With a Full Heart

Years ago, I had a wonderful individual working as my administrative assistant. In truth, the title does not do her justice as she was so much more than that. I was young, new in a big role, managing a large budget and a good-sized staff and responsible for all of the marketing and communication for…

Whether you are celebrating a new year at this time or whether it is a moment when you think, “It’s time,” it is, as the cliche goes, never too late for a new beginning. Sometimes the trigger is a date on the calendar, turning an age that ends in a “0” or a “5,” or…

I heard someone say, recently, that being a woman “of a certain age,” carried with it the “gift” of invisibility. They said that no one really even saw you anymore, that no one thought much about who you were or what you did, one way or the other. That comment has been clanging around in…

In December 2020, at the end of a year that felt a hundred years long, I read an email to my husband. I told him that one my favorite yoga teachers, and one of my favorite people, was offering a yoga teacher training course. She had partnered with two other teachers and they’d created an…

I was reading a column this morning by someone who has been writing about aging, She wrote about her life slowing down, her memory sometimes failing her, this next chapter of wrapping up life and heading for the inevitable end. As someone who has spent much of her life working with older adults, I started…

As a child, my mother frequently begged me to “please just sit down,” my constant motion both familiar and, I am sure, more than a little irritating. As an adult, a friend and mentor told me that I had “the attention span of a monarch butterfly.” Those comments join a lifetime of similar ones, in…

In my world of work with older adults, we often talk about purpose and how vital it is to for everyone to have a sense of purpose. Regardless of abilities or challenges, we can all find meaning in our lives. What we must remember is that it may look different for each of us. Purpose…

It sometimes seems to me that courtesy has ceased to exist. The words that we had drummed into us, and that were drummed into our children, “please and thank you” are often hard to come by. And, “excuse me” has completely vanished. I don’t think that this is an indication of me being “old fashioned,”…