Some events deserve much more attention than they receive. That certainly holds true of the letter, “A Common Work Between Us And You,” sent last October by 138 Muslim leaders and scholars to the pope and other leaders of Christian churches.

This initiative has come from a wide array of Muslims including both Shia and Sunnis, government and religious officials, and residents of countries all around the world. This diversity, representing groups often at odds with one another, gives the letter special force.

And in addition to the pope, a large number of other Christian leaders received this letter: the archbishop of Canterbury, many patriarchs, and the secretary of the World Council of Churches.

As if to include everybody, the senders of the 29-page letter conclude their list with the phrase “and to Christian leaders everywhere.”

At the start, the writers call attention to the place of Islam and Christianity in the world of today. Christians and Muslims, they observe, account for 55 percent of the world’s population.

The authors of “A Common Word” call this demographic reality “the most important factor in contributing to meaningful peace around the world.” They add: “If Muslims and Christians are not at peace, the world cannot be at peace.”

Even more emphatically, they state “The very survival of the world itself is perhaps at stake.”

Surprisingly, the signers do not speak to any of the issues that make for conflict between the two great faith traditions. Instead, they focus on the beliefs that bind the two together.

The body of the letter makes three points.

The first point is that both Muslims and Christians believe in, love, and honor the same one God. To show this they present dozens of citations from the Qur’an and the Bible. In citing the latter source, they include the Jewish community.

Secondly, the letter recognizes how both traditions, along with Judaism, proclaim the love of neighbor as vital. In both, this love flows from the love of God, and the love of God is regarded as false if it does not include the love of neighbor.

The third point draws on the two earlier ones. If Muslims and Christians have so much in common, they must act together in harmony. Here, some basic differences are acknowledged but these, they say, should not offset shared beliefs.

The writers reject the idea that Christianity is against Islam. Rather, Christians have solid reason, anchored in the words of Jesus, to be allied with Muslims. This approach provides the basis for mutual dialogue between the two faiths.

They conclude with the following appeal: “Let us respect each other, be fair, just and kind to another and live in sincere peace, harmony and mutual good will.”

It all sounds like an inspired way to defuse tensions between the members of the two communities, Muslim and Christian.

That would seem to be the view of Pope Benedict who replied in the same spirit and welcomed dialogue. He also issued an invitation to the Muslim leader who conveyed the letter to the Vatican, and to some of his colleagues.

Another response to the Muslim initiative, this one more detailed, came from a group of some 300 American Christian theologians and other scholars who responded in a public letter of their own. The members of this group, organized by Yale Divinity School, declared themselves “deeply encouraged and challenged” by what they called an “historic letter” and “courageous.”

They also praise the letter for representing “every major school of Islamic thought.” As such, it deserves a response that moves beyond a “polite ecumenical dialogue between selected religious leaders.”

Incidentally, the New York Times refused to run information about the Yale-led response except as a paid ad.

I asked one of the signers, Harvard theologian Harvey Cox, for his appraisal of the Muslim initiative. In his view, “It’s historically virtually unprecedented. They drew on their tradition the way we drew on ours.”

For the letter to make a difference over the long run, however, Cox stresses the need of follow-up. “There must be both local and regional conversations,” he says.

I also conferred with Ali Asani, a scholar who is a Muslim, about the likely impact of the letter upon Muslim-Christian relations. For him, the acid test will be “how people on the ground will look at it.” It’s one thing for the Islamic elite to embrace Christian leaders as sharers in the same faith in the one God. But will ordinary people endorse that movement toward mutual understanding?

He sees these relations as being clouded over by colonialism and European imperialism. These have made Christian missionaries branded as a threat to the societies where they have gone. A search is going on in the Muslim world for a new way of looking at the world but this new view has not yet taken hold.

“A Common Word” offers hope that someday it will.

Richard Griffin

“We are not other people.” Long ago, that reply used to come frequently from the lips of Betsy, the mother of six children, presumably when they argued about what other kids were allowed to do.

At Betsy’s recent funeral, one of her daughters recalled this as one of her mother’s favorite lines. Predictably, the recollection provoked laughter from relatives and friends assembled in the church.

The reason we laugh at such lines, it seems to me, is that Betsy’s thoughts ─ if not her exact words ─ were so much a part of many of our own childhoods.

My mother, for example, often told my siblings and me not to think that, because other kids were allowed certain liberties, we also were entitled to them. The words were different but the message was similar.

One of my strongest memories is hearing another approach: holding up members of another family as models of good behavior. In this instance it was not my mother, however, but rather my Aunt Mary who appealed to us to emulate these paragons.

A lifelong resident of Peabody, Mary knew virtually all the other longtime middle-class families of that city. Among them, she most admired those who led orderly, respectable lives. She especially prized those children ─ and they must have been rare even then ─ whose manners were proper and genteel.

That’s why, whenever she was confronted with what she considered bad manners on the part of her nieces and nephews, she would urge us to emulate the Duffs. Those children knew how to behave, at least as she reported it.

We never saw any of the Duff children, and so had no reliable means of verifying the truth of our aunt’s chosen examples. However, you can bet that we were mighty skeptical about the Duffs. We had basic confidence in them as children: most probably they knew how to get out of line just as well as we did, if not better.

Our aunt was an idealist, whereas we kids were solid rationalists. It stood to reason that those Duff kids, in real life, were no better behaved than we were. Possibly, they were even worse than we were, though we had no way of proving this.

Aunt Mary used the myth of the perfect family as a method of ensuring that her nieces and nephews would eventually prove to be, if not perfect, at least better. For her, comparative exhortation was her device to ensure our improvement.

In any event, we Griffins were quite ready to quarrel with the code of behavior that stood behind our aunt’s hopes. We would later describe this code as Victorian, outmoded even in the 1930s and 1940s when my brothers and sisters and I were children.

After all, thanks to Aunt Mary, there were finger bowls at dinner in my grandmother’s house. On such occasions we would mischievously affect to drink the water rather than dip our fingertips into it. We made a joke of them, but that never seemed to offend or upset our aunt.

At other times we received admonitions from our aunt for fighting with one another, indulging in loud outbursts of ridicule, or even talking back to adults. The Duffs, of course, would never indulge in such behavior.

Almost surely, however, she would remonstrate with us and invoke her model family. “The Duffs would never do that,” she would protest, and we would, almost ritually, reject this affirmation.

Often we would go on to make fun of those Duffs, something easy to do because we were never to meet a single one of them. Perhaps they have now grown into later life as models of maturity.

Our grandmother, with whom Aunt Mary lived, would never join in the modeling that her daughter held up to us. Perhaps that qualified as one reason why our grandmother enjoyed universal popularity among us. She was always ready to accept us as we were.

Yet, our aunt was popular, too, because we tolerated her foibles and took pleasure in making fun of them. She provided us with fodder for talking about how unrealistic some adults could be.

Interestingly, my aunt’s approach to childhood conduct appears opposite to Betsy’s, quoted earlier. Betsy was saying in effect, in this family we have our own code of conduct. Don’t tell me what other kids are allowed to do; we are different.

Though my own mother stated it differently, we held to the same principle. Just because other kids are allowed to do something does not entitle you to that same action. You are not they; their parents may have good reason for doing something that we do not allow here.

Some 70 years later, I can look back on such ideology as inoffensive and even charming. Then, however, like my brothers and sisters I would sometimes chafe at the restraints that discipline imposed and the rationale that justified them.

Richard Griffin

“What was left was the love ─ that was the core.” This is how my friend Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle sums up the last years she shared with her husband, Hob.

The first diagnosis of his Alzheimer’s disease came in 1995; he did not die of it until 2002. Olivia calls this passage “the most amazing education I’ve ever had.”

There was suffering, to be sure. Seeing one’s life partner in such decline had to be agonizing. “I just lost it any number of times,” Olivia recalls. “There were times when I would roar in my car.”

But, more important to her, “there were blessings woven through the heartbrokenness.” Compassion, kindness, love ─ all stirred within her frequently and still do.

Olivia tells this story in her new book “The Majesty of Your Loving: A Couple’s Journey Through Alzheimer’s.” She has published it under the Green Mountain Press heading.

I have found it to be an eloquent and humanly rich account of the couple’s experience.

In addition to the main text, Olivia has included at the end of each chapter, “Reflections, Suggestions, and Seed Thoughts.” Her hope is to throw light on the experience of caregiving for others who must deal with diminishment of a loved one.

Like other friends of the couple, I felt part of their journey as it moved toward its inevitable finish. The inspiration they provided has radiated outward and now forms part of my own interior life.

Hob and Olivia had a long history of serious interest in spirituality. For them, it was vital to explore various traditions and movements. Through the years they had kept in personal contact with such spiritual mentors as Bede Griffiths, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Henri Nouwen, not to mention many others.

One result of these investigations was Hob’s ordination as an elder spiritual teacher in the Buddhist tradition, a role that helped define the second half of his life.

This spirituality, it would seem, is what enabled Hob to accept his disease in an often lighthearted manner. He described his condition as “horseblinders,” and often joked about death. When asked how he wanted to die, he told the spiritual writer Joan Halifax: “I’d like to die laughing.”

On one occasion, when he and Olivia went out to a restaurant, Hob passed out and fell to the floor. Members of the rescue squad and others crowded abound him, anxious to help.

Hob looked up at them asked them to move back, saying: “Can’t you see that I am trying to die here?”
Often he would describe what was happening to him. “I feel as if someone has taken the wheels off my roller skates,” he said.

As Olivia describes it, Hob’s illness led them to make what she calls “sort of a deal.” They agreed to look deeply into what was happening, to share their findings with each other, and to negotiate the illness consciously and lovingly to the end.

The book provides a beautiful record of the years when they both coped with the illness and struggled to draw meaning from it. The experience strengthened an already strong marriage. In the latter stages they got to the point where “we didn’t need words any more.”

Before arriving at that point, however, they did need to talk about the crisis. One such discussion concerned Hob’s discomfiuret about having caregivers coming into the house.

Olivia had to explain how her own well-being and survival depended upon receiving help from other caregivers. Connected to that need, as Olivia explained it, was the need for each of them to begin letting go. As the disease progressed, their relationship would have to “disengage from its old forms.”

This, of course, was a hard saying, but Hob accepted it. At an earlier stage both he and Olivia had agreed on the value of a statement by Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit. Teilhard wrote of the adjustment he had needed to make in the face of his last illness. He finally came to thank God for what he termed the “grace of diminishment.”

For Hob, that approach presented obvious challenges. For Olivia, it raised the question of how to let a loved one go. Their way of dealing with these issues will, I believe, prove helpful to others confronted with diminishment, either their own or that of a loved one.

One reviewer (Paul Raia, a psychologist noted for his considerable experience with Alzheimer’s patients and their families) says of the book: “After thirty years of practice in this field, The Majesty of Your Loving changed the way I think about Alzheimer’s disease.”
 

If you wish to get the book, you can order it on the web site www.MajestyofYourLiving.com.  It is available at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge; it will soon be in other bookstores as well. You may also order it from the Alzheimer’s Association in Watertown (617 868-6718.)
      

Richard Griffin

The film’s title may mislead you. At first hearing, it sounds like a movie about primitive wild men living in the jungle and preying on others.

But “The Savages” has no obvious violence. Rather, it takes its name from the family portrayed: Lenny Savage, the father; Jon, his son; and Wendy, his daughter. These roles are taken by actors who rank among the finest ─ Philip Bosco, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Laura Linney.

This film rates for me as the most satisfying overall that I have seen in a long time. More specifically, I admire its portrayal of a crisis faced by a huge number of American families, either right now or in the future.

Most of us are familiar with this situation: a person advanced in years becomes seriously ill or disabled and needs long-term care. Into this crisis, almost inevitably, are drawn the adult children.

In this instance, Jon and Wendy have been more or less estranged from their father for many years. They are far removed from him, both emotionally and geographically. But that all changes when Jon receives a telephone call in the night informing him that his father needs help.

The film provides a realistic and sensitive look at what happens to the father. We see something of his bewilderment as he moves from the home he was sharing with a woman friend in Sun City, Arizona, to a Buffalo, New York nursing home.

But the film centers on the effect of their father’s crisis on Jon and Wendy. They have not been in close contact before their father’s illness; getting suddenly thrown together proves challenging, to say the least.

Both are shown to have human defects that diminish their lives. Jon has been living with a Polish woman but lacks commitment to her. She is forced to return home when her visa expires.

Wendy, for her part, feels qualms about her sexual relationship with a married man back in New York City. She also feels unfulfilled by her failure to achieve much success in her career as a playwright.

Negative feelings around these issues in the lives of brother and sister are intensified by the stress they are experiencing because of their father’s situation. The stress leads to angry exchanges between them, often punctuated by profanity.

What fascinated this filmgoer was the difference between the two characters and us in the audience. They were unable to identify the stress clearly enough to let them deal with it. We recognized it and felt a mixture of sympathy, exasperation, and gentle superiority.

Especially memorable is the scene featuring Wendy and Jon seated on one side of a restaurant booth and their father on the other. Len, the father, is in the early stages of dementia. Wendy, awkward and embarrassed, tries to ask Len his wishes about end-of-life care and disposal of his body. Jon does no better.

Finally, the father becomes exasperated with them and yells out his answers so that everyone in the restaurant can hear.

In the role of reviewer, I cannot reveal to you any more of the story. That might spoil your pleasure in watching the plot unfold. But I hope to have presented enough of it here to whet your appetite for seeing it for yourself.

I hope others will admire, as I did, the skill of the screenwriter and director (Tamara Jenkins is both), and leading actors in dramatizing without condescension the family drama that touches so many people in our country.

This film takes its place with a couple of others that have dealt with similar subject matter in recent years. Yes, despite the pitfalls of the subject, some filmmakers have managed to get the point about late-life issues and their effects on family members and others.

I recall the 2006 film “Away From Her” in which Julie Christie, in a return to movie making after a ten-year recess, portrays a woman with Alzheimer’s disease. She lives in a nursing home, cut off from her devoted husband.

And I remember “Iris,” the 2001 film in which Judi Dench plays the writer Iris Murdoch, afflicted by the same disease. Jim Broadbent takes the role of her husband, with a sensitivity matching Dench’s.

It may not be coincidental that women were so largely involved in making these films. The directors of both “The Savages” and “Away From Her” are female and, of course, so were the standout performers in those two movies and in “Iris.”

I feel fortunate for having access to such good films; they help me unravel better what the journey of life means. By throwing light upon the anguish of illness and death among my age peers, and the effects those unwelcome realities have on families, these films invite their viewers to appreciate the pathos of human existence in its times of crisis and its hard-won triumphs of love and insight.

Richard Griffin

Children love to disclose their ages. They even take pride in counting portions of years.
 Asked how old she is, a preschooler will reply four and a half. She clearly feels boastful about the half part.
Of course, they have better reason than adults to value the extra six months. After all, for them this stretch of time comprises a large proportion of their time on earth, exactly one-ninth for that four-and-a-half-year-old.
For their part, parents commonly welcome those extra six months and sometimes celebrate the half-year as if it were a whole one. Recently, I visited the living room of neighbors who were toasting their six-month-old daughter.
Young people, after becoming adolescents, value the birthdays that will allow them to drive, to vote, and, last of all, to drink legal beer.
Once adolescents become adults, however, they commonly become less ready to disclose their age. By the time they become middle-aged, adults generally feel loath to reveal their age. Sometimes they resort to artifice in order to conceal that vital statistic.
Incidentally, the latter cannot fool me. I have a directory ─ and so could you ─ that tells the year of birth of virtually every resident in my populous city. This makes me a dangerous man in the eyes of some age-concealers.
When old age sets in, many Americans change their approach radically. Instead of taking pains to conceal their numerical age, they often begin to boast of it. It’s as if a key unlocked a bundle full of secrets and everyone now has access to its contents.
The coming New Year will mark this breakthrough for me. The numerals 2008 relate neatly to the year of my birth, 1928. I am now free, not only to acknowledge being in my 80th year of life, but to take pride in it.
Already, a mysterious new process has begun to take place inside me. Difficult to describe, it feels like an arrival, a release, and an achievement, all wrapped up together.
The arrival suggests coming to a new stage of life. August of the year 2008 will bring my 80th birthday. Already I am taking hold of this reality or, more appropriately, it is taking hold of me.
The release comes with not having to observe certain social restraints that have kept me in check until now. It has become easier to accept certain disabilities, for example. And not being the smartest guy in the room, or the most successful.
Achievement is probably the wrong word to describe passage into the 80th year. For me, it is more a gift received than an accomplishment managed.
Yes, I exercise every day and take some care about the food that sustains my life. However, so did many of my age peers, along with friends, relatives, and neighbors who, to my deep regret, have died before me.
Survival is shrouded in mystery. But it now describes my life. Thankfully, I have become a survivor. Many threats could have killed me but it has not yet happened. I’ll try to let you know when it does.
Is 80 the old 50, as some optimists claim? I much prefer to think of it as the new 80. Fortunately, many of my age peers enjoy the same vigor that I have managed to sustain thus far.
Another phenomenon of this ascent to year number 80 offers a welcome surprise. People, especially the young, treat me differently.
They not only offer their seats in the subway and on buses. More subtly, they look at me differently and show a new and unaccustomed tolerance and patience with me.
At times, these differences have their downside. Sometimes without realizing it, people can be condescending as if to say, “You’re old, we have to lower our expectations of you across the board.”
But this distorted approach to age remains rare in my experience. The younger people that I encounter on my daily path are almost invariably respectful and polite.
“You know the wrong people,” critics will perhaps respond. Perhaps, but I plan to keep expecting the best of others.
I have always enjoyed making friends in other generations. The young people of today are a source of endless interest and variety.
Do my younger friends see us elders as their future selves? Probably not; but neither do they seem to see us as a race apart.
I have never been shy about asking for help when I needed it. But being in my 8oth year gives me new freedom to do it. Why should faux independence force me to shovel my own snow?
So the New Year 2008 promises yet another set of experiences in what has become a surprisingly long life. Some of these experiences will surely prove undesirable. But I will try to cope with them, while relishing the benefits brought by the passage of time.

      Richard Griffin

In his late fifties, a man named Ed Speedling decided to leave his work as a high-level health care administrator and find a job that would bring him into direct contact with homeless people. Now he has an important position with a nonprofit that tries both to relieve homelessness and to prevent it.

Sally Bingham married right out of high school and was still bringing up the youngest of three children when she decided to become an Episcopal priest. That meant she had first to go to college, starting at age 45, and then to a seminary. She now preaches regularly and serves as director of a project that brings together her faith and her active concern for the environment.

These people are two of the midlife job-changers who figure prominently in the new book Encore. Author Marc Freedman adds the subtitle: “Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life.”

Founder of the program “Civic Ventures,” Freedman has drawn much attention to new notions of retirement. His movement specializes in helping people middle-aged and older to discover new work that is both fulfilling to them as individuals and beneficial to society.

To put this new movement in perspective, it helps to know something about the history of retirement over the past 60 years. After World War II, no one had much idea of a role for retired people. Financial planners and marketers attempted to convince these men and women that they were living the American Dream; but these efforts went only so far.

But, starting in 1960, that situation was to change. A player who looms large in this history is Del Webb, the founder of Sun City in Arizona. He wanted to convince Americans that, after leaving work, they could indeed enter the Golden Age and be made happy by sports, hobbies, and other recreational activities in the friendly climates of the southwest and elsewhere.

This was the beginning of a new concept of retirement that spread across America. Retirement could become an “endless vacation,” filled with pleasurable activity.

As the millennium approached, however, the inadequacy of this model became evident. It has failed to provide the underlying meaning that is needed for long years of middle age and later life. And many retirees have found their income insufficient to support decades without working.

This spiritual and economic vacuum has prompted many people to seek work after retirement. Ideally, at least, that would be work which combines added income with personal meaning.

The old idea of “senior voluntarism” no longer suits a lot of people, especially the well-educated and healthy job seekers whose experience qualifies them for challenging work.

I myself admire the energy and ambition of the new breed of retirees, but I have also benefited greatly from the work of older volunteers in more traditional and less exciting roles.

Civic Ventures is riding high these days in gerontological circles, but it has its critics. Robert Hudson, the distinguished Boston University scholar, knows the program well. He has ably explained, how commentators on both the right and the left find fault with the program’s agenda. Like other such debates, it’s complicated.

Some conservatives feel wary of older people getting more involved in political issues. Following the philosophy of Civic Ventures, the retired people who have become employed again might be positioned to press for even more benefits from government than they have now.

Some liberals see Civic Ventures as elitist, a further expression of the “successful aging” school of thought. It would put a premium on well-being and might push to the sidelines those not privileged by good health and advanced education.

Some liberals also fear that large-scale involvement of elders might make government feel it less necessary to provide services to members of the older population. It would be a pretext for cutting back on social programs that respond to elders in need.

My own view inclines toward the second position. Though I welcome ways of getting retired people into satisfying and meaningful work, I am wary of social pressures making them feel worthless if they don’t seek such employment.
At the same time, I recognize that many of the retired have left work too early to sustain themselves financially and psychologically over what can be a long haul.

A feminist critique also merits attention. A scholar named Martha Holstein writes: “The expectation that our later years will bring a life of discipline and self-control primarily in the public sphere negates the value, place, and significance of what women do at home.”

And she asks: “Can the norms of civic engagement dignify both the 66- year-old Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and the 79 year-old woman who lives in assisted living and recently told me ‘everything hurts?’”

But, as a wise woman friend, Catherine Bateson, reminds me: “You can’t cover everything in one set of recommendations.” Like her, on balance I welcome the Encore initiatives.

        Richard Griffin

I’m always eating breakfast. Or lunch. Or dinner. Or I am sitting at the table, snacking on milk and cookies.
Constantly, I am brushing my teeth, getting dressed, going to bed. And wakng up.
Or I am forever swimming, walking home from the Square, taking out the trash.
There I am, perched before my computer, filling the screen with new material, reading email, some of it dubious. Why is that unknown woman from Nigeria always telling me the sad story of her family and urging me to send funds to an address she encloses?
Morning is always breaking and I am unlocking the front door, going out on the porch, and picking up the daily newspapers. This habit, widely abandoned by those under a certain undefined age, remains ingrained in me. Old Gutenberg did not serve us so badly, I still believe.
Alternatively, I am anxiously opening a library book eager to read history and literature. I rest back in the easy chair, not immune to the effects of an afternoon slump.
Afternoon wanes and I am making my favorite drink. Bourbon plus sweet vermouth with a cherry floating on top equals a Manhattan, the closest I will get to that favorite destination today.
Add taking pills to the list of habitual activities. For most of the past decades, I was immune to this requirement. But now my membership in the vast drug-taking conspiracy of America is firmly established.
Do you have sensations like this or is it just me?
You may think the response to these experiences can be put simply: I’m in a rut. You might prescribe a long vacation, a trip around the world, or some other radical change.
What these sensations mean to me, however, is more than that. I have lived a long time. There has been ample occasion for me to have done all those habitual things countless times over.
As of last August, I had lived 28,835 days. This computes to 692,040 hours, the majority of which found me awake. That’s a lot of time to have done many of the same basic things over and over. 
I have become inured to hundreds of actions that go to make up a more or less ordered life. The daily schedule stretches far back into the past and has become ongoing. If you have my mental make-up, there is no escaping these habitual actions. Nor do I want to.
But I have discovered how to milk certain routine actions for added worth. Swimming, for example, can serve as a time for thinking. You can reflect on situations, and sometimes find answers to problems.
Walking also serves reflection, not just on the world as you pass by, observing it. This exercise also promotes insight, even prayer on occasion. The church and academic bells you hear in passing stir thinking about transience.
Fortunately I am never bored. The world is too filled with fascinating people and events for that to happen. And technology. Ever since I bought my first computer, the old Commodore 64, and words from it flashed on my hooked-up television screen, I realized that boredom had been exorcised from my world for the duration.
I also welcome change, at least sometimes. Don’t ask me to give up my routine of daily exercise, however. Nor regular talk sessions with certain friends, and many other habits. To surrender these quotidian activities would mean loss of something precious.
For many of my age peers, it seems, time moves slowly. If you can believe reports, the passage of days for them does not resemble my description.
Having a deadline for this column admittedly speeds the flight of each week for me. The chosen need to produce some 800 words of readable prose every Friday induces “time’s winged chariot” to fly faster.
But other people share this sense of time gathering speed in later life. They are surprised by the arrival of another Christmas, a new New Year, yet another birthday. 
Looking back down the years, you can see the present patterns of activity in somewhat different forms. Reflecting on the past, everyone can find both continuity and discontinuity.
Some stretches of time I regret. Those years in which I listened to dull lectures, not a few of them in Latin, seem wasted. But “wasted’ as a category demands scrutiny. That long-ago regimen was the product of a certain time and place now, long after the fact, impervious to change.
These musings of an increasingly longevitous elder of the community may reverberate in you. If they suggest richness, that’s what I have in mind. The daily repetitions, like so much else, belong to the mystery of human existence.
We are, and therefore we do. And much of what we do we have done before. But the next times we do them may hold the surprise of new insights.
                                                                                                 Richard Griffin