Welcome to Part Two of this special edition of the Fierce with Age Archives, a collection of writings about spiritual aging curated especially for Substack. For ten years, I led a team of archivists and contributors who gathered nearly 1000 digest entries ranging from the classics to cutting-edge thought leaders, including Joan Chittister, Ram Dass, Parker J. Palmer, James Hollis and many more. It’s been humbling to learn that we are not the first generation to face the spiritual challenges of aging, and at the same time comforting to realize are we are not alone.
What follows is the second of 10 monthly editions, joining with my blog series and the Old Soul Study Guides. (To learn more, click HERE.). Enjoy the best of my years as editor of this Digest, and the wisdom of those walking the path before us that has proved timeless.
--Carol Orsborn, Ph.D.
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FIERCE WITH AGE ARCHIVES: VOLUME 2
She Let Go
“She let go. Without a thought or a word, she let go.
She let go of the fear. She let go of the judgments. She let go of the confluence of opinions swarming around her head. She let go of the committee of indecision within her. She let go of all the ‘right’ reasons. Wholly and completely, without hesitation or worry, she just let go…
She didn’t promise to let go. She didn’t journal about it. She didn’t write the projected date in her Day-Timer. She made no public announcement and put no ad in the paper. She didn’t check the weather report or read her daily horoscope. She just let go…
In the space of letting go, she let it all be. A small smile came over her face. A light breeze blew through her. And the sun and the moon shone forevermore.”
–Rev. Safire Rose
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The Busy Ethic
“How many times have I heard people say I’ve never been busier since I retired!…More than 25 years ago, Prof. David Ekerdt published an important paper, The Busy Ethic: Moral Continuity Between Work and Retirement (The Gerontologist, 1986).
In that paper Ekerdt argued that many people legitimate, or justify, retirement in terms that redefine leisure not as empty time but as something earnest, active, and occupied. The busy ethic is so named because of the emphasis people place on keeping busy in retirement, an echo of the work ethic so widely endorsed in our culture.
In Ekerdt’s view, this busy ethic serves to defend retired people against judgments of senescence. It gives a positive definition to the retirement role, by adapting retirement to prevailing societal values (“Are you busy? Are you productive? Or are you just hanging around?”)
But I wonder: Are we losing something by thinking of retirement this way? I think of Pascal’s statement that All man’s troubles come from the fact that he cannot sit quietly in his own room. As the Zen Buddhists put it: Sitting quietly, doing nothing.
–Harry (Rick) Moody
This excerpt is from editor Harry (Rick) Moody, from the electronic newsletter, edited by Harry (Rick) Moody, at the time edited by the Office of Academic Affairs at AARP and distributed by the Humanities and Arts Committee of The Gerontological Society of America.
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Be Still Not be Stalled
Contributor Kathy Sporre found herself adrift in her sailboat. Rather than panic, she quieted down and the solution came to her. Taking advantage of a slight, ephemeral breeze she would otherwise have missed, she was carried safely back to port.
Kathy writes in her blog at the time: “Being calm, aware and present in the moment was absolutely necessary to receive this blessing. And the ability to master this calm presence is one of the gifts I have received through the refinement that only age can bring.
In other words, I no longer thrash about like I did as a child when learning to swim now that I know I can float. How many magical moments have you missed while in the midst of an outburst over a change in circumstances or a misfortune of some kind? Did a breeze pass you by without notice and leave you stranded?”
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Old Apes are Happy Apes
“Too bad chimpanzees can’t buy sports cars. Recent research published in National Geographic says it’s not just humans who go through midlife crises: Chimps and orangutans also experience a dip in happiness around the middle of their lives…
The study team asked longtime caretakers of more than 500 chimpanzees and orangutans at zoos in five countries to fill out a questionnaire about the well-being of each animal they work with, including overall mood, how much the animals seemed to enjoy social interactions, and how successful they were in achieving goals (such as obtaining a desired item or spot within their enclosure). The survey even asked the humans to imagine themselves as the animal and rate how happy they’d be. When Weiss’s team plotted the results on a graph, they saw a familiar curve, bottoming out in the middle of the animals’ lives and rising again in old age. It’s the same U-shape that has shown up in several studies about age and happiness in people.
“When you look at worldwide data, you see this U-shape,” said National Geographic Fellow Dan Buettner, author of Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way. “It’s different for every country, but it’s usually somewhere between age 45 and 55 that you hit the bottom of the curve, and it continues to go up with age. You see centenarians in good health reporting higher well-being than teenagers.”
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For more, visit the Fierce with Age Archives Vol. 1 HERE
Thank you for this insightful writing.