Philosophy & Spirituality of Aging (CONTINUED) Meaningfulness

“Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.”          - Dalai Lama

On Having an Ageless Soul With a view on bolstering good and positive thoughts about growing old, I recently read Thomas Moore’s newest  book, Ageless Soul: Living a Full Life with Joy and Purpose. I’ve always been a big fan of Moore, who is currently 77 years of age. Two of his books I have read repeatedly, among more than 20 he authored over the years, are A Life at Work, and Care of the Soul, which was a 44-week NY Times best-seller back in the early 1990s, and still resonates today.  I also enjoyed A Religion of One’s Own, his previous book, published in 2015.  READ MORE

Think Deeply, It May Do Some Good As I have noted in a good number of previous posts, early old age, which varies for some, ranging anywhere from 45 to 65, brings lots of consternation about who you really are and what you are doing with yourself in work and elsewhere. You come to an intersection where you think more deeply about where your compass is pointing, and it’s almost like going back in time to when you were first trying to figure out what you were going to do with your life, maybe even as far back as elementary school. READ MORE 

A Relatively Brief Review of  My Studies on Aging I’ve been studying what it means to grow old, from philosophical, psychological, sociological and spiritual perspectives. I have developed a substantial personal library on aging. I’ve been reading through concepts about meaningful aging espoused by such authors as Thomas Moore, Joan Chittister, James Hillman, Gene Cohen, Carol Orsborn, Lars Tornstam, Carl Jung, and many others. I’ve started to cover the world of work and leisure during the last third of life, and the phases of inner change many of us go through when we reach our sixties. I’ve also delved into theology and spiritual practice, including Zen, Christianity, and Buddhism. READ MORE

Remembrance Thinking & Character Development in Old Age In “The Mature Mind: The Positive Power of the Aging Brain,” the late Gene D. Cohen, geriatric researcher on positive aging, wrote about a “summing- up” phase in life that typically hits people in their late sixties and into their seventies and eighties. Cohen identified this phase as “a time of recapitulation, resolution, and review.”  Recapitulation, according to Google dictionary, is “an act or instance of summarizing and restating the main points of something.” Resolution is “a firm decision to do or not to do something.” And review is “a formal assessment or examination of something with the possibility or intention of instituting change if necessary.” Let’s call recapitulation, resolution, and review the 3Rs of Old Age. READ MORE

Attempting to Piece Together the Meaning of Life Puzzle: Efforts to Know More My self-guided research on the philosophy, psychology, sociology and spirituality of aging has taken me along numerous streams of valid and authoritative information. Perhaps I should not say self-guided, however. Many of those streams are discovered in the reference sections of the papers and books I’ve been reading, as well as, of course, where the search engines take me. Yet, there’s no mentor or teacher involved. So, it’s also fair to say that the work is substantially autodidactic, which means self-guided.  READ MORE