Comments on Berni, still pondering but a lot further South: Elderhood. What is that?

Here's to us older women!

2009-10-15T05:07:03.504-07:00

Here's to us older women!

Happy birthday to her. I've seen her around the b...

2009-10-13T20:20:26.892-07:00

Happy birthday to her. I've seen her around the blogs and have popped on her blog now and then.
Aren't these relationships great that we can develop even over a computer. We really start to care about our blogger friends and their lives.
What a great post and encouraging.
♥
Joy

Good Article. I feel I finally can become who I r...

2009-10-13T07:41:49.529-07:00

Good Article. I feel I finally can become who I really am ... since retiring. Best thing is, I got to retire early. I like this stage in my life. I look at young people and think, poor sots ... they've all that stress to go through yet ... I wouldn't trade places with them for the world.

Becoming "who you truly are" is something that is ...

2009-10-13T03:01:00.876-07:00

Becoming "who you truly are" is something that is dawning on me at 49, so I'm happy to say I might be a little ahead of the game in elderhood.

In many cultures, of course, elders are revered and respected. But it is true that much of Western "civilization" idolizes youth over maturity.

If you have a library in your town, Grace, you would enjoy the book "In Search of Stones" by M. Scott Peck. It is a book written ostensibly about a 3-week trip with his wife in England and Scotland, but along with being a personal travelogue the book is a constructed by chapters on different topics - one of them being aging; and that chapter is quite beautiful. He talks about the losses (he calls the process "stripping away") - but without putting an overly maudlin spin on it; it's more like the loss of interest in superficial things, and more emphasis on the things that matter. I have seen some of this stripping away in myself already in the past year. It is not unwelcome. And, in the end, we go back to God as ourselves, without all the layers we built up over a lifetime here on Earth.

Get the book if you can, or if not, I can mail you my copy when I'm done.

Thanks for this nice little tribute to our friend Jeni :)

Okay -here I am tonight, it's late, I'm tired and ...

2009-10-10T22:40:26.999-07:00

Okay -here I am tonight, it's late, I'm tired and I'm scrolling down through the posts on my reader when suddenly I see something that catches my eye. Gee, that looks a lot like my profile photo but be darned if I remember doing any post with that title or even on that topic, for that matter. I did another look-see and then I realize it is Bernie's post and she's using me, my birthday, my picture, to illustrate her point.
All you said in this post makes perfectly good sense to me. After all, if my mind could rule what I want to do in every instance, then, mentally, most of the time my mind tends to think I am still only 30-35 years old. It's when there comes a need to put physical things to use along with mental where my body deceives me -and my mind -and that is what ends up ruling my day then -the darned physical aches and pains and such. But then I stop and think too that for at least 40 of the last 45 years -giving a little time off here and there for pregnancy, raising babies/toddlers, etc -I have worked, usually jobs that required a lot of physical labor too and ya know, I'm perfectly content to pass that baton on to others and concentrate on watching my grandchildren, playing with the embroidery or knitting or sewing, now and again, doing a bit of reading and let others worry about the other stuff!
My turn has finally arrived and I'm gonna enjoy it as much as I can, as much as I can afford anyway. It is a shame that there are a great many of the younger generations though who do regard the seniors as having no intellect, no savvy about anything, not enough money to be significant and therefore, not important. Someday they will find themselves too in the same or similar straites -that is if they live long enough to attain elderhood! Great post and thanks for the publicity too, Bernie!

Life after sixty brings freedom and contentment an...

2009-10-10T16:43:48.393-07:00

Life after sixty brings freedom and contentment and peace that were never in my life before. You wrote a very good post on life in the third stage of life, Berni. Good job.