Author: John Schuster

Making space for the Good People Think of a person you know who “never got over” a bad event. Conversely think of those who somehow powered or muddled through big difficulties and declare they are the better for it. Why do bad things dent or even crush some and not others? This is the complex question that drives the large body of research on resilience we can now tap. George Vaillant, MD, has something to[…]

Aging is an activity you do, not something that happens to you. ~Thomas Moore The wisdom that comes with our later years does not just show up. It was forged, if we paid attention to our experiences, in our contact with life, especially when we had staying power as things were going wrong, against our wills and goals, in the messes of our lives. We learned to survive the hard times. We reflected on the lessons[…]

The setting: I am in the Manhattan office of a colleague I much admire for his leadership and stellar career, and we are having a rich conversation on aging, aging men in particular. He tells me a story of his friend who lost his wife of many years, and then suffered deeply and for an extended time the loss of his life partner. In a candid moment with my colleague this widower in pain gives[…]

The body will become restless until the soul paints all its beauty on the sky ~Rumi   Do not go gentle… Rage, rage against the dying of the light. ~Dylan Thomas   You don’t have to take Dylan Thomas’s advice exactly, and on your 70th b-day rage against the night. But you have my permission to stay restless, even in the most positive of aging journeys. Tranquility, perhaps the number-one goal of many a mindful[…]

Later Life years are not a time to keep our life-long learning process going. It is a time to accelerate it. We speed up our learning as we age, not because we make it happen so much, but by allowing a new kind of learning to happen. We do this on two levels or planes: the outer and the inner lives we enjoy; the material and the psycho-spiritual. Society with its age-ism—wrinkles are bad, pretend you aren’t aging; keep producing, career[…]

But at my back, I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near   Andrew Marvell My colleague and master coach and teacher Doug Silsbee is dying. He has a blog on these last months of life that he is creating with wife Walker. Doug had many many like me, proud to call him colleague, teacher, friend. He has these beautiful words to offer in his March 25th post. He wanted his son Miles to sense how an[…]

There are always two opposite truths to embody, two polar ideas to integrate. Life would be so-o-o much simpler if only one side of the spectrum were true. We have to be just and merciful, powerful and gentle. As we ripen and mature, we have to hold on and let go at the same time. First the Hold On part, something a lot of us are good at One joy for those aging at this[…]

Maybe we get wiser. Maybe it is having less time. Whatever it is, lots of us in later years report some deeper, clearer understandings of what matters. One great little book, one that pulls no punches on both the hard and good side of the journey, also beautifully captures what to look forward to in aging. The book is The Measure of My Years by Florida Maxwell Scott, which was written when she was in[…]