Category Archives: Aging

In Autumn, the Truth is Revealed

In autumn, the truth comes out.

And by autumn, I mean any autumn. Autumn the meteorological season before winter; Autumn on the calendar; Autumn in our life span; and Autumn in the liturgical year.

In every case, if you step back far enough, you can see the patterns. The photo op brilliant foliage reveals what was there all along, shaped by experience.  In spite of the sometimes-brutal clarity of autumn, I love this time of year.

Deciduous trees that turn yellow, gold and orange in autumn are not so much changing color as revealing the color that has been resting underneath, hiding under the green of chlorophyll. As the days grow shorter and cooler, chlorophyll production decreases. The leaves have always been golden. The trees have experiences, and these matter, too. Perhaps there has been plenty of rain and the soil is rich, or perhaps a hurricane has blown off so many small branches that the tree suffers malnutrition from a lack of chlorophyll. Then, too, if it is the sort of tree that turns red, its intensity will be impacted by sugars manufactured and stored; more sweetness makes for a more brilliant red.

In October or November, looking back at the resolutions, motto, word or intentions for the new year, the truth is revealed. In March one might kick that can down the road; even in June there is still “plenty of time.” But in autumn, reality comes to visit. We either did, or did not, step up and out into the life we intended to try to make. The combination of who we are (like it or not) and the experiences thrown at us by life bring the outcome we assess in the autumnal review of our intentions for the year. I’ve had the same motto for years now because apparently I’m a slow learner.

In the mirror, in the season of life poets call autumn, we see the person we have been all along, plus our experiences. The smoothness and sameness of youth is gone for those in midlife and later; laughter and tears, pain and care, habits – good and bad – all are revealed. A twenty-five-year-old might hide bad habits, but by forty-five, the entire body shows the pattern and at sixty-five, odds are the mind and spirit are far from what they promised to become before a bad habit became an addiction. On the other hand, there can be an explosion of energy, creativity and spiritual growth at in the autumn of life that startles those who mistook the responsible behaviors of younger years for that person being “boring.” This is when adult children wonder if their parents have gone a bit crazy – taking up new hobbies, traveling, refusing to be properly “old.” No, they were never actually boring, just busy with lifegiving, the drive that Erikson called “generativity,” that leads people to make sacrifices for others, and trees to manufacture food out of sunlight to nourish themselves and the seeds for future trees.

And then the liturgical year winds around, ending about four weeks before Christmas, with the Scripture readings for the last few weeks focused more and more on the last things – our own death, the final judgment, the need to take account of how we are living and make changes in accord with the highest good.  How appropriate that this unveiling of the reality beneath happens in such a pervasive way – that we are offered the chance see ourselves, our year, our years in total, through the same golden lens.

Happy mid-autumn; wishing you all the golden light the season offers.

Believe that there is more to you

It is a sad and common theme.

A person is struggling: with an addiction, or obsessions and compulsions, or moral injury, or the impact of trauma, and has come to a place where the sense of self has been entirely subsumed by the problem and its pain.

The definition of self becomes “the addiction,” or “the monster who did (whatever has led to moral injury)” or “the mental disorder diagnosis.”

And, of course, as a therapist, I believe it is critical to address mental health troubles with the best of the science we have, with the particular approaches suited, as discerned ongoing, with the specific needs of that client.

But I also believe that a parallel need is extant and urgent: the need for this person, who is suffering, to come back to an awareness of self as a deeply beloved child of God. Not generically loved, like we may say that we “love” some food or activity or type of animal – but particular, personal, and intense.  Women who, like me, have been blessed to give birth will recall that wild wave of emotion that engulfs us when we meet that little person face-to-face after the peculiar intimacy of pregnancy. It makes us irrationally jealous of everyone and anyone; what mother doesn’t remember resenting the nurses and physicians who separated us from the baby long enough to do the general assessments and necessary care? Well, that is a reflection God’s love for each person.

If a person who is suffering is willing to enter into, and do, the hard work of therapy, which will include lifestyle changes and “homework,” and also becomes open to reconsidering his or her existence as a deeply loved person, someone who is more than the addiction, or bad choices, or terrifying memories, or intrusive thoughts and painful compulsions, then true and deep healing can happen.  This is what I would wish for every person struggling with emotional wounds.

Loneliness can kill you…Part 1

According to new research from the journal Nature, Human Behavior published on January 3, 2025, loneliness and social isolation lead to molecular changes that, in my simple terms, seem to set the body up for serious problems – increased risk for dementia, depression, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke, and early death.  The researchers’ recommendations include routinely asking about loneliness and isolation, the way a health professional asks about sleep habits, alcohol use, and drug use.

If you are lonely on an ongoing basis, this is for you.

Loneliness can strike through no fault of one’s own.

Losing your spouse, for example, or a best friend, will almost inevitably lead to a long stretch of deep loneliness during the initial year or so of grief, and can continue beyond, as the bereaved person struggles to outsource some of that emotional, intellectual and spiritual intimacy to other relationships. In a healthy marriage, you share all sorts of confidences with a spouse that you simply might not share with anyone else – fears, dreams for the future, spiritual insights and struggles, and the warmth of shared memories that are no one else’s but the two of yours.  Somehow, some of that must be extended to others, and depth built over time. It an absolutely monumental task to parcel out these small slices of the immeasurable depth of a healthy marriage.

Moving, alone, to a new city, for a new job, can be exciting, but the reality can include aching loneliness when everyone at the new job goes home to their lives and you go to your apartment and try to figure out how to build a life. Developing the big, and small, connections that make a place feel like home can be daunting, and for most people, it takes longer than they had ever anticipated.

Loneliness hits other people, too. Those who are living primarily second-hand, separated by screens and trying to substitute electronic connections for human ones, are often intensely lonely. Some people interact with others in person, but the conversations are shallow, guarded and therefore nearly empty of connection and meaning. This type of loneliness can be even more painful, because it seems inexplicable; how can a person live with family or a partner and yet feel deeply lonely?

So, what to do? Unfortunately, the impetus is mostly on the lonely people to do something differently.

Here are some suggestions I would give to a client in such a situation.

  1. Go to church or synagogue. If you are grieving, try to go back to your own – but if that’s painful, go somewhere else, at least for now. If you are new to the area, just find a place that seems like a possibility. Then go to the hospitality time afterwards. Introduce yourself, and invite people to tell you about the faith community. Do not stand around with your cup of coffee and wait for people to notice you. Set a goal: perhaps that you will introduce yourself to three people, get their names, and ask a little about this community. See what happens. Try to focus on the other person; make the conversation a chance to get to know them and about their community – not about you. If it goes fairly well, go back the next week, greet those three people (and anyone else you met) by name if you can, re-introduce yourself without taking them forgetting your name personally, and see if you can meet a couple of other people. Within a month, you will have some acquaintance with a dozen or more people and have a solid idea if this community offers activities for education, worship and service for you to join.
  2. Even if you usually like to do things solo join at least one activity – one exercise class, one art class, one talk at the local bookstore, etc. – on a regular basis. Get to be a regular. Greet other people.
  3. Volunteer in your community. Do this with others. Doing good solo is beautiful, but if you’re not getting out of your head and focused on others in an interactive way, you are missing part of the point.
  4. Be friendly but don’t try to bully people into being your friends. For example, if you are new to the area, don’t wear out your welcome with the neighbors who came over to introduce themselves on moving day.
  5. Please do not use alcohol or other substances, or resort to hanging out having drinks as a way to cut loneliness.
  6. Be patient and keep trying! Think of these steps as experiments. Track what happens over time; be willing to change to a different experiment if the first one isn’t working after a month or so.

As you can see, the remedies for loneliness all include getting out of your head and into the world. Focusing on others, in small ways (such as greeting them and showing interest) to big ones (such as volunteering), is a critical part of overcoming loneliness. This can be really hard, because loneliness tends to make people even more withdrawn, more insular – it is a self-perpetuating problem unless you boldly step out, even with small but courageous steps, into focus on others.

More about connecting with others in Loneliness can Kill You, Part 2, coming soon.

Random Life Lessons

Here, on a beautiful autumn day, are a few life lessons I’ve picked up on the way…perhaps one will be useful to you.

Walking in the morning, before sunrise, can lead to being stopped by law enforcement, who, upon getting a look at me from the front (wrinkles and rosary beads) say things like, “Oh. I thought you were a kid out breaking into cars.”  Wearing a reflective vest and a skort, instead of baggy gym shorts, has solved that problem. Either that or I have succeeded in looking old from behind. The lessons: be reflective and dress appropriately to the task at hand.

Don’t save special stuff for special occasions.  Eventually someone else will just throw your treasure away or it will end up, sad and dusty, on a thrift store shelf. Use it up, whether it’s that fancy cocoa mix someone gave you at Christmas or your grandmother’s crystal. Drink sweet tea out of a fancy goblet.

Not from personal experience (see a prior post about this issue) If you change your hairstyle and/or color on a regular basis, you might not be the best candidate for a tattoo. The same goes if you try to destroy or at least hide any photos of you from five or more years ago because you can’t believe you left the house looking like that.

If there is something you really want to do, and it’s realistic for you, then pick a reasonable time frame (say, one year) and reverse engineer backwards all the way to tomorrow. If you want to achieve “X” – your G.E.D., your master’s degree, a marathon, writing your first book – there will be something specific that you do and/or don’t do tomorrow that is different than yesterday. Then the next day, you will, again, do/not do something different because you have this goal. If it’s your G.E.D., and you want to pass by one year from now, then the first thing to do is look up where to go for information. Then call the place. Then go. Then decide what you will give up to make time to study. Then do that: give up some of that time to study. Learn how to study (a lot of people get to college without knowing how to study; no shaming). And study again and again. Enlist people who will encourage you because it will be hard and discouraging and there will be people who try to pull you off course.

Don’t spend time around people who discourage you when you are trying to become a better person. If you have thought things through, and realized you must change some habit or adopt a new plan for life, and wise people agree it is a good move, then be very skeptical about the motivation of people who try to interfere.

Unless you have doctor’s orders to the contrary, odds are that alcohol is not your friend. Remember when Pinot told you what a great dancer you were at your cousin’s wedding?  Or how some kind of brown liquor helped you straighten out that miscommunication with your in-laws? Yeah, not your friend. Besides, alcohol is eager to share bad things: disrupted sleep, increased risk of cancer (it’s a major factor in a number of types of cancer), dementia, prematurely aging skin and who knows what else. Disclaimer: I don’t drink and I’m not in recovery, which means this one comes from 1) observing life and 2) reading the medical research.

Be wary of people who think it is funny to scare animals. A guest who tries to frighten your cat because it’s “funny” when the cat’s fur stands on end needs to go away and not visit again. This is a red flag, no matter how “nice” you thought this person was. They exert power by terrifying others; is that nice? No. If a five-year-old could easily explain it, I shouldn’t have to say another word.

The above does not include the person who is willing to make an absolute ass of themselves trying to scare a squirrel, bunny, rat, lizard, etc., out from under their parked car so they can leave without killing it. 

Try, if you can, to be patient with people who act as if they didn’t need to let you know about something they wanted you to know about because they put it on social media. Give yourself permission to explain that you don’t spend time looking for something you ought to know on social media. Unless you do, in which case you have bigger problems, perhaps, than missing one person’s newscast.

And, in closing, bear in mind that one person’s life lesson is not necessarily yours…but then again, maybe it could be.

The Best Years

When I was in high school, many adults told me I ought to really enjoy those years because they were “the best years of [my] life.”

Well, for me, high school itself was not, overall, such a great time, and having a bunch of grownups assert that it would turn out to be so was not encouraging at all. From where I am now, I feel sorry for a lot of those adults, because if that was their experience, they must have had pretty miserable adult lives.

Very often, we’ve adopted the idea that some certain time comprises the “best years of life.”  Consider the people who postpone marriage and family because they believe that their 20’s are “the best years of life” and they want to be “free” to travel/build a career/be self-indulgent/whatever.  Some of them will regret later that they did not make different choices (ask any therapist, priest, minister or rabbi).

On the other hand, some of us have our lives unfold in a different order: responsibility precedes higher education, and career-building comes largely after active-duty parenting. What, in the long haul, did I “miss out” on? Not a thing, and this was clear all along the way because I refused to take the bait on some certain time being “the best years” as if it were a prize category.

How about framing things up this way: each period of life is the “best” for what it is meant to be. As it says in Ecclesiastes, 3:11, “He has made everything beautiful in His time.”  And in its time, too.  There are some things that our 20s tend to be best for; and for some things, our 40s, 50s, 60s.  Yes, biologically, the 20s are peak time for having babies, and yes, forms of learning that require sheer memorization are best pursued prior to the 40s.  High-level analysis and wisdom, on the other hand, peak later than memorization and keep rolling, usually long after we start fumbling for the reading glasses we put down someplace and then find on our head.

There are different challenges, joys, and heartaches all along the way. Fortunately, our priorities change, or ought to. For God’s sake, who wants to be over 50 and as terrified of other people’s opinions as the typical 15-year-old? 

Are you tempted to feel discouraged? Does it feel as if all doors are shut because some events, some struggles, or perhaps your own regrettable choices, have meant you have lost a chance at the “best years”? Please reconsider. Make a different set of choices or just one different choice today. Then, perhaps, unexpectedly “best” years start today. You probably won’t be able to tell right away. Usually, we only see this when there’s enough distance to look back at today, tomorrow and the next day.

Why am I still here?

“Why am I still here?”

I hear that a lot. Perhaps you do, too.  The veteran who survived a firefight that took his friends; the person who woke up in the hospital to find they were the only survivor of a car crash that took their family; a survivor of a natural disaster that took many lives.  Many adults, perhaps most, have had such an existential episode. I’ve been in car accidents that could have killed me; survived acts of violence that could just as easily have tipped over into lethality, lived through serious illness. None of those are particularly unusual, and only mentioned to underscore the point.

“What do I live for now? What ought I be doing?”

That’s a tough one, yet it is the question every believer is tasked with as the subtext of life every day.  There is some chatter among the media that presuming that one’s survival is in God’s hands is some sort of unusual perspective. It is not my intention to speculate on any particular person’s interpretation of what that means. For those who find it perplexing, I hope to offer at least this Christian’s perspective. God never wants evil; it takes our free will for that to happen. Many of us wrestle with trying to figure out why God allows bad things to happen. Allowing something is not the same as wanting something, that’s for sure; every parent has to learn that lesson, fairly early on.

You may want your toddler to go to sleep. You may want that very, very, very eyes-burning-with-exhaustion much. But you have to allow the reality that the toddler will keep on singing songs, or whining, or coming out to complain. (If you do anything to “make” a child sleep, whatever adult is aware of it is required to report that to child protective services). C.S. Lewis does a much better job of explaining this particular point.  God, of course, chooses to allow or not. I’m not going to understand why because I am not God. God creates everything and I can do not a thing, even catch a breath, unless God wills it.

Our job is to figure out what God wants from us in each emerging situation, whether the situation itself was His will or not. For believers, every breath is a gift; there is no guarantee of another. Pondering what we are to do with these circumstances and assuming God has a preference in terms of our choice of action is not a big stretch.

So, for a Christian, God did not want Corey Comperatore to die in gunfire, protecting his family. It was not God’s will for the gunman to shoot. Mr. Comperatore clearly discerned his purpose was to protect at all costs. He had, apparently, discerned this over and over until his reflex towards self-sacrifice looked “automatic.” That seems to be a sign that his formation into the nature of Jesus Christ, the nature of complete self-giving, was something he had truly embraced.

And now, everyone left behind must discern what God asks of them in this new, tragic circumstance. Over the course of years and months, his family will each have to discern how to restructure life and find a different path forward. Friends and neighbors will need to discern, ongoing, how to provide friendship and support when the months pass and the spotlight of media attention fades.

The question doesn’t necessitate a tragedy, such as an accident, tornado or an attempted assassination. It is a perennial question: every person mourning infertility, every widow, widower, and bereaved parent.  Adolescents are supposed to wrestle with it; the elderly are, too. And all along the way, it is the question every thinking person ponders when transitioning to a new stage of life. We ask it at those times, too, that are both joyful and sad; a child grows up and successfully leaves the nest: mission accomplished; but what is my purpose now? Retirement comes; well, then what? What is your purpose now, beyond a vague sense of perpetual recess?

Being Christian means striving to be conformed to the nature of Jesus Christ. That means seeking not just to avoid being “bad” but attempting to do God’s will in every situation.  Is it “bad” to spend an entire lazy weekend afternoon with a pot of tea, a good book and a handful of chocolate? Especially on the Sabbath? No, lemon ginger tea and Lady Gregory’s book of Irish folklore, edited by W.B. Yeats, don’t make the list of “do-nots,” but the entire afternoon? When a friend needs a caring ear or a letter? When a nagging thought keeps intruding with that starts with, “I really need to reach out to…” maybe the “not a bad thing” needs to step aside and yield to the “better thing,” a “because” for the moment.

And, when you’re wrestling with the big questions of life, the little “becauses” become a path through the dark places.

Mom Wisdom: See, I wouldn’t like that

My mom has much wisdom, and it is often compressed into a succinct statement. One such statement is the beautifully versatile, “See, I wouldn’t like that.”

It is a thoughtful, personally disclosing and completely nonjudgmental response to all sorts of statements and behaviors. 

A distant relative has gotten an uncomfortable looking piercing. See, I wouldn’t like that, having a hole in my lip. But it’s not my lip.

Another family member is an avid hunter, while she is a vegetarian. See, I wouldn’t like that. But I’m sure it’s good to save money on food and of course the poor animal had at least a better quality of life while it lasted than those poor animals trapped in commercial stalls.

An elderly family member is planning a hiking and camping trip in the mountains. Well, good for her, but I wouldn’t like that. I’m sure she’ll have fun.

She will not pretend to agree with an opinion to keep the peace; she will not be abrasive or confrontational about it, either. She will not pretend that she, too, would want to skydive or travel someplace with large insects or otherwise engage in activities that she finds unappealing. She will listen, ask lots of questions, show genuine interest in the topic, seek to understand the other person’s enthusiasm, be encouraging and may also remark, well, see, I wouldn’t like that.

We have, to some extent, adopted this expression. Even when making an observation about something, such whether to go to the local First-Friday concert when the music is not a genre we enjoy, no criticism is necessary, just the agreement that lots of people will really enjoy it but, see, we wouldn’t like that.

I wonder what changes would ripple out if more people, instead of criticizing others for thinking or doing differently, the first stance was that respectful curiosity followed by a personal reflection that has nothing to do with whether the other party is “right” or “wrong.”  The alternative is a world where people fight or even cut one another out of their lives for matters that are more personal opinions than principles and too often, too little effort is made to find some common ground. And, see, I wouldn’t like that.

Cutting off Mom and Dad, Part 3



…and now we come to the final installment (so far) in my
wonderings about this strange phenomenon of parent rejection by adult children.
So far, I have tried to spread the responsibility around: the infantilization
of young adults by many institutions, the culture at large, and parents.  Now it is the young people’s turn.


It is my observation (granted, limited to some review of the
literature, professional trainings and clinical experience – over a quarter
century) that it is not usually the abused children who grow up and cut off
their parents. This seems odd, doesn’t it? If a child who was tortured decided
to cut off contact, we could understand, even support the healthy distancing.



It is much more typical for the young person who simply does
not want to be bothered to cut off the parent or parents. Quite often it seems
to be one parent; a widowed mother, typically, which makes me suspicious that
the possibility of some sort of responsibility drives the distancing.  I am sorry to be that cynical, but so it
sometimes seems.  Other themes seem to be
that the parent doesn’t just pat the child on the head for every decision, or
the parent has different political opinions, or religious beliefs.



If you are an adult, then surely you have developed the
capacity to tolerate the presence of people different than you; it appears to
be a matter of pride to young adults, especially, to be open-minded about
people’s differences, to refuse to allow even stunningly foundational
differences in values to be barriers to mutual respect. If that is the case, if
you think of yourself as tolerant, then surely you can tolerate the fact that
your parents, or grandparents, or aunts or uncles or other relatives, no doubt
have different ideas than you (and from one another). It may come as a surprise
to you that your parents, whom you may see as some monolith of monotony,
actually disagree with one another. A lot. The research indicates married
couples disagree on about two thirds of the stuff of life, or more; they just
have figured out, I hope, how to live and let live on these disagreements and
how to work with the few that are pretty significant areas. 



Are you afraid? Afraid that you cannot properly defend your
own positions, operationalizing your terms and pointing to data, rather than
feelings, and that interacting with your parent(s) will be an exercise in
losing an argument and feeling like a fool? 



Are you afraid to simply listen to try to understand more of
their opinion, meaning the information and experiences that support that
stance?



Are you afraid that staying close to aging parents will mean
being stuck with them, having to take care of them, when you are carefully
curating your life to minimize responsibility?



Are you afraid you will die of boredom if you have to listen
one more time to their ramblings about the events of their lives, which may
actually not be any more ennui-producing than your own (have you wasted a chunk
of your life bingeing a fictional series lately or playing video games?).



Are you afraid that they will keep trying to get you to
change and you are tired of explaining to them that your
job/partner/reproduction plans are not up for discussion?



Are you afraid to set boundaries, including the boundaries
of discretion? Surely you do not talk about everything with every friend; in
the same way, it can be very wise to discern what topics to discuss with whom.
If your definition of family means “people who have to accept and agree with
everything about me,” then even something as simple as dietary differences (the
omnivore and vegan siblings, for example) will necessitate cutting off a family
member when all you had to do was not rave on and on about the great steak you
grilled last weekend or stop talking about murder when you are sharing a meal.



Cutting off family without very strong grounds to do so is a
red flag. If your friends have done so, consider their reasons; if this is how
they treat the people who sacrificed for them in ways they may not yet
understand, exactly how solid is the rock you stand on with these friends? Can
you really count on them to be there, helping to clean up after you have
vomited, for the zillionth time, during chemo? To show up for you when there is
a death, or a birth, and in the long months of change and bewilderment
afterwards? To take a day off and drive you to and from having your wisdom
teeth out, or a colonoscopy, or whatever else has to happen – and the medical
office will not release you to a ride share service?



The family cut-off is a tragedy, under the best and most
reasonable of circumstances. The dangerous parents might need to be cut off,
for the sake of their children and grandchildren. It is heartbreaking that life
had to come to this, but it may be necessary. That is not something to be done
lightly, indifferently, or without serious reflection of how this decision will
play out in the decades to come.



Thanks for reading –



On Being “Beyond”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately on being beyond. Beyond what, you might ask, and I’m sorting that out. Basically, though, it started with realizing that I am now in that great blob of the population described so often as “beyond.” As in the headlines on the covers of women’s magazines,

“Get glowing skin! Customized tips for your thirties, forties, fifties and beyond!”

“Walking for Fitness at Any Age! Belly-busting strategies for your thirties, forties, fifties, and beyond!”

I don’t know the extent to which men are burdened with this. I can imagine, though:

“Get ripped! Washboard abs workouts for your thirties, forties, fifties and beyond!”

Yeah, I’m beyond.

It sounds sort of like a super hero, as if at 60 – when we enter into Beyond – we ought to get a cape. I have a cape – Irish wool, very warm. If you think that sounds more cozy than conquering, you haven’t met enough Irish women. (Note to would-be inventors of Beyond Woman action figures: spare us the wasp waist. We have the usual age-related spinal compression plus hormonally driven fat redistribution. Keep it real, that’s all we’re asking.  Because we are fine, better than fine, and in fact, beyond – just the way we are.)

It’s quite comical that the apparently youngish people who write so much media content put the newly 60s, the 60-year-olds’ mothers, their aunts, and centenarians all into one category, while the decades earlier are carefully delineated as if the difference between, say, 39 and 41 comprises dramatically more difference than between a 60-year-old and any given 80-year-old woman, and between that woman and a centenarian. It seems to reflect a silly and self-absorbed presumption about the nuances of midlife compared to the daily warfare of old age.

The implication is that, well, now you’re old and one old person is the same as the other. That is clearly ridiculous; there is far more difference between any two senior citizens than between any two 20-year-olds.  How could there not be? Life has been unfolding, every day full of experiences that compound the differences.  Every decision about habits, relationships, effort, sloth, etc., multiplies and intersects into complex and unintended consequences.  If you are 30 and reading this, consider how different you are from the people who were your best friends in high school, just 12 years ago. Wait another 30 years of daily choices and the ramifications of those choices, plus the unexpected and random events of life, and the differences between you will be inestimable.  

So, what does it mean, being beyond?  Well, the ones I speak with are beyond thinking they are in some sort of competition with the whole world.  They are beyond equally valuing everyone’s opinions; they stop craving indiscriminate approval. They are beyond getting aggravated about the minor speed bumps of daily life and getting tangled up in knots over every bit of bad news.  They are beyond thinking that social media alerts outweigh the person we’re talking with now. They have long been beyond pretending that cynicism is the same as wisdom.

All this means freedom: freedom to play freely with children without worrying about our dignity, sing in our cars, and ask questions without worrying we’ll look stupid. We adapt to what our bodies can and can’t do today. We can be creative because it doesn’t matter if other people don’t like what we paint or draw or bake or build. And, out of that freedom, we can offer encouragement and hope to people who are still trapped in the completely voluntary constrictions of being not-yet-beyond.

And so, here’s to being beyond, with all its freedom, challenges and gifts. 

What about you? What does being beyond mean – and will you wait until a magazine editor says you’re there to enjoy it?