“When I was little, a day seemed to last forever, especially a school day. Now a day is nothing, just a blink of an eye. You know intellectually that a month is still a month, a week is a week, a day is a day, but it goes so much faster the older we get.

“Sometimes I play a little game with myself. I know it’s odd, but I do it just the same. I try to make time pass like it did when I was a child. First, I shut off the television and listen to the ticking of the clock. That slows everything down. Then I tell my worries to back off so I can concentrate. It works like a charm. The morning lasts a long, long time.”

These are the words of Anna Ornish at age 81, a woman interviewed by my Seattle-based colleague Wendy Lustbader and retold in her newest book, “What’s Worth Knowing.”

By way of commentary on their conversation, Wendy says: “Anna Ornish had never been exposed to Eastern meditation techniques, but when I told her that some of what she was doing had been taught in traditions a few thousand years old, she said, ‘Good. That means I’m not so peculiar.’ ”

Convincing as Anna’s experience of time is, not every older person feels it this way. For some, time drags slowly indeed. Those, especially, who live in situations not to their liking –  – in nursing homes, perhaps, or in their own home cut off from everyone else –  – find that the hours have become glaciers, slow and cold.

But in writing about older people, in speaking about them, you have to generalize. Everyone is unique, personal experience is never repeated exactly, so we must settle for approximations. It so happens that what Anna lives through comes close to what I experience.

For me, time is moving awfully fast. My daughter’s schooling is nearing completion when it seems just to have begun. Those double deadlines for newspapers each week force the days to speed up. Even the dour days of last March did not much slow down my weeks.

What makes Anna interesting is her readiness to experiment. She plays with time, manipulates it so as to adjust its speed to her own liking and for her own purposes. Drawing on the wisdom of long living, she has learned how to arrest time and make it slow down in its passage.

The amazing thing is that she wants it to go more slowly. Few of us are capable of such a bold more; it would terrify us. But she has a purpose for time, says she wants to concentrate. What she means by that remains unclear but it sounds as if she wants to enter into some higher sphere of consciousness. You could call it prayer or contemplation or peace of soul.

Whatever you call it, Anna finds a value in it that counteracts the escape of time, time passing without meaning. It’s a lot better than television. And it certainly beats self-pity and regret. Anna’s reconstituted time is pregnant with new life. It makes her old age, if not sweet, at least resonant with welcome sounds.

Anna thinks of herself as peculiar, though when she discovers herself to have something in common with millennia of spiritual traditions, she feels less so. Being back in the time warp of childhood is not so peculiar if you know what to do with your time. In childhood, many of us suffered the long summers because, once we got beyond the neighborhood games, there was not much else to do.

Anna, standing still in her new time, presumably acts interiorly, doing the work of advanced maturity. She is coming to grips with the givenness of her life, the parts of it that she has never controlled but received from others. She is learning how to appreciate each day for the reality that is packed into it. She makes it her business to unpack its meaning, to investigate all that it brings.

Anna’s way cannot be everyone’s. Listening to the tick of the clock, for instance, would drive me berserk. But for her, it serves as perhaps a hypnotic device to send her into a new sphere of time. It carries her beyond the intellectual framework that tells her about a day being still a day. She has entered a spiritual place where the daily realities have been transformed.

I would like to be as adventurous as Anna. Her spirit draws my admiration. Without knowing much of anything about the traditional techniques of spirituality, she has discovered a precious secret of how to age well. I hope that her experiments with truth, as Gandhi would have called them, continue to bring her time’s surprising gifts.

Richard Griffin

As an elder citizen of Massachusetts, I am feeling sandbagged. As a columnist, I am feeling seduced.

Just three weeks ago, I wrote about the commonwealth’s new Prescription Advantage program, welcoming the benefits it would bring to this state’s older residents. I passed on to readers information sent out by the Executive Office of Elder Affairs in praise of its affordability, among other features. It was billed as an instrument that would bring to every elder “peace of mind.”

I also took at face value Secretary Lillian Glickman’s boast about the influence that Prescription Advantage would have across the country and her prediction that “the eyes of the nation will be upon us.”

But now, thanks to some sharp reporting by David Ortiz who writes for the Boston and Cambridge TABs and the Cambridge Chronicle, we discover that the state government has misled us. The shiny promise of the new drug program has been compromised and may turn out to be just another spoiled package.

We have now learned  that the state House of Representatives wants to cut 22 percent of the program’s budget. That cut will eliminate premium protection for elders with low incomes, raise co-payments, and double deductible limits each year.

Suddenly, the House proposes making worse some features of the program that were already dubious. No wonder that some critics have already renamed the program Prescription Disadvantage.

When I talked three weeks ago to John O'Neill, Executive Director of Somerville Cambridge Elder Services and current president of Massachusetts Home Care, I discovered that he already felt mixed about the new Prescription Advantage program, even before these funding cuts came over the horizon.

“It’s good that it’s a public plan,” he said then, and he thought it would prove helpful for low-income people. But, even then, it had too many deductibles and co-payments for his taste.

He recognized that determining the amount to be paid in premiums was a problem for the program’s planners. “The premiums are a shot in the dark,” he added, “because no one knows how much the whole program will cost.”  

“They are afraid of adverse selection,” he said of the planners, because so many people who are big users of prescription drugs may sign up. And the plan depends on state funding from year to year.

These were the incisive but balanced views of an informed critic commenting on a plan adopted last July and about to be the subject of an intensive media campaign this month.

Now, given the announced cuts, many elders must wonder about what the new program really offers them, since it comes loaded down with so many co-payments and deductibles, just like run-of-the-mill health care programs.

Fortunately, some elder citizens have already taken action in the face of the proposed cuts. Busloads of them went to the State House last week to lobby members of the legislature and persuade them to restore the original features of the plan. These advocates, many of them experienced and vocal campaigners on elder issues, hope to turn their representatives around.

I talked to my own representative, Jarrett Barrios, who said of the proposed cuts, “This is obviously something I am concerned about.” I await further word from him when he checks with Ways and Means about the prospects of restoring the funding.

Back to John O’Neill, I asked how he now feels about the new plight of Pharmacy Advantage.  The 22 percent cut, to his mind, jeopardizes the whole program “before the thing even gets off the ground.” In large part, that happens because the cuts “make it easier for many older people to say no.”

As to the effect of the cuts on overall costs of the program, the state has put itself in a strange position. “Instead of helping,” O’Neill observes, “it may perversely make it worse.” That’s because fewer, perhaps many fewer, will now register for a program that may cost them so much more.

A leader among citizen advocates, Phil Mamber of Lynn, agrees. Current president of the Massachusetts Senior Action Council, Mamber last week led some 200 elders at the State House protesting the cuts and pushing for amendments that would restore the program.

Asked about the 22 percent cut, Mamber says: “I think it was absolutely horrible. It took us by surprise. Now people don’t know what to register for.  It’s a terrible way to do business. Everyone is confused.”

Eileen Ginnetty, director of the Council on Aging in Cambridge, agrees. “It is discouraging,” she says of the situation. “If you are going to pay $4,000 a year, that’s what you pay for Medex Gold.” That removes any incentive for moderate-income elders to sign up for the new program, she believes.

As this column goes to press, no action has been taken to restore the money needed for  Prescription Advantage.

It will be fascinating to see how the state government gets out of this mess. More important, the health care needs of many elders hang on the outcome.

Richard Griffin

Until middle age, I had never known anyone who was not either a Christian or a Jew. Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and people espousing the other religious traditions of the world simply did not come across my suburban paths during childhood and adolescence. And obviously all of my colleagues in the Jesuit order where I lived in early adulthood shared my own Christian faith.

In 1972, however, I took part in what was billed as “Word Out of Silence: Spiritual Formation East and West,” a symposium held at Mount Saviour Monastery in Elmira, New York. There the Benedictine monks hosted religious leaders from a dozen different traditions in a week of prayer and other spiritual exercises. It meant my first exposure to turbaned swamis and Zen masters with shaved heads, an experience that helped to change my world view.

I will always remember the strain in my leg muscles as I assumed the lotus position for meditation each morning at 4:30 under the direction of a Japanese roshi. Though I was used to my own strict religious discipline, I worried about being able to last out the week under that austere regimen.  

At that time, only in the middle of my life journey, old age did not interest me as a subject for reflection. I was still too young for thoughts of later life to impinge upon my consciousness. Though I did often contemplate the thought of my own death, that event seemed far off in the future.

Thirty years later, however, I have become intent on finding whatever light on old age is offered by the various religious traditions of the world. Surely their wisdom, preserved for thousands of years, must have something important to say about what it means to grow old. And they must speak to the end of life on earth and its meaning for the future.

Even the changes brought on by modern life, I have learned, do not rob the wisdom traditions of relevance to our situation. In fact, as we struggle to find out for ourselves what later life means, many elders feel starved for spiritual nourishment. If traditions other than those with which we grew up can feed that hunger, then we may want to hear more.

This experience helps explain why I recently welcomed receiving for review a package of materials from the Park Ridge Center, based in Chicago. Entitled “The Challenges of Aging,” this package is intended for adult education in church settings. Though its focus is primarily Christian, the material also includes a rich handbook summarizing the outlook of other religious traditions about aging. Further information about the Park Ridge Center’s educational program is available at (312) 266-2222.

Though the five traditions discussed in the handbook – – Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism – – differ among themselves in many ways, they all share some central values about aging. These values go directly against two dramatically different views of aging that have become dominant in modern American society. Both of these secular views are deeply flawed and are often the object of criticism by gerontologists and people who hold dear the religious insights offered by their tradition.

Those two views portray old age as 1) simply a time of decline when we start to lose it as we proceed downward on the path toward death,  or  2) a stage of life in which enterprising people can practice “successful aging” achieving good health, engaging in ceaseless activity, and discovering new creativity.

By contrast, the great religious traditions say first of all: “Later life is a time of spiritual flourishing.” These are the words of Dina Varano, who writes the fine summary article in the handbook that comes with the adult education package referred to above.

Spiritual flourishing is consistent with physical suffering and decline. In fact, all the traditions find value in suffering, not as an end in itself but as an opportunity for enrichment of soul. Personal enlightenment can transform the experience of bodily decline into personal greatness.

Each spiritual tradition calls for a “radical transformation of consciousness in later life.” Varano quotes the philosopher Harry Moody: “The spiritual traditions have never accepted the idea that human fulfillment is the product of social roles or relentless activity in the world.” Rather, the great religions see human fulfillment as something spiritual that comes as a gift of God.

Incidentally, the ancient Jewish biblical commentaries offer a charming explanation of how age began. The Midrash tells it this way: “Abraham introduced old age to the world. He came before the Lord with a plea. ‘Master of the universe, a man and his son walk together and no one knows unto whom to give honor. I beg of you, make a distinction between us.’”

Thus, according to this tradition, did age become seen as a blessing. The other religious traditions, too, offer profound reasons for appreciating what it means to grow older.

Richard Griffin

I do not hate politicians. Given the prevailing American views of office holders and seekers, this sentiment may strike you as naïve, even outrageous. However I continue to respect them in general and even to admire some.  Ideally, at least, I consider the knowledge that they have acquired as important to the rest of us and I welcome opportunities to hear from them.

That is why a recent university forum entitled “Reflections on Public Service” attracted my attention. Intended largely as a gathering where a small group of highly seasoned politicians could share some wisdom with students considering public service as a career, it turned out to be both instructive and entertaining as well.

This forum featured Senator Edward Kennedy; former Senator Warren Rudman from New Hampshire; Philip Sharp, who served for twenty years as a United States congressman from Indiana; and Doris Kearns Goodwin, the historian who has written widely about American presidents.

The atmosphere in the crowded amphitheater of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government was animated and yet relaxed. This tone was largely set by the old pros who spoke with warmth and humor of their work in Washington. To me, the occasion seemed that rare opportunity whereby older people get the chance to share their wisdom with those younger.

Ted Kennedy, in particular, showed himself at his most genial and more at ease than I had ever seen him previously. He seemed to take special pleasure in recounting anecdotes of his time in the senate and in sharing his political ideals. Asked by moderator Gwen Ifill how to connect public service with politics, he responded by invoking the famous line from his brother’s inauguration speech: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

He then affirmed that “young people made the difference for people of my generation” and cited their leadership in the civil rights struggle, the opposition to the Vietnam War, and the environmental movement. For him, volunteerism is still alive and well. The best part of it is “all you have to do is care; you don’t have to be a senator.”

For his part, Warren Rudman spoke from the heart about the value that he has found in his chosen path. “There is no psychic satisfaction like public service,” he proclaimed. “I decided that a long time ago.” Since leaving the senate, he has found pro bono service to the community “terrifically satisfying.”

Phillip Sharp praised participation even when it does not produce success. “It is also important to run to lose,” he said of becoming a candidate for office in situations where there is no realistic chance of getting elected. It still helps the community to raise issues and refine them.

Doris Kearns Goodwin spoke with typical charm about some of her experiences with Lyndon Johnson. He felt depressed in his last months of life by his failures as president. “The only hope he had before he died was that he would be remembered for civil rights,” Goodwin recalled.

From her current study for a book on Abraham Lincoln, she told how depressed he was in his early thirties, so much so that his friends took knives away from him. But after he freed the slaves, he wrote: “my fondest hopes are realized.”

Asked about unaddressed issues, the two senators focused on racism. Ted Kennedy believes that we have made fundamental progress but that the issue remains before us still. “We have to free ourselves from it,” he stated. He also spoke of our national need for “a sense of common purpose.”

And Warren Rudman made this bold prediction: “If we cannot give equality to all Americans in the next twenty years, then you will see the decline of America.”

Phillip Sharp is convinced of the need for us “to undo the barriers that prevent people from rising to the level of their talent.” Doris Kearns Goodwin emphasized our need for “leaders who can follow public opinion but shape and mold it at the same time.”

A student asked whether political leaders need to have a high level of schooling. Ted Kennedy stated that “innate qualities are more important.” Doris Goodwin cited Lincoln who had only one year of formal schooling but brought temperament and character to the office of president at a time of great crisis.

Another questioner raised the subject of global warming. Kennedy called it an “enormously serious” issue and accused the Bush administration of being “in the tank” with industries.

I came away from the forum encouraged by this example of give and take among generations. This was a sharing of experience and viewpoints that characterizes a healthy democratic community. Many young people do want to hear from those with many years of public service; some of those who have been in the public eye for a long time do welcome hearing the views of young people.

Richard Griffin