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Secrets of an old woman

10/8/2018

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PictureWith Jim at Fenway Park, September 30, 2018
​I’m old. Not in the usual physical ways of many people age 78, but I’m old in years, and that very fact guides any sense of meaning that I feel and experience in my life. Put succinctly, my age is the filter through which I lead my life. 
     Discussions about aging (blogs, books, magazine articles, advertisements, and personal conversations) seem unequivocally prefaced by physical failings, which then unwittingly become the cause and blame for any malaise an older person might have. There is a taboo against confessing our struggle to find meaning in our lives unless we link the cause to a physical problem. The psychological aspects of getting older are overshadowed by the physical. 
    Those of us older women who don’t relate everything we are feeling or experiencing to physical causes, walk around smiling and pretending to be sixty, the new seventy.  We choose to remain silent, to keep secret our deepest wonderings about our purpose as our life diminishes day by day. At least that’s my observation, but how would I know? No one talks about it. I know, however, because I have such secrets, the biggest in the form of a question: What is the purpose in my life?
   In this blog I plan to open up some of the secret questions that preoccupy older people, but that they don’t talk about: the young (under 70) don’t ask, we old (over 70), hold back. Why this monotonous dance of reluctance? It’s time for old people to take the lead and reveal their secrets.

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       I am a 78 year old white, educated, privileged woman, in excellent health, with a wonderful family. I go to church and travel by myself to Italy and Scotland. That’s my public vita, my public persona. But that’s not all who I am. I have secrets, secrets of an old woman. So let me say some more.
         I’m old. Not in the usual physical ways of a person age 78, but I’m old in years, and that very fact guides the sense of meaning that I feel and experience in my life. Put succinctly, more and more my age is becoming the filter through which I lead my life.
         I’ve had a rich life, with caring parents, a loving husband of 54 years, two wonderful children, and four amazing grandchildren. My teaching career was rewarding; I published six books for teachers describing my experiences as a kindergarten and first grade teacher. When I retired I earned a divinity degree and became the spiritual care counselor for a local hospice.
        I ask myself if now I am really retired. Well, yes and no. Yes, in that I have more free and unscheduled time to satisfy my longing for silence, solitude and simplicity, which I blog about in this blog-- www.acottagebythesea.net, and more time to attend to my spiritual life, which I blog about in www.aprayerdiary.net. I have more time to spend with family and friends, help at church, read for pleasure, write, and travel,. My old woman secret is that I am still searching for meaning and the search is intense and life supporting.

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