Health advisors are unanimous: for the benefit of our physical selves, we elders ought to exercise more than we do. One author, Douglas Powell, is so convinced of its value that he risks telling the younger members of his extended family what to do. “If I could make only one suggestion to my children and grandchildren about optimal aging,” he writes, “it would be this: Get regular exercise.”
Two Women
Two women, both middle-aged spiritual seekers, trying to find a deeper reality and to give it expression to a wide audience, appeared together last week as part of a book fair. Their presentations offered much to think about and pray over.
Joan Anderson told of leaving her husband and her home to live by herself for a time on Cape Cod. She did not want a divorce, nor did she cease caring about her husband; she simply felt the need of a radical change.
So, as she describes it in her new book, A Year By the Sea, Joan Anderson did things that established contact with the world in novel ways. She took a job in a fish market; she dug clams on the beach; she took long walks along the ocean’s edge; she went swimming with the seals.
From There to Here
Until my college years, I literally did not know anything about homosexuality, even its very existence. It simply did not occur to me that people of the same gender would gravitate toward one another sexually. That’s how sheltered my suburban upbringing was in a family where anything sexual received precious little mention.
After college when I joined the Jesuits, I did become aware of the attraction some men feel for one another. In fact, I felt it myself for at least one fellow novice, a fact that caused me much confusion. But, my spiritual counselors explained, that often happens in living situations restricted to a single gender such as in a military setting (as it was then) or, in this instance, in a spiritual boot camp.
Spirituality and the Creative Arts
The large stage of Sanders Theater, filled to its last square foot with young people as singers and players, provided the setting last week for a stirring musical performance. Verdi’s Requiem resounded through the hall with all the vigor, and the subtlety, of the great composer’s creative art. Members of the audience, clearly held in rapt attention during the performance, at the end rose to their feet and applauded mightily the conductor and all who had brought us such an experience.
Love and Death
Donald Hall, a celebrated poet and writer rooted in the New Hampshire soil where his ancestors have lived for generations, is a man of profound feeling and spirituality. Having had to face life-threatening illness himself as well as the agonizing death of his wife, Jane Kenyon, also a poet, he knows what it means to have his faith tempered in the fire of suffering. Continue reading
Can the Generations Talk to One Another?
Does a gap yawn wide and deep between Americans currently middle-aged and their parents? Has the generation of younger adults been brought up so differently that communication between them and those now old is, if not next to impossible, at least extremely difficult?
Mary Pipher, Ph.D. definitely thinks so. Another Country: Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Our Elders, the title of her new book, suggests as much. Pipher, a clinical psychologist based in Lincoln, Nebraska, places great emphasis on the cultural changes that have swept over this country in the past century, considering them to have made members of older and younger generations practically foreigners to one another.
Single Payer
On a bright breezy morning, cheek-by-jowl with noisy Beacon Hill street traffic and busy people on the way to work, it was exhilarating to stand outside the State House interviewing advocates from around the Commonwealth who had come to lobby for health care legislation. Many older men and women animatedly milled about holding signs in favor of single payer health care.
Barbara Ackermann who reads this column in Cambridge, had urged me to come to the rally. Now age 74 and long retired from electoral office, she once served as Cambridge’s first female mayor. These days she uses her sharp political skills to lobby for fundamental change in the health care system.