On the Senior Experience

Tonight in a women's evolutionary consciousness group, the theme of our sharing was Death. Sounds pretty gruesome, but it wasn't any of that.  Most of what we shared was about transitioning from our younger selves to the winter years of our lives. For some of us, there was a sense of mourning the loss, or a sort of death as it were. For others, the transition came in the form of reinventing ourselves in such a way that we accept the changes taking place with dignity and grace, and that we find a new and meaningful role for the people we have become.

I have often thought that when we get to be seniors, we have learned a lot of life lessons - some wonderful, some good, some bad, and some tragic, but we have learned a lot of things through our lives. The benefit in this is that it enables us to have compassion for others, to understand how to best offer advice that can help others, and it helps us, or should help us to know that we can manage our own lives.

I wish it were always that simple.  But sometimes things happen that make it difficult for us to manage our own lives. We get ill, or we fall on other hard times. And that is when we need every resource we can get to help us to get through it. Unfortunately, there are a lot of seniors right now who don't know their options, and so there is resulting homelessness, people having stress and concerns they shouldn't have, and people doing without things they need - basic things like food, medicine or medical care. I work with physically and developmentally challenged folks, and I see way too much of this.

I'm just one person, but I am a senior too, and I have decided that if there is anything I can do to help others like me and to also try to make some small change in this world while I am still able, that is just what I am going to do. I don't always have much myself, but I have a lot of skills, and one of them is being a good researcher and a decent writer. So I am going to try to provide resources and answer questions and try to help seniors in any way that I can. The way I see it, if people don't start helping each other, we will all be struggling to stay afloat.