Oh dear, what a tangle of banners and cries, Of “My truth is truer!” and “Mine’s far more wise!” Of temples and doctrines and sacred decrees, All wrapped up in “holiness”. . . if you please. They march and they shout and they thump and they pound, With righteousness ringing (a very loud sound). But peek past the noise, past the flags that they wave…

Virginia once raced through the world like a woman with a personal vendetta against gravity. In her Go-Go years, she was a force of high-stakes motion. Whether she was organizing a midnight rescue for a stray llama in the Andes or perfecting the art of “extreme gardening” by planting two hundred tulip bulbs in a single afternoon, Virginia lived at a relentless pace…

Walking through Vienna, Joel noticed an elderly woman sweeping the streets. His first instinct, shaped entirely by the culture that raised him, was pity. She was old. She was still working. Surely something had gone wrong.
His father corrected him gently. Nothing had gone wrong. She was valued here. She was useful…

There’s something I’ve come to notice as I’ve gotten older, and once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. It is this basic truth: We don’t give ourselves much credit. When I look back on my life, the facts are there. I built and ran businesses. I bought, remodeled, and sold twenty-six homes. I earned a pilot’s license. I played in bands…

Self-improvement has never been easier with a wealth of knowledge at your fingertips. Everywhere you look there is advice on faith, diet, relationships, travel, finances and career from a wide range of sources. For anyone on a self-improvement journey, it doesn’t take long to realize that delving too deeply into the self-help …

If you haven’t had this moment yet, you likely will. You look around at a life you built with care, effort, and sacrifice. And instead of clarity, you feel a quiet question underneath it all. Who am I now? It is easy to say you “lost yourself.”

Since I turned 60, I have been constantly surprised at the amount of innovation, bravery, and inspiration I have seen in older women. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised… we are the generation that has changed the world, probably more than any other…

There’s a line in a song I wrote recently that stayed with me longer than the music: “I know it’s my own doing… bein’ where I be… but that don’t make it easier… livin’ inside of me.” I didn’t write that line as advice. It wasn’t meant to fix anything. It just showed up one day, the way honest things tend to do. And the more I sat with it, the more I realized how much of life can feel like that…

We have this obsession with needing to know what we want at all stages of our lives. And it doesn’t fade with age. In fact, sometimes it gets louder. There’s a subtle expectation that by now, by this stage of life, we should feel certain. Settled. Complete. As though we’ve arrived at a final version of ourselves…

There’s a phrase most of us have heard our entire lives: “Just be strong. You’ll bounce back.” It’s meant kindly. But by the time you’ve lived six decades, you already know something that phrase refuses to acknowledge. Some experiences don’t leave you unchanged. And they’re not supposed to…