy when there are birds all around?

During the past several months, I’ve lost three cousins, a cousin’s husband, three friends, and the ongoing losses of my once vibrant husband as his dementia takes its relentless toll. A small bird’s seeming grief feels big to me.

Three days after the bear took down the houses, my photograph confirms that the bluebird is no longer sitting on the old eggs. I fling the nest and its contents far into the meadow. The little bird will no longer be able to try to find consolation by hatching non-viable eggs. I will no longer have to watch the sadness of her futile effort.

George and I have acted as caregivers for the bluebirds for more than two decades. It’s time for us to take the last house down. I can’t bear the heartbreak of watching them work so diligently to raise chicks and not be able to protect them from aggressive tree swallows and marauding bears.

I scrub the house out with soapy water to rid it of mites and lice and leave the hinged wall open so it can dry.

While I’m dumping the dirty water into the sink, George walks into the kitchen. “What are you doing?” he asks. I repeat the story of how the houses got smashed and that I’m cleaning out the last one so we can give it to someone else.

He looks out the window. “There’s a bird sitting on the house,” he says. “It looks like he’s trying to go in the hole.”

I rush to the window and see the male bluebird sitting on the open wall. I hurry out and slam it shut.

A few minutes later, I look out the window. The male is sitting on the perch atop the house, his shiny blue back as straight as a sentinel. The female, in her muted hues, flies in and perches beside him. He lifts off and she disappears into the entrance. He returns and pokes his head into the hole, his blue tail feathers sticking out of the house. In and out they go.

I wanted to remove the house because we’re not able to protect the bluebirds from disasters that we can’t control. But they don’t share my fears. How can we remove the house when they’re already beginning again?

While standing at my stove, I watch the bluebirds as they fly into the house with tufts of grass clasped in their beaks. I wonder at their resilience, at their capacity to move forward. At their innate awareness that life goes on.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share

Photo credit: Julie B Adler Koppenheffer: “Nature’s daisies complement the blue flag and bearded irises I planted.”

Dear friends — Today's post is a change of pace! I'm so happy to share this lovely poem by Julie B Adler Koppenheffer with you! Hope you enjoy it! Warmly, Diane

In the exuberance of spring

Nature entrances,

Draws me into its immensity,

Feeds me with the rich breath

Of incipient leaves opening their pores

To the sun.

Our partnership is fraught.

The invasive bittersweet vines snaking up mighty trees

To claim the sun

Its strength grounded in a labyrinth of roots

Running like an implacable underground river

Forging tributaries into ever expanding territory

Remind me of nature’s power to overrun and overcome

With its dominance.

Yet when we’re in synch

My plantings spreading nature’s wealth

Make me handmaiden and nature’s mate.

Begonias, coleus, irises and lilies

Planted in pots and fertile ground

Foster nature’s plan and my delight.

Their future, like mine,

Extended by love and care.

Each morning is uncertain.

Foul weather like foul moods

Can ruin a day.

Black spots, fungal spores, and rot may spread.

Marauding deer or insatiable voles may devour a plethora of plants

In a night.

Fine days introduce exuberant displays

Of nascent flowerings.

Intimate natives and cultivated guests

Explode from soil and stalk.

Color and texture

Of abundant complexity

Harmonious and competitive

Life giving and transient

Embrace me.

Nature has its seductive hold

There is no divorce.

Through fair and foul

It beguiles, invites, inspires

Enfolds.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Photo credit: Shutterstock id: 1663519189 photographer:Pasko Maksim

My apologies for the absence of posts recently. I’ve been working on a new project that’s been taking a lot of my spare time. So far it’s not getting where I’d like it to go, but I have hope.

In fact, that’s what I want to write about today - hope. But trigger alert – I’m also talking about politics. Please feel free to skip this post if you are protecting yourself by not reading or thinking about politics. But also, please feel free to write in the comment section if you have a different perspective from mine. My one request is that any discussion remain kind. Different opinions are welcome. Unkindness will be deleted.

I know that some of you are on different sides of the political spectrum from one another and from me, and that’s fine. It’s good in fact. I think the more we can find common ground even when we have significant differences, the better the chances of this country beginning to heal. Unfortunately, that’s not necessarily where all our fellow Americans seem to be going.

But I am hopeful.

I have a yoga teacher who often starts class with a simple breathing exercise. Recently she had us breathe in to the count of four and out to the count of five. As we breathed in, we were to think “hope.” As we breathed out, we were to think, “full.” As you can imagine, after a few breaths, it wasn’t clear which was the first word and which was the second. That of course was the idea. We were looking to feel full of hope.

I’m basically an optimist, so I embrace any encouragement to feel hopeful with both arms. It’s a little hard to feel hope right now. I know too many people who have lost jobs and are having troubles finding new ones; who are too frightened to leave their homes because they are not US citizens, have dark skin, and are afraid of being “mistakenly” taken up by ICE; who are worried about the deterioration of our ecosystem and the possibility that their children won’t have clean air to breathe or clean water to drink; who are afraid of bringing their children up in a world full of rage and hatred for anyone who is different; who are worried about the health care system; who are thinking of leaving the country.

The NY Times ran an article recently about young people who are not having children because of their own experiences with their parents. On the heels of that article came another, about grandparents raising their grandchildren. At the end of the second article the author quotes her dad. He and her mom have sued for and received full custody of her drug addicted sister’s children. The author tells us, “In recent years, my dad has talked about that I Corinthians passage everyone reads at weddings. And now, these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. ‘Love is the big one,’ my dad says, ‘but people don’t pay enough attention to hope. Even though it’s there all the time, right behind love.’”

It's sometimes hard to hang onto hope. But here’s a link to an article by Ann Lamott in the LA Times earlier this week. In this article, Lamott explains why she thinks the No Kings protests on Saturday are important. Joel and I were already planning to attend one near us. I think it’s very important to celebrate the military and those who have served to keep our country safe, and Flag Day is an appropriate day for that celebration. But there’s a bit of confusion about who is being honored with this extremely expensive parade. A protest against a president who seems to think he owns the flag also seems appropriate.

I’m not sure the protests will do any good. With the danger of violence, reinforced by the shootings of two lawmakers and their spouses in Minnesota, I was worried that militants on both sides would turn some of them violent. So I thought about not going.

But Lamott’s words rang loud and clear for me. She wrote:

“I will celebrate the last week of spring with tens of thousands of people at the San

Francisco Civic Center. Just ordinary citizens with a moral compass, we won’t have a

plan or strategy to save this hurting nation, but we will show up heartsick, angry,

peaceful and exuberant, the young and old, babies, the Gens X, Y and Z, people of

every ethnicity, spiritual path and none at all. The love we have for this beautiful,

beleaguered democratic nation will be our little light to see by, and shine.”

Like Lamott, I love this country. I love the democratic ideals and values that are part of the spirit and belief behind the flag. I know full well that we have never been all-good and we have never lived up to the ideals of democracy. I know that even the initial premise on which this country was based was flawed, and there are and probably always will be problems within problems that have to be dealt with. But hope has always been part of the United States of America. Hope is why I stood, with my disabled husband, in a cheering, peaceful crowd, to protest the dangerous inroads on these beliefs yesterday, Flag Day, June 14, 2025. And hope is why I’m posting this essay today. Thank you for reading it.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share

Photograph by Lucigerma Shutterstock id#2212307939

The news is so full of horrors these days, I thought I’d try to pay attention to some of the good things that are going on around me. I’m sitting on my back porch, listening to what sounds like hundreds of birds in the woods, and, despite a chill in the air, trying to take in the beauty of a lush, green spring morning.

It's hard, though. It’s not just the news. I work with a number of asylum seekers, all of whom were deeply traumatized in the countries from which they escaped. Their stories are horrendous, and their lives in the US are pretty distressing as well. But what’s amazing is that despite past and present hardships, they are often unstintingly generous with others in need. Just a few small examples: a man who was himself seeking asylum offered shelter to a young boy who had escaped their country after a severe beating left him with brain and other damage; a group of men pooled their hard-earned, limited savings to send victims of a container fire back to their hometown to be buried, because they knew the families could not afford to do it; a young father who was detained and sent to a distant state by ICE could not call his family to let them know where he was, because he had to pay for phone calls and had no money with him when he was picked up. Another man in detention with him paid for him to make that call.

There are bad stories among these good ones, since we humans are not all-good; but we’re not all-bad, either. I limit my news consumption to bare essentials, but I keep wondering why we focus so much attention on the bad. I don’t mean to suggest that we should ignore the horrors around us; but would it be wrong to also connect to some of the better qualities of humanity?

There is a lot of it around, despite the news and despite sad events and painful life experiences. Many of my friends are caring for ailing partners, for example. As in the lovely essay by my friend Marilyn Peters Haus, some of these partners can’t express their appreciation – some don’t even know that they are being cared for. But they are recipients of kindness, although obviously not random.

I spoke not too long ago with a delightful woman who lives in Asheville, NC. Her home was in one of the areas devastated by Hurricane Helene, but she was still able to cook, so she began making huge pots of food for her neighbors, many of whom began to gather outside her home, some of whom brought their own food supplies to put together with hers, to make the available food stretch even further. I wouldn’t call that random either, but it does count as kindness.

A new friend who knew I was working on a difficult writing project called to check to see how it was going. That wasn’t random, but it was unexpected kindness, and greatly appreciated.

These good moments, precious though they are, aren’t always easy to absorb. As I was writing, my husband came over to give me a hug and a kiss. Maybe he saw that I looked distressed and wanted to soothe me. Maybe he just wanted to get in a little loving. My automatic first reaction was to tell him I was concentrating and that I’d cuddle later. It took a few beats, but it finally dawned on me that he was doing exactly what I was talking about. Taking a minute to be loving, and if that’s not kind, then what is?

What about you? Can you think of a moment when someone has shown kindness to you or to someone you care about? If you feel comfortable sharing, please leave a note in the comments. But no worries if you’d rather not. More important is just that we all take a minute to appreciate these gifts of kindness.

Leave a comment

Share

Photo by Marilyn Peterson Haus

I'm thrilled to present another wonderful essay by my friend Marilyn Peterson Haus. Just a heads up, this is a sweet and touching, but also sad description of life with a husband who has Alzheimer's.

No Yesterdays and no Tomorrows

It’s 10:00 am on a dreary mid-March day in the Berkshires and I’ve been awake for four hours when I open the door that leads to our bedroom. “Ding-a-ling! Ding-a-ling!” I say, trying to sound cheerful, the way I do every morning as I wake my husband, George.

“Ding-a-ling! Ding-a-ling! Time to get up!”

He looks at me with bleary eyes. “Why do I have to get up?”

“It’s 10:00 o’clock. You’ve slept long enough.”

I hate having to wrench him out of a deep sleep, but he’s already been asleep for twelve hours and I don’t want him to switch his days and nights, as sometimes happens with people who have dementia.

“It looks like the sun might come out,” I say while I select a pair of chinos and a shirt to replace the ones he hung on the chair next to our bed. He hates having to change into different clothes but won’t notice that I swapped out the ones he’s worn for several days.

“I don’t need a shower,” he says. “I took one yesterday.” He no longer remembers how many yesterdays have passed.

“Your hair is looking greasy. It looks so pretty when it’s clean and fluffy,” I say, knowing he’s not immune to a bit of flattery.

I balance the “SHOWER TODAY” sign, which I drew on a large piece of pink paper, on the faucets above the sink that he uses when he shaves. I added batches of hearts around the words. Reading the instruction doesn’t trigger his defenses like my reminding him does. I like to think it’s because of the hearts.

After he’s dressed, I remind him that today’s The Berkshire Eagle is down by our mailbox. He likes to read the paper while he eats his breakfast. He doesn’t remember which papers he’s already read, but the walk gives him a bit of exercise and fresh air.

He tosses the paper on the kitchen counter. On some days, he begins opening and closing the drawers and slamming the cabinet doors. “Go two steps to your left, turn to the right, and reach up to the cabinet door above the freezer,” I say.

“Oh yes, that’s right. That’s where the Cheerios are,” he says, sounding as if he knew where they were all along. I don’t challenge his pretense. It’s not his fault that his brain is being chipped away.

He slices a banana into a cereal bowl, adds a layer of whole-grain Cheerios, heaps a pile of cranberry trail-mix over the precarious mound.

“Why don’t you use one of our bigger bowls?” I ask.

“Thank you very much, but I don’t need a bigger bowl. This one works fine.”

When he’s emptied a Cheerio box, he creases the inner bag into its original folds and sharpens the creases by running them over the sharp edge of the counter several times before folding it into a compact bundle. I find the little bundles tucked in with the dish towels, squeezed in with the cutting boards, behind the dishwasher detergent.

His breakfast is a long and leisurely process. The spoon makes a loud scraping sound on the bottom of the bowl as he excavates the last crumbs. I’m relieved when the grating noise ends.

By then, it’s nearly noon. He settles into his chair and picks up one of his engineering journals. He underlines sentences; marks a thick line at the beginning of an article so that he knows that he’s already read it; places a large checkmark on the front of the journal after he’s read all the articles. How does it feel, I wonder, to read so intently when you’re unable to remember anything that you’ve read?

He becomes anxious when we leave our house for an appointment or a concert or to visit friends. “Why do you take him out when it stresses him?” the people in my support group ask. But we have to make trips that are necessary.

“It’s time to put your coat on. We don’t want to be late for your appointment,” I say a few minutes before we have to leave, allowing as little time as possible for his anxiety to build up.

“I have an appointment?” He looks startled. “What for?”

“With your doctor. Don’t worry, it’s just for a checkup. He wants to see how your pacemaker is doing.”

“Where are we going?” he asks as he pats his pockets. “I don’t know what I did with my keys!”

“Don’t worry. I’ll drive. I know where his office is.”

“That’s good,” he says with a smile. “Because I don’t!”

He hasn’t driven for three years but still claims he does all the driving. I switched his license for an identification card when I applied for a handicap placard. “It’s so we don’t have to pull our wagon across all those parking lots at Tanglewood,” I said when he wanted to know why we needed it.

“You can’t park there!” he says. “It’s for the handicapped people!”

“Yes, I know. That’s why we have this placard. It’s because we’re too old to walk very far.”

When he’s asked five times where we’re going, I grit my teeth and mutter under my breath, He can’t help it! He has a brain disease! But I wonder if I’ll be able to remain calm should he become nasty and rude. If he begins to wake me repeatedly during the night. If he starts to wander or becomes incontinent.

He’s fine being alone for two or three hours while I drive off to buy groceries or to play mahjong with my friends. But when I began having a caregiver come in two afternoons a week, he complained:

“I don’t need anyone to take care of me! I can take care of myself!”

“It’s not for you, it’s for me. I don’t want to have to worry that you’ll have another heart block and go smashing into the floor – like you did when you had to get your pacemaker.”

I distract him by having fresh coffee and muffins ready for them when the caregiver arrives. He’s grown to like her. She likes him.

Two years ago, when our daughter came to stay with him while I flew to London to visit our younger daughter, he refused to go to bed. “Marilyn has left me! I must have said something really bad to make her leave!” But a few months ago, when I hired a live-in caregiver, he remained calm during my entire five-day absence. When I returned, he greeted me as if I’d only been gone a couple of hours. I no longer will have to worry about him when I visit our daughter in London or my siblings in Minnesota.

As dinner time approaches, I ask if he’d like to start a fire in the fireplace. I’ve adjusted to the short-lived fires he now builds. I’ve also adjusted to the fact that no matter how slowly I eat, he will only have begun his meal when I’ve finished mine. “Thank you very much,” he says, for whatever I’ve prepared. “This is very tasty!” He repeats the compliment several times. He’s always been grateful and polite.

After the fire has disintegrated into gray ashes, we read. There are few conversations we can have when he remembers no yesterdays and is unable to envision any tomorrows. Still, our silences are infused with the deep bonds we forged during sixty years of marriage.

I give him his evening meds before I go to bed but leave it to him to lock the doors and turn out the lights. It’s a routine he still enjoys. He sleeps so quietly that when I wake up during the night, I often wonder if he’s still breathing.

When our days were energized by his vitality, he changed our children’s diapers, sat on the floor and played “pretend” with Barbies and GI Joes, helped build Lego machines that lurched across the living room floor. Now, when our children spend time with us, they ask, “How are you able to be so patient?”

But I remember how patient he was when he cared for them. I remember the care he has always shown for me.

How could I not be patient now, when he needs someone to care for him?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share

Photo credit:Shutterstock photo id: 746416003 photog: mvc_stock

When my aunt was in her late eighties, she dropped a glass on the floor and bent down to pick it up. To her dismay, she couldn’t get up again. She wasn’t able to reach her phone and wasn’t willing to hit her alarm button to have EMS come out to help her up. She simply remained on the floor until the next day, when her aide came in.

At the time, I was horrified. “What do you think the alarm button is for?” I demanded, not very nicely. She told me that she had been able to get up off the floor her whole life. “I just kept thinking I’d be able to do it this time,” she said.

One of the hardest things about aging is facing the changes in how we view ourselves and how we are seen by others. My aunt had been my idol when I was young. She was sophisticated, smart, and beautiful, and I wanted to be like her when I grew up. I now imagine that idealization must have been a burden to her, especially as she aged and could no longer live independently. From my Third Age vantage point, I can empathize with her need to push away the awareness that she was no longer idealizable, at least not in the way she had been.

As a psychotherapist, I am drawn to the idea that we each have many selves, which are not always in our control. In his poem “We are Many,” the poet Pablo Neruda humorously bemoans his inability to choose which of his many selves emerges at any given moment. When he wants to show his intelligence, for instance, he writes, “the fool I keep concealed on my person takes over my talk and occupies my mouth.” (Click HERE to read the full poem.) I’m guessing that my aunt felt like that. How could she call EMS, she must have thought, and reveal that her clumsy, aging, and weak self had appeared just at the moment when she was trying to be self-sufficient and competent?

Of course, by staying all night on the floor, she revealed another self she didn’t like – her stubborn, irritable, and possibly even self-destructive self.

And this is, in fact, the problem that comes as soon as we try to highlight one aspect of self over another. We may think we’re hiding a weakness or a flaw, only to discover that we’ve put a different one on display.

While I’m drawn to the idea of multiple, interacting, and often conflicting selves in each of us, I’m also drawn to a different theory of the mind that suggests we all have a hidden or secret inner self. The psychoanalyst Thomas H. Ogden highlights this theory in a paper called “What Do You Want to be When You Grow Up?” In the paper he discusses the idea that psychotherapy provides clients an opportunity to “go on being.” He talks about an inner sense of self that exists outside the realm of words. We can connect to it through art, he says, and music, and nature. We can also, paradoxically, connect to it by being with others.

Ogden suggests that an interactive process, at its best, allows us to weave threads from our experiences with others into that internal sense of who we are.

I was exploring these ideas with a study group of wonderful, experienced psychotherapists. The discussion was rich and lively, and it reminded me that we humans have space for complexity, if we just open ourselves to it.

But the complexity is not always easy to name or process, especially when it involves paradox. How can you be a competent, experienced, knowledgeable Third-Ager and a fun and loving grandparent and an adventurous, curious, growing adult, and a Third-Ager with physical and mental limitations unknown to any of those younger selves that still reside within you?

Proving Ogden’s point that art and literature can help us find threads connecting these impossibly confusing conflicts, one of the therapists in the study group sent me a poem from T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, which, as you probably know, is the basis for Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical Cats.

Photo credit: Shutterstock photo id: 2475401153 photog: Porawat Suepchaktip

In this poem, called “The Naming of Cats,” Eliot writes that finding a cat’s name is a very hard job, since each cat must have three different names. There’s the “sensible everyday name” that the family uses. Then there’s the special name that is only for one cat ever. This name gives the cat self-esteem and self-satisfaction. And finally, there’s the private name that Eliot tells us, “no human research can discover—But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.” (Click HERE to read the full poem.)

So, what about us humans? Do we all have three names? Or maybe even more? And can we find the name that gives us a sense of pride in ourselves, even when we fumble and fall? Even when we can’t remember things we used to know? Even when we can’t climb on a ladder anymore?

And what about that secret, private name? Do you have one? Do you know what it is? And is it the same today as it was when you were a child? When you were a teen? Or when you were a young adult?

My guess is that the answer to these questions is as varied as we are. As you think about them, you may realize that you never had a private name, that who you are on the outside is also who you are on the inside and always has been. Or you may notice that your private name and your special name are the same. For some of us, those two names stay the same, and for others, they change. Or one changes and one stays the same. And some of you may note with relief that the private name of your childhood and young adulthood is not the same as the name you have given yourself in the Third Age. Maybe you’ve let go of old stories that went with that old name. Maybe that’s been a good shift.

In the end, I think the answer is far less important than the thoughts themselves. What’s for sure is that by the time we reach the Third Age, we’re a richly colored and complex mosaic of selves. But even now, as we go through this uncharted and sometimes difficult new territory, the more we stay open to possibilities, the easier it will be to “go on being.”

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Photo credit: shutterstock id 2347276037 Sabrina Bracher

After years of a tumultuous relationship with yoga that included confusion about what it was all about, struggling through Vinyasa classes at gyms where the poses weren’t explained in what were supposed to be beginners level classes and, of course, being the only person with a curvy figure and Black & Brown skin, I gave up.I decided that it just wasn’t designed for someone like me.

That was until I took an 8-week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) at the Open Center in NYC that changed my life and made me fall in love with yoga.

In MBSR, yoga is framed as a mindfulness practice through movement. When we do yoga, or movement practice in MBSR, it's about being aware of your body’s experience in the pose in the moment. There is an emphasis on non-striving and letting go of perfection. It’s about being with your body in whatever expression of the pose is available that day and giving yourself permission for that to be enough. All concepts that deeply resonated with the part of me that was running on empty.

I wanted to share the gift of these kinds of experiences and ultimately signed up for yoga teacher training. I also joined the Black Yoga Teacher’s Alliance (BYTA) which is where I experienced Yin Yoga for the first time.

Wow! I still remember being in frog shape (which is what poses are called in Yin Yoga) in the main hall at Kripalu. And as Keisha Battle guided us into the shape and explained the 3 principles of Yin Yoga (also known as “Tattvas”), I began to witness my body shifting, changing, even in the stillness. I was hooked. I hadn’t even come out of the shape yet to truly feel the impact it had on my mind and body. What was this amazingness? I needed so much more.

When I discovered that my beloved prenatal yoga teacher training instructor, Kelly Devi of Devi Ma Yoga, also taught Yin Yoga classes I signed up immediately. Eventually I completed Yin Yoga teacher training under Kelly’s guidance and have been teaching Yin Yoga for the last 5 years. While I do teach other styles of yoga, Yin is my favorite. It brings mindfulness meditation, yoga and several of the principles I introduce to my clients in psychotherapy all together. A seamless integration of my life’s work (thus far).

So what exactly is Yin Yoga you may be asking….

Yin Yoga offers a chance to slow down, go deeper, and nurture both body and mind in a world where finding time for stillness is increasingly rare. Rooted in traditional Chinese medicine, this practice invites you to hold “shapes”, for 3-5 minutes or longer.

While many yoga styles focus on building muscular strength, a more “Yang” type of energy, Yin Yoga works differently. By holding poses longer, we are able to access and nourish the body's connective tissues—such as the fascia, joints, and ligaments that support our everyday movements. This cooling, slow yet powerful practice perfectly complements more dynamic forms of exercise, bringing balance to your overall wellness routine which can help with bringing energetic balance to your life.

Teaching Yin Yoga brings me so much joy because of the impact the practice has had on my life and the lives of my students off the mat. While there are physical benefits abound, there are a myriad of other benefits that enrich our lives when class is over.

Yin Yoga teaches us one of life's most valuable skills: the ability to be still and to be present with whatever arises. In each shape , you have the opportunity to witness your experience while practicing non-judgment—whether it's a physical sensation, a passing thought, an emerging emotion or all of these! This practice of mindful awareness extends far beyond the mat. Personally, it has supported how I navigate life's ups and downs especially in seasons for tremendous grief and loss. So important in this current climate, it has helped me give myself permission to pause, rest, and be curious about my experiences as opposed to judging myself or constantly striving to be what we are told is “productive”.

There's something uniquely powerful about practicing Yin Yoga in community. While each person's journey is deeply personal, the shared experience creates a supportive environment for exploration and growth. In a typical Yin Yoga class you are encouraged to honor your body's unique expression of each shape, letting go of "shoulds" and embracing where you are today. This acceptance has definitely contributed to me having a healthier, more compassionate relationship with my body in my day to day life.

While distinct from restorative yoga, Yin Yoga offers profound opportunities for restoration and renewal. The practice's gentle approach invites deep relaxation while nourishing those harder-to-reach areas of the body. As tension melts away, it’s not uncommon to become aware of a new sense of ease in both your body and your mind. I have noticed that my mind and body work together to find or create ease within life circumstances that can be tense or stressful. This has been invaluable in helping me to stay clear, grounded and connected when it matters most.

Dr. Kimberly Grocher is a psychotherapist, executive coach and yoga/mindfulness meditation teacher. Kimberly teaches Yin Yoga classes and workshops in Westchester County, NY.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Photographer: Diane Barth

I have a special tea kettle, given to me by my children and grandchildren. It’s apple green, cheery, and boils water quickly. And it’s starting to rust. On the inside.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the internet trying to find out if it’s safe to drink water from a rusted teakettle. My gut tells me that it’s a bad idea, and there are plenty of folks out there who agree with my intuition. But I don’t want to lose it, and there are plenty of other folks who say it’s fine.

Since I drink a lot of tea, the kettle gets a lot of use. And every time I pour boiling water into a cup with a tea bag and milk, I feel connected, loved, and loving. Maybe it’s silly to invest so much feeling in an inanimate object. I have plenty of moments of love every day. My almost four-year-old grandson has learned how to use FaceTime on his own, and he checks in regularly, sometimes several times a day. I love that.

But my tea kettle has taken on a special meaning. It’s not soft and comforting like a beloved childhood stuffy, but it has that kind of feeling for me. In psychotherapy-ese, it has become a transitional object, that is, something that represents a connection to a loved one, something that we hold or use to feel comforted, something that makes us feel safe.

I know not everyone reading this Substack shares the same political opinion, but I think we may all be sharing a sense of anxiety about the future. Even if you’re not worried, we all need soothing at times.

By the time we reach the Third Age, we have well-established patterns for giving and receiving comfort. A walk in nature for some of us, or along busy city streets for others, a cuddle with a beloved pet, a cup of tea and a good romance or detective book, a glass of wine with a friend – all tried and true ways of easing our anxieties and pains. All of the above work for me, but almost always with a cup of tea in hand – yep, even when I’m taking a walk, I like to have my carry cup full of hot tea.

So it’s not such a surprise that I feel connected to the pot that boils the water that makes that tea. And despite the fact that it’s not soft and is often too hot to handle (although my daughter-in-law gave me a matching hotpad for this exact reason), my bright green tea kettle has many of the qualities of a good stuffy. It represents not only my family’s love, but their understanding of me and who I am and what I need, which is the point of a transitional object.

The phrase “transitional object” was coined by the psychoanalyst and pediatrician D.W. Winnicott in 1951. He was referring to something, usually soft and cuddly, that allowed a child to begin to make the transition from total attachment to a parent to a more individuated self. We now understand that transitional objects are important because they allow children to maintain a crucial emotional connection as they are becoming more independent from the grownups in their lives.

In my years as a psychotherapist, I have seen that we all use transitional objects throughout life. A photograph, inherited jewelry, a gifted piece of art, furniture, china, or pottery, a letter or birthday card, even a plant that has some sort of tie to a loved one can bridge distance, time, and absence. We feel connected while we feel separate from that important person.

The thing that’s both puzzling and ultimately nice about this time in our lives is that while we still turn to these concrete representations of our connections for comfort, we can also manage without them. I am seeing this phenomenon in action as friends who are downsizing to smaller homes are culling through their belongings. I’m impressed with their ability to gift, sell, and donate items that have meaning but are not necessary to their lives. As one friend told me, “I have the real connections, and I have the memories. I don’t need a blankie anymore.”

I am not ready to downsize yet, and I think it will be hard for me when that time comes. I have many transitional objects, and I like them all. I am comforted by the knowledge that these friends are holding onto some treasured comfort items. But I also know that I, too, have the memories and the connections.

I have decided that I can put these ideas into practice with the apple green tea kettle. It won’t be such a comfort if I worry about what the rust is doing to my insides. A better solution will be to get myself a new kettle and use this one as a planter. Or maybe I’ll take what is, for me, a radical action and toss it out, since I don’t want to gift it and have someone else’s rusty insides on my conscience.

Then, if I need to connect, I can FaceTime my grandson while I drink my tea.

Photo credit: shutterstock id #1742579816 photographer Koltsov

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich:

The other morning, I had a hard time getting to my regular morning yoga class. The news had been disturbing, some of my psychotherapy clients were having a particularly hard time, and my granddaughter was ill. I was feeling a little down and moving slowly, but I managed to get into my yoga clothes and sign in for a zoom class, and, as always, I started to feel better shortly after the class began. And then, my yoga teacher, who has been a rock of sanity and centeredness in recent weeks, told us that we were doing a “wriggle-asana.”

“Asana,” means “pose” in Sanskrit, the language in which yoga was initially practiced. A wriggle-asana means moving your hands and feet, legs and arms, and body in gentle ways but not necessarily structured ways to get the body warmed up.

Apparently, “wriggle-asana” is a real thing, taught to my teacher by her own teacher, and, when I googled it, taught by plenty of other yoga teachers as well. One experienced instructor writes that wriggling is one of the ways yoga can help you get to know your body.

For me, the idea combined exercise and laughter – the perfect antidote to the heaviness of spirit I was feeling that morning.

As we Third Agers, along with the rest of the world, are trying to figure out how to find some sort of balance in these turbulent times, many of us are also coping with personal issues. Illnesses that range from cancer to the flu, family difficulties, money worries, loss of friends and loved ones, and just plain age-related stuff are all on the table for most of us.

It’s important for us to remember that even on this difficult path, we can – and should –try to experience joy when we can. Research shows that being able to appreciate the good moments in our lives is key to being able to bounce back from difficult experiences.

I recently read an article about trying to find joy during difficult times (see link below), which lists a number of tools that we can all use. The author says exercise, meditation, limiting exposure to gossip, and doing things for other people are all paths to joy. I was interested to see that physical exercise was listed twice.

As some of the wonderful, touching, and uplifting guest posts I’ve been fortunate to include on this blog, and others on Crow’s Feet and Oldster (see link below), remind us, our bodies are changing these days. There’s nothing we can do about that. We can’t do some of the exercise we used to. But we know that some form of exercise is an important aid to our emotional and physical well-being as we age.

But did you know that being silly can also help? That’s what the “wriggle-asana” did for me. I just couldn’t stop myself from laughing at the concept. I have found that silly combined with appropriate and careful exercise might just be the best possible combo for increasing joy.

Sometimes we eliminate the concept of silly from our psychological vocabularies when we pass into the Third Age. But why? Where is it written that we must be serious all the time when we get older? Is it in the same place that tells us that we can’t wear our hair long anymore? Or that we should never wear sleeveless tops or shorts?

Since I know from my work and my personal life that silliness, when not carried to an extreme, is a powerful psychological healer, I was thrilled with the image of wriggle-asana.

These are not easy times, no matter what side of the political spectrum we’re on. My yoga teacher said that our bodies are probably tighter, tenser, and more vulnerable than ever right now – no matter what our age, political leanings, or general life circumstances. She said that one way of dealing with the anxiety, fear, anger, and exhaustion that so many of us, on all ends of the political divide, are feeling, is to keep moving our bodies in gentle, non-stressful ways. When she introduced “wriggle-asana,” it was with the suggestion that we just move our feet and hands for a little bit in an unstructured way, without worrying about shape or form or how we looked. It was early in the morning, and she told us we were just waking up our bodies gently.

Wriggle-asana might not be the kind of pose that the founders of the practice had in mind. But it is a perfect one for what we need right now.

At the end of the class I felt more relaxed than I have in ages. I take the class online, so I didn’t have the benefit of finding out firsthand from other class members if they’d had the same reaction that I did. But I’m willing to bet they did.

The medical folks at the Mayo Clinic, which is one of my favorite sources of medical info, say that laughter actually changes our bodies by enhancing our oxygen intake, stimulating our heart, lungs, and muscles, and increasing the endorphins released by our brains. The physiology of laughter “fires up and then cools down your stress response, and it can increase and then decrease your heart rate and blood pressure. The result? A good, relaxed feeling.”

There are also long-term effects on our nervous system, our immune system, and even on pain. And obviously, if you can be light-hearted enough to laugh, your mood will improve as well.

I’m afraid we don’t have a lot of cheery moments these days. But maybe we need to incorporate something light, meaningless, even almost ridiculous into our activities.

We Third Agers know that life can be hard. So it’s important for us to remember that we need to take a few minutes to have a little fun.

It’s a lesson to be passed along. Having fun isn’t going to change the world. But it can help us get through the darkest moments.

If wriggle-asana isn’t your thing, try wriggle dance. Wriggle walk. Wriggle phone calls (maybe not on FaceTime?) Laugh at yourself. Laugh at the world. And have a few moments of fun.

Click HERE for the useful suggestions in the article “How Can You Find Joy (or At Least Peace) in Difficult Times?”

Click HERE for the link to the Mayo Clinic article on laughter and our physical health

Click HERE for a link to Crow’s Feet and HERE for a link to Oldster’s.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment