“Old Age is an island surrounded by death,” wrote the Ecuadorian essayist Juan Montalvo. At its core, life is not about things, it is about relationships. It is the hands we go on holding in our heart...  Read More

The Hasidim say, “For the unlearned, old age is winter; for the learned, it is the season of harvest.” It is the distribution of that harvest to the rest of the human community for which we look to th...  Read More

Spiritual eyesight increases when physical eyesight decreases according to Plato. It is this spiritual eyesight, the ability to see into the inner meaning of things, the spiritual value of things, the...  Read More

Agatha Christie, still writing bestsellers in her eighties, shattered the very idea of a sclerotic old age. If anything, she is an icon of the link between education and experience, of the notion that...  Read More

The fact is that religion is not one thing, but a multi-layered phenomenon, if successful, that can bring people to the height of whatever spiritual mountain they climb. The Tibetan master Sakya Pandi...  Read More

In some ways, we are all just getting to be more of who and what we have always been. We can decide right now what we intend to be: approachable and lovable, or tyrannous and fractious. The Austrian n...  Read More

“Though it sounds absurd,” Ellen Glasgow said, “it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I had felt at twenty.” There is no doubt about it: whatever we have become at sixty, we are. The game clo...  Read More

Pablo Picasso wrote, “It takes a long time to become young.” The beauty of the later years, in other words, is that if we have learned through life to trust our own insights at least as much as we tru...  Read More

“In youth we learn, in age we understand” is a quote from Mary von Ebner-Eschenbach that she wrote when she was seventy-five years old. This shows an understanding of the function of aging and the rol...  Read More