“Not-Knowing” Wisdom
Magic dwells in the spirits of those, most generally elders, who are savvy enough to know, that they know enough, to know, they don’t know very much.
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Reunion: A Lesson In Aging
How could I have studied gerontology all these years and yet retained “a purely abstract notion” about aging?
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Medicare for All(most)
In a time when politicians and deficit hawks are advocating raising the eligibility age for Medicare, we should actually be pressing to do the exact opposite.
Continue ReadingWhen Time Flies
So, here is an interesting video of a guy who took a picture of himself everyday for twelve years. In about ten minutes you can watch a man pass through more than a decade of his life. What you see is his hair styles change, the rising prominence of his freckles, bags and wrinkles form under his eyes, a beard, and a few other things.
Continue ReadingSLOW DOWN YOU MOVE TOO FAST
America’s obsession with speed, performance and “effectiveness,” which suited the Post War generation so well on its long journey through adulthood, grates on people who are edging into elderhood in ways not unlike the well-loved relative who has overstayed her welcome. The first impulse that many people have is to complain about how much faster […]
Continue ReadingBeing Old is Time Consuming
Crabby Old Lady is worn out and it’s not because she has been extra special busy lately. It’s just ordinary living that takes up more time than it did when she was younger. Or, maybe, it’s the consequences of ordinary…
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Modern Times
It is worth looking back a couple of generations for an example of how changes in the human perception of time and the uses to which time is supposed to be put have been received by others. The classic American silent film “Modern Times” captures some of the distress that people in another era experienced as they struggled to make sense of how time was changing around them.
Continue ReadingThe Catch-22 of Time and Money
Americans strongly believe (with some justification) that “time” and “money” are tangible things. There are, after all, 24 hours in a day and a hundred cents in every dollar. Common sense tells us that time and money are real things, tangible and largely unchangeable.
In fact, “time” and “money” are, more than anything else, cultural constructs.
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