In those days, I never really thought about Thanksgiving changing or a time when I would long to see some of those folks again on a Thursday in the future. I believe it is those days when God protects us from viewing tomorrow and allows us just to enjoy the day.
I am grateful for the freedom of choices that I have had over the years, but I’m also ready to release more and more and liberate my cluttered mind and closet and hopefully make more important decisions like Richard Branson does.
However, there's a big difference between making sense of the numbers on a wristwatch and knowing where time goes. As we age we often say time flies, but even today's youngsters are more aware of its passage than I was as a child.
Yet there is hope here; there are possibilities promising respite from potential bleak boredoms of aging, from deteriorating to depths of despair that can infect the aged. We don’t have to stay here!
We older folks who don't dwell on our headaches and heartaches, nor other litany of complaints like not being the sharpest pencil in the box now – find life still holds wonder and magic for us.
What if we brought a homemade pie of kindness to the table of hate and calmed anger with a dose of warmed goodness? Then our grandchildren would learn just like I did from my grandmother – when we take the time to create love, we might just witness healing our hurts, one pie at a time.
I watched the grit of competitors who had no chance of winning a medal, far behind the leaders, yet determined to finish the race, as well as athletes who had to overcome physical challenges competing with enthusiasm and success.
A 2010 Gallup poll found happiness tends to be positively linked with age, and 85 year olds are more satisfied with life than 18 year olds.
The only thing that still excites me with the same intensity is seeing my adult children. The only thing that deflates my ego is seeing my adult children because, and get this – I don’t generate the same excitement from them at seeing me — it’s unbelievable!
I was driving along a muddy, rutted dirt road a few miles outside of town. I was slowly gaining on an old German shepherd making its way along the road’s edge. As I passed him, he looked at me. I looked at him. I thought “Good luck, old boy. I hope you make it home OK.”
I don’t know what he thought of me. But I figured he probably would make it home OK as we were both drawing nigh an old fieldstone farmhouse. Neither of us made a big deal about the other’s presence. “Now, that’s rural,” I thought. I had my metric.