An Important Update for My Subscribers

The Evolution of Carol Orsborn and Spiritual Aging

Well Done, my growing band of subscribers and pledgers!

As early adopters of Substack, we’ve made it to the frontier of yet another new technology! I’ve got more to say on this, but first, I promised you an important update on the Spiritual Aging Study and Support Group (SASS) and our offerings.

For starters: to acknowledge your support and flexibility, I am pleased to extend free membership in SASS through the end of the year. I am grateful to those of you who have shown your commitment to spiritual aging and faith in me by making pledges. You as well as all others who pledge now will lock in the pre-publication membership rate regardless of future price increases, while retaining the option to opt out at any point before we go paid. And you won’t be charged until 2025.

More news. I’ve evolved our study guide format from the “Weekly Sass” to “The Old Souls Study Guide.” We’ve already shared the first 3 in what is now a 9-part series that will be published the third Monday of every month through the end of the year. Visit Post One HERE.) This is in response to those of you who requested to slow the pace to allow the time for weekly in-person study groups to form. Along these lines, I will have exciting news to share about this shortly, as the leading organization in the conscious aging field will be announcing their plans to launch intimate in-person SASS groups, using our study guide, to begin meeting weekly on ZOOM globally starting 2025. Meanwhile, thanks to your feedback. I will be adding in more new and classic blogs into the mix on non-guide weeks.

In December, in conjunction with the publication of my new book Spiritual Aging: Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life, we will return to weekly guide posts with The First Week of January post of The Spiritual Aging Study Guide, setting the stage for 2025 to be a year of reflection. I will post for the coming week every weekend so that in-person and Zoom groups can meet any day of the week.

Words can’t express my gratitude to each of you! If you are still a free subscriber, upgrade to a pledge now and you will continue to receive full membership benefits when we become a paid membership next year. If you choose to continue with the free subscription when we go paid, you will still receive monthly blogs and see previews of the weekly study guide posts with the option to upgrade to receive the full weekly guide and participate in the paid members only chat. That’s the headline news. (But FYI, if you haven’t visited CarolOrsborn.com lately, you’re in for another big surprise. Read on.)

Now, back to my thoughts about embracing change. Of course joining Substack isn’t the first time. Over the course of our many decades, we’ve had to say goodbye to our beloved Selectrics and made the leap to computers. Bank tellers to ATM’s. Checks to credit cards. Sometimes our leaps have been graceful  (television and mobile phones, for instance.) But for many of us, most have been more along the line of lurches. (Copying machines and cable remote controls with malfunction features apparently built in.)

I am slow to adopt change. My personal email is AOL, for example. Need I say more? So you won’t be surprised to hear that after 15 years of updates, patches and workarounds on my website, the designer told me that even so much as one more tweak would bring the whole house down. After a couple months of resistance and denial I neither leapt nor lurched but dragged my feet into change. As it turns out updating my website was but one tile in a game of dominos of which moving my primary mailing list to Substack is the final to fall into the future.

So here we are, meeting up at Substack, each in our own way challenging ourselves to stay current. This turns out to be a good thing, by the way. I may kick my computer printer regularly, but I love not having to scrub the carbon off my hands. Even better, with even a hint of mastery, new capabilities become available to us. I’m loving how easy Substack is making it for us to interact with one another, for instance, through discoverable posts, chats and networking.  At 76, I didn’t expect to meet so many like-minded old souls nor feel this potential for expansion rather than the contraction we are socialized to expect, while still honoring the changing demands of this new age and life stage.

My next new blog “Older, Wiser, Fussier” will be delivered to you this coming Monday. Then on July 15, we turn our attention to unwanted circumstances: when to push through versus when to accept them in Post Four of the Old Souls Study Guide If you would like to read ahead, we will be reflecting on the section “On Enduring” in  Older, Wiser, Fiercer, pp. 20-22.

Thanks for showing up and as my old friend Connie Goldman was fond of saying…To be continued.

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