Making contributions as we grow older

Hello friends, one goal of my long writing career has always been to explore the spirituality of aging in a humanistic idiom. Its themes can be related to traditional religious language, but they don’t have to be. For example, topics like community, nature, gratitude, acceptance, contemplation, compassion, friendship, humor, celebration, transformation, suffering, and death are taken up by all historical religions. Too many people still think of the secular and sacred as separate categories. We can make distinctions, but real separation is misleading. We live in one interlinked world.

I’m optimistic about developing our later years into a valuable time for personal growth and for elders to make contributions to the wider community. Yet I want to stay aware of the inevitable downsides of aging. Life after eighty brings home for me some of these challenges. In this light, here is a statement from Stephen Hawking, the brilliant physicist who contended for years with A. L. S. (Lou Gehrig’s disease), which greatly limited his mobility and speech: “My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you from doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit as well as physically.” (New York Times, May 10, 2011) Aging will in various ways disable us all.