Inspiration

If you’ve tried advice that should have helped and it just didn’t land, the problem might not be the advice. It might not be you, either. It might be that the advice was written for a different chapter than the one you’re actually in. Most of us have been there. You read the article, buy the book, or sit through the talk, and everyone around you seems to nod along while you quietly think…

A new habit is usually planned for a best week. An hour of walking, a chapter a day, a tidy routine in a clean notebook. It holds for a few days. Then a bad week arrives. Someone gets sick, an appointment is moved, the weather turns, and the whole thing folds. The notebook goes into a drawer, and the conclusion is that discipline was the problem…

We all have dreams and bucket lists that we would like to accomplish in our lifetime. Seeing that most of us are past 60, we have likely completed many of them…

My wife and I have been traveling extensively this year. I mean home two weeks, gone two kind of thing. People wonder how we do it and why but there’s always a tinge of jealousy or entitlement in the phrasing. (Read between the lines – aren’t you leaving anything for the kids?) In short, our reply is that our kids are doing fine…

Sometimes there’s that niggling feeling. We can’t quite put our finger on it, but we know something doesn’t sit quite right. It’s not like you’re super unhappy or depressed, but something feels off and you can’t quite work out what. It’s frustrating because, on paper, everything can look okay. Different areas of your life are going okay…

I announced my decision to retire just before my 65th birthday. It wasn’t my first retirement. A divorce forced the sale of my business at the crack of Covid. My emergency back-up career in real estate served me well, but reaching Medicare age gave me a nudge…

To give and receive love is a natural, universal desire, and so too is sexual pleasure. Why, then, do most people feel awkward with self-love and uncomfortable embracing their sexuality after 60? How can we look to ourselves for love and sexual pleasure that suits our unique desires, without giving our power away to other people?

Do you remember the girl who was curious and excitable before she learned what was sensible? Do you recall the woman who had dreams before she became responsible for everyone else’s? Do you have a memory of what made you rock with laughter, ignite your creativity, made you feel sensual and loved and had you sharing ideas and opinions well into the early hours?

In our 60s, attending to our needs and improving our relationships is more important than ever before. Time is of the essence, but making the most of our time takes practice. One way to enrich our lives is by applying boundaries to accommodate…

There is a word I have been thinking about lately: margin. Years ago, when I was teaching first graders how to write, I remember pointing out the faint margin lines running down both sides of their copybooks. “See these lines?” I would say. “Your writing begins here on the left, and it stops here on the right. You don’t write all the way to the edge.”