Doing and Changing

Well, I've been dormant on content creation for a few weeks -- a blogging no no. But one does need to occasionally go out and create some content, otherwise known as living, periodically.

I had tivod a show called CBS sunday morning and the moderator interviewed several so called remarkable 80 plus year olds. The one who struck me most was Norman Lear. He still had a lot of the fire and purposefulness in him that often seems absent in the older. The interviewer asked him his secret for staying so engaged. He replied, ''well I take every day as thought it were a production - so I would say, write - but then to write, you need to do. Just do.''

I kept hearing that in my mind, ''do.'' Live.

I can spend (waste) considerable time on activities that may be momentarily distracting and pleasurable, but are of little consequence. Then today, in lovely piece of synchronicity, I came across a book in a used bookstore here in town on ''soft addictions'', such web surfing, tv, gossip, overgrooming, shopping, etc, and what those are really standing in for ( a need to be seen, heard, loved, touched, have community, primal human needs that so often go begging in our culture).

Nice. Just the cosmic smack on the rear I needed at this time, when I was considering cutting off my directv.

My ears are always pricked up for older people who can show me this aging thing can be done in some kind of way that is semi palatable.

I don't want to be one of the ridiculous women here in overly juvenile clothing, puffed up lips and looking so clearly like someone who can't accept the obvious (I know I know -- I probably DO like that sometimes now and then!).

I heard Julia Roberts once say something so apt when she was asked about her very young costars Julia Stiles et al in one of her movies, how that made her feel as the ''older woman'' in the cast. "You can't outkitten a kitten.'' She replied bemusedly. I loved that.


There's so much to let go of as we get older, a series of dropping offs, letting gos, and transformations, that all began at the beginning. It feels so solid and permanent in young adulthood, then rapidly rapidly after 40, it changes, the sense of being in a rapidly running river.





A good time to let the size of one's ego diminish while the expanse of one's consciousness expands.