I’ve decided to talk today about the one thing everyone thinks about but does not want to discuss.

Losing your marbles.

Conversations with my sweet mother-in-law have me considering this, as do comments from mid-life women who tell me that when hormones drift out of the building, whispers of memory go with them.

It’s a real issue. If you like to look at statistics, this is something that may be in the cards for some of us, dementia in all its forms. Let’s say it out loud.

But there is a large territory between sharp as a tack and that. Let’s talk about that. Let’s get comfortable with what itt means.

And let me tell you how I see it.

Sure, cognitive abilities change with age. Why does this surprise us? Knees get stiffer, there are brown spots on our hands, we do balance exercises when no one is looking (and what five, thirty, fifty year-old decides to do those?)

If the body creaks a bit, of course the brain can too. But both can still be functional and operational. Different can still be valid; adaptation is life’s both most underrated and effective survival skill.

This is what I am observing about my own mind in my seventh decade.

Some facts are like lobster traps.

Containers thrown over the side as the boat powers forward, attached by ropes to be circled back to and pulled up when needed.

I feel that now those ropes may be longer than they used to be. Hauling things I don’t need every day takes longer to retrieve. They are still attached, but slower to surface.

The name of that woman who lives on the house on the corner?

Her dog’s name was Garth (I can list every dog name in my neighbourhood with immediate and total accuracy, that says something about me) but this lady? Angela won’t come to me until after dinner.

What’s going on here?

Maybe the disks are full. After all there are whole stories of my life, time spent in some jobs, for instance, that I carry now in synopsis format only, the footnotes long gone.

Part of it too is that, like my vision, now directed by trifocals, my focus seems wider these days. The peripheral catches my attention more than it did. The trip with a measuring cup from the cupboard to counter (was that one cup or one and a half?) interrupted by the Blue Jay glanced at the window, the image of the friend I want to call, a resolution I am going to abandon, a decision I have to make.

I make more notes-to-self these days and remember my mother. At ninety-seven she was one of the legendary sharp as a tackers, and I remember how many notebooks we found in her apartment. Itemized lists of what she ate and what time, who called and who she had to call, both the agenda and minutes of her days. What mattered was not that she needed these notes, but that she’d devised these strategies to carry on.

I sometimes wonder if some of her vaguer peers would have done better if they had worked more on ways to adjust and less on sighing and resigning to not being who they were.

My mother never started a sentence with “at my age.” I think that is significant.

After all different does not necessarily mean worse. New territory can deliver great gifts.

There are ways now that my mind works better than it ever did. I am sure about this.

What lives in the peripheral vision are a lot of new ideas. What the intellectual librarian brings up from the vault of the archives is often very interesting. It’s easier than it ever was to be creative, to express myself by instinct not effort. The mix is different now, more intuition than logic.

I roll my eyes when I hear writers talking about composing stories with AI. I have some understanding of how it works. Information and data are collected, “scraped” from bodies of knowledge and then accessed when queried. It’s a mechanical reproduction of what the human mind can do. Useful for ideas or organizational processes that would be too difficult or tedious to construct ourselves. I even beta-tested a writing program so I would understand what all the fuss was about. I get it.

But as a writer, of columns like this and mystery fiction?

Forget it.

Here’s why.

My whole life, all those experiences, the people I’ve met, the places I’ve been are packed away in my own intellectual data bank. What I “scrape” when I write is that depository. Made and accessible only to me. No one else has been exactly where I have been, or done exactly what I’ve done. No one else has this mine. And because I have been around this long, that’s a lot I have stored away.

And creative activity finds and uses it. Posts like this one or my books could not have been written in my early or mid-life. The material wasn’t there.

And now it is.

I am a better problem solver now than I ever was. Quicker to sort out what doesn’t matter from what does.

I may not be running marathons these days but I know some shortcuts through the woods.

The ties to old concepts may sometimes now be longer, but they have been surpassed by fresh ideas on the deck.

So much of the clutter is gone, and what remains are the punchlines.

I’ll have to share this with Angela.

I have to say I am surprised by how well-run her place is and am grateful that living in the province we do, it is affordable for her. Much effort has been put into making it feel homey, and the staff is cheerful. She tells us there is always someone coming by and she doesn’t feel alone, which is what was worrying us all most.

Rose has always been a very sweet person, I know that this is not always the case with those with memory issues, and that has stayed with her. But I have noticed a huge range in her disposition in some visits. Many times she is almost herself, sociable with her sense of humor, but every once in a a while I arrive and she is completely disoriented, not sure who I am, convinced that her deceased sister has just left, dizzy and dazed. She had one afternoon like that last week. Randomly between visits before and since when she was doing well.

But what I did notice on her bad day was that the drink on her table was untouched. This made me wonder if she was dehydrated. Recently my husband was out in the country on a hot day inspecting a job site, had forgotten his water at home, and arrived back nauseous and vague. Remembering that I went down to the communal kitchen and got Rose some water and sat with her while she drank a few glasses. It was remarkable to me how after a bit she picked up. The signs of her demential began to fade and her personality started to return. It was remarkable to see.

This experience made me wonder how often this happens. Intellectually, I know that older people tend to lose their sense of thirst. And Rose is of a culture and a generation that possibly has only two cups of tea a day at most to refuel. But what if the confusion of aging might be affected, not determined of course but affected, by something as simple as a lack of water?

What if some of the complex problems of life do not need complex solutions at all? What if the issues that overwhelm us are not fixed by major overhauls but by small adjustments? What if before we make big changes, we tried the little ones first?

The lady who lives across the street from me was feeling isolated after an accident that reduced her mobility. This summer she has made one tiny change. She moved her “sitting outside” chair from her backyard to the front of the house. Dog walkers, folks going to the corner to collect mail, mothers with strollers wave and often stop for a few words with her now, sometimes for a chat.

I notice she is moving better now when she walks, too.

Human beings are simpler than we give ourselves credit for.

In an overambitious society it is worth remembering that.

One of my sisters sent me the above photo yesterday. That sister is a florist and some days she goes and helps a woman, still very active in that business in her eighties, with large orders. Yesterday, when she arrived at the senior florist’s house, she passed through the kitchen. This is what she saw: a place on the island set already, early in the day for supper, for a single diner.

Those of us who were brought up in a certain time would recognize the meaning of the cutlery, laid out for several courses. As well as the little dish, maybe for a tea bag or a condiment, and the cover on the mug to keep the tea warm.

When my sister commented to her friend that she certainly was organized, the response was, “I always take care of myself.”

I saw this the same day I talked to a neighbor, also older than I am. That neighbor told me that her contemporaries rarely cook anymore. Most of them are widows and the consensus was, “they can’t be bothered.” She herself had eaten nothing but cheese and pate the night before.

What a difference in attitude.

How easy to let go of everything that is not specifically required. After all, if no one is watching, if there’s no one else to care, should you?

Yes.

I can say this with conviction, having recently read The Maintenance of Everything by Stewart Brand, a wonderful book that argues that paying attention to routine systems to maintain operations might in the end matter more than inspiration or even will.

Now, back to cooking. I appreciate, being a veteran myself, that decades of delivering meals-on-the-table can burn away enthusiasm. And I am sure that many of my older neighbours were raised by, and reproduced, meat, potatoes, and two veg menus, all pot and clean-up intensive.

But it seems to me that rather than perpetuating the past, it might be time to retool and come up with new ideas. After all, meals come around three times a day, at least, and that’s too often to tell yourself you are not worth the trouble.

Because you are.

***

For those looking for inspiration, I suggest you look at the very inexpensive NY Times Cooking subscription. The recipes there, written I am sure for harried bigger-city-than-here cooks, focus on quick prep and interesting combinations of recognisable ingredients.

I’ve felt a little of that myself lately. A few people have passed away. A few have had difficult diagnoses. There have been certain closures in my own life. Realizing that two of my children who have moved away will never be moving back. And watching my first generation of grandchildren become teenagers, I found myself going through empty nest all over again.

Last week nearly all of the extended family gathered, because we chartered a boat and went out into the ocean to spread my parents’ ashes. My father died many years ago, but he always wanted to be returned to the sea. My mother died more recently, so this was our chance to combine their souls, sail out, and release them both to the waves together.

The second generation of parents in the family decided all the children should be there, even the very little ones. Because of that I wanted them to find some lightness in the afternoon. I actually sewed bags for my parents’ urn, and treat bags for the little ones, out of camping fabric, because both of my parents were great campers.

It was a strange and moving experience. Two of my sisters and I took turns sprinkling the ashes, and I’d expected them simply to float away. Instead a whirlpool appeared in the ocean, circled, gathered my parents up, and drew them under. When I lifted my eyes, not far off, I saw two seals swimming near where the ashes had gone down. And when I turned back to the boat, two of the youngest children, little boys, were dancing.

In that moment there was a choice. To get carried away by loss, or to notice that the very same moment was also someone else’s beginning. The day we say goodbye to my parents, some small child somewhere is taking her first steps. Someone is getting married. Someone is falling in love. Someone is riding a bike down the street. Another leaving the library with a stack of summer books. Some mother is standing at her sink, scraping plates, getting ready to wash them.

I think we have to be careful, as we age, not to forget how many beginnings are happening around us and to make sure we give them equal space.

When I went to bed that night, I lay in the dark and thought about the birds in the trees outside my window, high in the branches where they go in the dark. I thought of the fox in the forest not far from where I live. But mostly, I thought that somewhere, out in the deep ocean, two seals were swimming.

Out to sea, life goes on. We do too.

I think it’s important to move with the forward current.

A friend was discussing, with humour, her tendency to scoot from one enthusiasm to the next. In my circle she is famous for taking lessons in nearly every craft ever invented and buying all the gear possible for each new hobby. But once she has completed a few projects, she moves on. Her husband wants to know what they are supposed to do with all the weird stuff in the garage.

Some background.

My friend is a very accomplished woman; a PhD in a professional field. But this is her life in retirement; one she enjoys.

“The thing is,” she said. “It’s not that I don’t have any follow-through. What I like is the learning. And when I have figured a technique out, I find another new thing to study.”

It would be an understatement to say that when I heard her say this that a lightbulb went off in my brain. It was more like a neon explosion. I realized this woman had explained myself to me. And she had liberated me from an old lingering worry that the huge variety of my résumé indicated a lack of stick-to-it-ness.

I am not scattered! I am a lifelong learner!

I like the sound of that.

I should have remembered my own classroom. There, I presented all of my materials simultaneously in four formats. My visual learners got PowerPoints. My auditory learners, a lecture. My text-based people received written handouts. And my fourth group, the tactile learners, (the ones who grew up with mothers asking them why they had to touch everything in the store,) I knew would pay more attention if they had an object to hold. For them I tried to find something to pass around; if not I let them knit in class.

The local church has a basket of “fidgets” at the door. Whatever works.

After all, we intake and manage our reality differently, and sometimes our way isn’t mainstream. My husband, for example, has no inclination to read for pleasure. But the same man can be absorbed by a dry 800 page book on astronomy if he can find it in an audiobook. He is also a great fan of how-to YouTube videos, whereas I, the text-based learner, am not. This was true until I figured out how to use close captioning to translate videos into my own format.

Examples like this are everywhere.

The girl who did my nails yesterday told me that she struggled in school, humiliated by teachers (themselves graduates of text-based training) who couldn’t understand why she did not retain what she’d read. This same girl is happy now. My fingers in her palm, she told me she also works as a a pastry chef and jewelry maker - both of which capitalize on her accurate, sensitive, light touch.

Her story made me wonder how much energy and self-esteem we sacrifice by forcing ourselves to interact with our environments in ways that are not native to us. After all, there are thousands of languages spoken in different countries. Why can’t the same be true for individuals? Surely nurturing our own natures is a far more effective and a more productive use of our resources than force fitting ourselves into a method of interpretive experience that is not ours.

We all have our natural mother tongues.

The trick is to identify, understand, and appreciate the one that belongs to us.

***

An anthology of some of these Substack columns is now available for pre-order:

I often think of the invisible rules, or standards, that women of my generation were raised with, that did not serve us well. I hope most of these beliefs are no longer lingering and dampening lives. That modern parents are careful not to pass these biases on to their offspring.

Most of all, I hope the emphasis is fading on the importance of being, particularly as a woman, a well-rounded person.

Remember that one?

If you liked to write poetry, they signed you up for volleyball. Report cards glossed over achievements and scolded over failures. It was a non-stop conversation about strengths and weaknesses. As if we were human chains destined to be only as strong as our weakest link.

When we were growing up, gregarious children who talked a lot were told to settle down. Shy kids were forcibly pushed into groups. The highest praise went to the all-rounder or, if you were south of this border, the “All American” kid.

No one was ever sent to summer school for more of what they were good at, only to patch up what they were not.

All nonsense.

Because one of the huge, huge advantages of getting older is that we are able to see how things turn out. Us vintage editions get to survey the results and inspect the data.

And this is what this one life researcher has noticed.

The dividends of being a generalist decline over time. The people around me, the ones who are happiest now, and have lived with the fewest regrets, are those who have over their decades done this:

They put disproportionate effort and time into what they really cared about. And whenever they could, let go of the rest.

They walked (or would have) a thousand miles to see someone they loved. They got up in the middle of the night to go downstairs to work on a project. They drove during a snowstorm to a yarn store. They ate frozen pizza themselves while they bottle-fed kittens. They weeded gardens in the dark. They saved train sets from the flood. They foraged for mushrooms.

They didn’t care what anyone else thought about their distractions, because the passions eased out all those opinions. When something is just born into you, what anyone else thinks doesn’t matter.

The evidence is in.

Surely the most important advice we can give anyone else would be to grow what we are good at, and find ways to minimize, or at least neutralize, the rest? Being even can be, maybe has to be, shallow. Focus gives depth. The eccentric within is likely to lead the most satisfied life, and, this is the biggest irony, be most interesting to other people. Not that the occupied eccentric cares.

The price paid for abandoning or subcontracting what doesn’t interest or excite is so, so small compared to that of denying a true calling, an interest.

J.K. Rowling doesn’t drive. Who judges? Certainly not Harry Potter.

The times demand us to consider this. The importance of living an individualized, even specialized life is more important now than ever. With social media out to flatten us, and AI is able to deliver extreme competence but never the tiny spark.

We all have interests that spark us. What’s yours?

***

Oh, and before I forget. In response to a reader’s suggestion, I am releasing a book version of my favourite of these columns July 31, currently available for pre-order on Amazon.

My poor friend, mourning the deaths of her husband and only daughter in the same month, is spending her time, one foot in front of the other, one goal per day, in a beautiful condo high in the sky overlooking the ocean. She tries to leave this place every afternoon at least once, if only for a quick trip to pick up a pre-made meal. Then she returns.

On my last visit she told me that every evening she watches for the seagulls, the only souls who come up to where she is, checking on her. She tells them, “I’m still here.”

I have a cat.

A rescued barn cat with what the vet calls a heart murmur, but I don’t think there is anything wrong with her heart at all. For some reason this particular cat has come into this world to be a nurse. It is her deep purpose.

When my old dog was fading away, it was this cat who stayed with Daisy, sleeping with her small grey arm around the dog, her body pressed up close, sharing the rhythm of her breathing, calming Daisy’s agitation until they both fell asleep.

This is my husband’s cat; she sticks close to him. When his arthritis gets him up at night, she sits with him and purrs. After my mother died, she jumped into my lap, unusual for her, and waited it out with me.

These days, when my husband goes off to work she stays at the window and watches for him. At the end of the day, when the car turns in at the bottom of our very long street, she jumps down and sits by the door and sure enough, five minutes later, he is there.

My husband won’t be working again when this project is finished. He went back only because the job is so interesting and important. They are building a fish ladder through the city. Two hundred years ago, with the thoughtlessness of the species who invented commerce, a waterway that ran right across the province was blocked off and replaced by a system of canals. The fish who had migrated across the land forever were cut off.

But now that waterway is being freed again, the current restored. It is a huge engineering task, involving, in some places, fish ladders and in another a thousand foot water passage carved under the pavement and asphalt of the modern roads. There are divers involved in this assignment, and archeologists. My husband says it’s the best work of his life. When they are done, for the first time in two centuries, the fish will be able to travel their route again. He says some are moving into the part of it already opened, and everyone working this job feels, as he does, that the fish out in the ocean are there waiting for them to finish.

It seems to me that we do the same thing in our lives the original canal builders did in the central selfishness of being human. We numb ourselves, in our busyness, from any sense of our fellow travellers. Somewhere along the way, we stop being the children who hear the birds in the morning, observe the bees, lean against the dogs. We don’t start out this way, blocking off the flow, and this is not how we should end it.

But fortunately age frees us, returns to us the opportunity to notice. And this might be what we need most in those times when we wonder if life will ever be the same again.

It’s warmer here now. The birds are returning. Among them are the shearwaters, who fly 30,000 miles every spring from South America to Nova Scotia. Such a distance they travel, never over the land, but only over the water, so close to it they shear off the tips of the waves. All that way they journey to arrive here simply to lay a single egg. If that isn’t hope, if that isn’t faith, I don’t know what is.

Which makes me wonder if our original assignment is to turn our heads and see the messengers around us.

Because maybe the point is not that we are still here, but they are.

I was going to title this it’s not like capitalism, but thought I’d lose some folks right there. And what I want to talk about are the expectations we have about moving through life.

It’s about progress as the template for how life is, or at least should be lived, and turn out. It’s a societal instruction to expect a process that begins at birth that with self-improvement, development, education, effort, and the self-correction of bad choices and things that will, we are promised, lead to achievement and celebration.

We treat parenting and careers according to this model. We expect to invest in the early years and to reap the benefits. To be one day the grandparent in a place of honour at every family event, to have a moving retirement party, to sail off into the golden year’s sunset. If we do it right, we expect to collect the rewards, to then live off an accumulation of respect, but at the same time, in those last decades, to be young enough to still wow the family with trekking the Camino, to publish the heartfelt novel, be the elder parent who is simultaneously never so busy as now, with life of their own, but also there whenever anyone needs them.

Retirement we believe, is our graduation. Our own version of every story ending with a happy ending, a resolution, or lessons learned and translated into nuggets of wisdom to be passed down.

This is a linear view of life, in which (I cannot resist the comparison to capitalism, I could translate that into mass industrial society, indulge me that), that assumes things keep getting better and better. There will be a reward, and we will collect it.

Things rarely turn out this way. We need to stop being surprised by this.

Sometimes, the best years of a life are not now. Our prime in many senses can be behind us.

What then? When our happy endings have come and gone?

Because life is not like the movies.

After lunch, I am going to sit with a friend who lost both her husband and then her daughter in the same month. Two weeks later she sent out an email, subject line “Doing much better.” The pressure she feels to speed walk into peace is too much, to my mind a tragedy in itself.

In contrast to this, or maybe not, one of my sisters, with whom I have not agree with much ever since our sharing-the-room days, said to me, “Happy is optional. You get up every day and just do it.” She’s a high achiever of the perfectionist kind but when I heard these words, I almost spit out my coffee.

I’m not sure she’s right and most of all I wonder what happiness looks like to her. Or to anyone in pain.

So, I’ve been thinking.

What’s so wrong with accepting that not all stories have happy ending? And that many don’t? That there is nothing linear about life and there is no pass we get at the end to only enjoy the good stuff? What if it’s always a struggle on and off, although interfiled with great gifts? And what if those gifts don’t stop, but reposition themselves to be revealed here and there, in glimpses, to those committed to watch for them?

This morning I walked through my backyard with the dog and inspected a dead tree we know should come down. I noticed that woodpeckers have drilled holes into it, little caves like condos. And today, when I looked up, a bird’s head popped out of these nooks and looked down at me. It’s spring; she’s building her nest. The tree stays.

If my father, a naturalist, the father of four daughters, was still here he would be able to tell me all about that bird, but instead she reminded me of him. A man who was so funny that he considered any day, up to his last, an opportunity to make someone laugh. And that this was all he had to do in this world, his success, his assigned achievement.

My father died younger than he should have, but I believe he knew what came after sadness. That a funny story, a line, endures way past any eulogy. He knew that there were angels and if there were none around, the job was ours.

I was that cranky person who sent off a complaint to an innocent business via email. I’m not sure why I did it.

Maybe sometimes it’s just that one last little thing that gets to you. We have an expression here for it. Down to my last nerve. Truth was I didn’t realize I was there until that particular nerve got pinched.

The situation was innocent enough.

It began with a lovely email from a very well-known knitting store in New York. A source of hip patterns and nice yarn. Such an innocuous message. How could a place like that possibly say anything that would set me off?

Here it was. A suggestion for mom for Mother’s Day. A knitted hot water bottle cover. Not a bad project, not a bad idea, but when I read this, I had an image in my mind of what these younger, hipper women saw in theirs when they tried to think of what an older mother would like.

I felt they who they saw was someone with aches and pains, tucked up on a couch, inactive, out of the mainstream. An image that came to mind when they thought of most moms.

This sparked something in me and I wrote and said I thought this choice, of the many that could have been made, was ageist. An overreaction and out of character behaviour for me.

The thing is that hot water bottle woman is not my reality. At least most of the time. Who I am is someone who in her whole life has never been as busy as she is now with new people, projects, and ideas. For me personally, my greatest fear is not fading away but not getting it all done, in what a glum neighbour likes to call the remaining years.

I guess I don’t like my inside being judged by my outside and being underestimated when it has taken me a lifetime to stop doing that to myself.

Fully aware I’d made a bit of a fool of myself writing that email and receiving one back that said we are not sure what I meant, I left the house and went out to a performance of my granddaughter’s high school musical.

I had a great time. The show was wonderful, so much talent, and so much enjoyment on that stage. I was aware that this was a night they would all remember. A joy, a high point.

But what touched me most, this was the last night of the performance, were the flowers the cast handed out to the teachers, helpers, and mentors that made it all possible. The conductor in the pit, the wardrobe and set designers, the choreographer, all the folks who worked behind the scenes to give these kids this moment.

All of them were women, some of them young, many who weren’t. Those actors and dancers on the stage cried. “She believed in me and taught me to believe in myself.”

And sitting there in my seat I was suddenly aware that what I had witnessed was not just theatre but an intra-generational transfer of talent, skill, confidence, hope and caring. Several generations pushing the next one out, like hands on the sterns of these little boats, gliding out to the bigger water where they’d one day sail out of sight.

This is what mothers do, if we have given birth ourselves or not. And it’s a job that doesn’t end, and is not supposed to.

So the gift mom needs most on Mother’s Day is not a hot-water bottle cover. She needs recognition that this is her job and that she’d still doing it.

Last time we talked he ended the call by saying “With the greatest of respect Barbara we are never going to have a good government in this country until all the Boomers die.” I laughed, but had to acknowledge that there is a new trend adrift of resenting my generation. Not only do we not vote like we should, we are spoiled, secure, and can afford to worry about the non-essentials. We live in houses paid for decades ago, drive cars without loans, and, if we had the privilege of higher education, we might have graduated debt-free.

It makes me sad that stressed younger people are waiting for us to move on, but partially, the resentment has a point.

My grandparents at my age, the few that got this far, had lived through two world wars, a depression, and immigration. Many of us had parents who should have gone to university but left school to bring in family income instead. One of the best politicians I knew had a grade eight education. He spent his life fighting for the kind of opportunities he never had.

I paid for my own higher education by what I made working in the summers. I graduated debt free. But the last year I taught in a university classroom I saw credit card kiosks set up in the halls during orientation. And, although it was totally unrelated to my course, I brought in a financial planner to speak.

One boy, a lovely student, put up his hand that day and asked how a 21 year-old could go about declaring bankruptcy. Others were graduating with more than an annual salary in loans to pay back, and told me they would never be able to save for a house while they had car payments. Most of my former students won’t have savings or pensions, and certainly not ones with defined benefits. And yet we’ve raised them with high material expectations I can see they will never meet. Pre-teens are buying $30 moisturizers. Faces down on their phones, they can’t see ahead.

But we can. And didn’t.

A lot of this we created. The security of our lives was passed on without an awareness that much of it we were given, not earned, in a more settled world. In many cases we raised expectations in our own children, but retained the power to meet them for ourselves. Possibly indulged by parents who were in awe of our opportunities, or in some case their own survival, we have lived our lives, focused on ourselves. Let’s admit it, we were, and are, the lucky generation.

And I am worried we’ve stopped listening. Set ourselves up in containers, where we keep comfortable and unchallenged, often focused on our ailments and appointments as if amazed that the rule that bodies do not come with warranties applies even to us.

And let’s be honest, we are leaving a mess behind. We are the ones who let consumerism take over, elevated the value of money and the moneyed as if they bestowed other virtues. We have enabled, corrupt leaders and kept walking. We are the inventors of moral grey areas, of taking care of our own backyards but not our streets, of being the beneficiary of all the grain in the silo but not planting for the next seventy years.

Our grandparents did more than this for us.

So maybe it’s time we worried less about our bloodwork and more about our bloodlines.

Maybe this is our moment to stop talking and start listening.

And find out what they need.

I got hearing aids.

I have been wondering if my hearing has been fading for a while now. The soft-spoken daughter-in-law repeating her words. Missed the conversations at the other end of the table in restaurants. The usual. My loss is not severe. “Normal aging” was what the audiologist said, and these little units should help.

But I found the whole experience, to borrow a word that everyone but me uses, triggering.

You see, the youngest of my three sisters is deaf, has been since birth, probably as the result of a virus my mother had when she was pregnant. It is fair to say that we grew up in a household, after her diagnosis, dominated by my sister’s deafness. My mother, a former nurse, attacked this disability as her life’s work. We moved across the country to the best deaf school in the country, one that followed the oral method, which essentially meant no signing allowed, lip-reading only, and from my sister’s perspective, pressure to just try harder. No one in our house was allowed to sign. Life revolved around somehow raising my sister’s capabilities (and this was a person who could hear only a jet engine if it flew through the room) to an acceptable, communicate-as-normally-as-possible level with the hearing world.

This week, being in that room, seeing those screens, the line of my own hearing struggling to reach regular person levels, but falling, brought it all back to me. I’ve had enough deafness in my life, I thought. I don’t want to do anymore.

Which was silly; the quiet part of my brain knew this. An adaptation is not a failure. And there is everything in that difference.

My sister taught me that.

This is the rest of her story.

When she was sixteen, she quit.

Off came the ineffective hearing aids; I’m deaf, she learned to sign. So what? Her mind finally opened when she could speak in her mother tongue, ASL (American Sign Language) and she talked about Deaf Culture, relaxed into herself. My sister understood that she saw the world differently than the rest of the family. And this was okay, and an opportunity for the rest of us.

I thought about all of this when I walked out of the audiologist yesterday, fitted and turned on, the sounds of my shoes loud on the steps, and it occurred to me that this was a parable about aging.

That there are different ways to go at it: this getting older, like there are with any identity or capability that does not match the majority norm.

One way, my mother’s, I can see now, is to get stuck in the grief of it, to mourn what is not available, to try to make it not true. I see this in elderly drivers behind the wheel, in professionals who strain to keep practicing when the time to move over has come and gone.

Another way is to simply give up, to retreat, or stay at home where life is less frictionless. To start too many sentences with “at my age” or to repeat that “old age is not for sissies,” a line written, I am sure, by someone who was.

And you can be stubborn, like my sister was not, and say, if you don’t speak my language, I won’t talk to you, or I don’t want to do it, so I won’t. Even if it is good for you. Even when it means leaving the hearing aids in their box in the next room.

Or you can get wily, line up help when you need it, relax into who you, and where you are, and adapt.

After all, it is the what, not the how, that matters.

Just ask my sister. With her flashing light alarm clock, the two TVs set up side-by-side in the living room (close-captioned so she and her husband can still watch their different shows together). Ask my sister what her iPhone, FaceTime, and the ability to write a question in a store have done for her. How the early adoption of every technology available has sped her past the delays that the rest of us, with good intentions, imposed on her in the past.

Huge things are possible if you take your eyes off the disabilities, the setbacks, and the challenges, particularly the physical ones, that come with time. After all, the way I see it, we are all books in the Universe’s library. Due to be returned one day, but if there are no holds, or modern medicine has come through for us, often with a chance to renew.

So let yourself renew into someone else, still creative and functional. Let your sadness come and go, then reach past it to whatever new ideas or tools you can find.

Work around with your work arounds.

And then, go open that box in the next room.

When I was in Scotland, a cousin told me that the old aunts had always observed a weekly day of rest. A time when they did not do housework, when they, at the most, went to services, or had time with family. My cousin said that sometimes she hesitated even now to put in a laundry on that one day of the week.

A pause like this has many names in many traditions. The Sabbath, Shabbat, only one letter difference there, an in common acknowledgment that even the Creator took a day off when the work was done, not just to rest, but to appreciate what had been accomplished. To enjoy the world that had been made.

My children were teenagers when the province of Nova Scotia had a vote to see if stores could be open on Sundays. We voted yes, to join the modern world, but I am beginning to wonder if, on a personal level, we need to bring the concept of one day different back.

Particularly now.

These are not the best of times. There is war in the Middle East. I was in a fabric store years ago when they bombed Bagdad. There was a music station playing in the background from speakers overhead. A song was interrupted by a news flash. I remember an older woman at the cutting table lifting up her bolt of fabric and slamming it down. “Here they go again. The women and children are going to do the suffering.” It was a statement that could be said about every war, before, since and now.

She was right. Trouble is not new, but what is new is that we are so involved with it, every minute of every day. Can you imagine spending nights in the tube in London during the Blitz on a phone, in real time, watching the bombers advance? Then news came by radio or in newspapers printed once or at the most twice a day. This interval in information gave people time to process what had happened and to prepare best they could for what was to come.

Without that break, we overload instead. Become paralyzed by incessant input, stunned, and then powerless. So overwhelmed that the resources are not in us to say “hang on there” to the autocrats who say common sense is an illusion. In a public level I wonder if we are being numbed into indifference, at the private level, I wonder why the most comfortable lives in a millennium are also the ones that talk most about burnout. No one waits anymore. Sits. Any unscheduled time and out the screens come. Heads down in waiting rooms, beside plates while we eat, we are crushing ourselves in the weight of information and of to-do lists of activity and self- improvement beyond our time and attention. We are letting ourselves be crushed by facts and invented obligations.

We do anything but rest.

This makes me thing we need to revisit the Sabbath. One of my sons and his partner tried a digital day off and that got me thinking. Of what that day used to be and what would look like in my life right now.

I’ve been trying it out. It is not easy. But maybe that’s the lesson. I think back to what they used to do in many traditions and it seems to me this was meant to be a day off from whatever happened the rest of the week. A day when it allowed, even required, not to produce. A day to turn the sign in the window to “Closed.” To shut off the phone, the news. A day to not get ready, to get ahead, or to get caught up.

A day of time off and time out. A day to visit, to go for walks, to fool around with the dog, talk to the cat, to read books and drink tea, enjoy the way plants grow, be satisfied by what you have made of your life, and recognized that this one day a week is what you have earned.

Live in the moment they call it. To enjoy each other and ourselves where we are right now.

I had an afternoon like that with my sweet mother-in-law this week. I had a hundred things to do but instead I went to visit her. We sat and talked and the room was filled with relatives, all of them still living and with us. We laughed at the husband who must be out somewhere on one of his projects and would be along soon. We talked about the way the wind was blowing the trees that day, of how her father was one of fourteen, and that she had baked five loaves of bread every week for close to eighty years. We talked about knitting mitts and younger brothers who had never got old but still lived in the old house. We had nothing but time to share, and when I left Rose hugged me and said, “what a lovely afternoon this has been.”

Which is all any of us really need.

On the way home, I reached for my phone but left it in my purse.

I knew that was for some other time.

That www did last. My boss didn’t.

I’ve held onto that story whenever confronted with new technology. As with most things, it pays to find out for yourself, to make up your own mind.

Which brings me to AI, artificial intelligence.

There is so much to think about.

Some of AI’s inventors are on the record as saying they are not sure some of it has not taken on a life of its own. People are driven to hysteria by images that are not real. Bad things have been done because the ghost in the machine explained how to do it. One of my sons has his AI chat set up so it talks to him out loud, in an accent he has selected. He told me that he was unsettled to realize once that he was enjoying the conversation, forgetting for a moment that the other voice had no person attached.

Masterworks have been plagiarized. As a writer of fiction, who finds that process both excruciating and invigorating, I was appalled to read of financially successful authors who told AI a story idea and let the novel be written before breakfast, edited and published before lunch. I’ve heard that readers in the future will be able to input the kind of story they want to read and have that book offered to them in minutes, no author involved.

I realize how many jobs, careers, and working lives AI will make redundant. Of new graduates from even last spring who will never use their training because those positions no longer exist. Real machines power AI too and they consume vast, vast amounts of energy and water (to cool it all down). Just when the world is beginning to deplete, we are adding this new consumption onto it. Someone human set this up and someone human is going to have to figure this out. Hopefully they are doing that, fast enough.

It’s enough to make any sensible person panic, but my long life experience, undertaken unassisted, has taught me that there are very few situations when panicking is what later you would wish you’d done.

So I’ve done my own investigating and experiencing, enough now that I’d like to report back.

I have beta tested what is now the most popular AI assisted writing program and given the company my feedback. I have experimented with it for my editing, my writing, and for personal projects. I have looked at how other people use it. These include my husband who had found it enormously helpful in correlating engineering data and for recipes for ingredients on hand. I have shared a picture of a hat I wanted to knit and had the 80 something knitter beside me take a picture with her phone and ask AI to deliver the pattern to make it. I have heard impassioned denunciations of AI in any form from my 15 year-old-granddaughter at a family birthday party table. I have been grateful I no longer have to mark university essays because I would not be sure who, or what, I was assessing.

That’s where I am in this process. And these, so far, are my observations.

1. Most of all, this is a fluid situation. What I think now may not be true next week or even tomorrow. And of course my opinions are early and simplistic. Take that into consideration.

2. AI is based on what already exists. Scraping is the term for collecting the ideas from a data source for later access, which it can do very, very, very fast. Research questions are answered at blow your hair back speed.

3. This base in established knowledge is so important. AI in my own experiments does not have much ability to think creatively because it only knows what it already knows. It can’t see past that. The human mind is different. We invent things from our subconscious (I woke up this morning at 5:45 with the idea for this column in my head - I write all of this Substacks like that, whenever I have something to say, after mysterious percolation, which is why I don’t publish on any schedule). My creative writing, the words I write here, come from caverns in my brain even I don’t understand. My stories are “scrapped” from decades and decades of experiences and memories no one else, certainly not AI, can see. Sometimes I write dialogue in my stories and I watch the words appear on the page and I realize that this is something that the guy who lived across the street from us when I was twelve once said to my dad. No one else has access to those words, mixed in with a hundred other contexts, than me. The mysteries of life roll themselves out every now and then and then roll themselves back. There is no code for what is beyond understanding.

4. AI assisted writing can be articulate, engaging even, but from the creative standpoint, for all the reasons above, dull. I write mysteries and can tell you that the trick is to have the reader have no idea, until the very last minute who done it. Otherwise, why keep reading? I have tried to explain this to Claude (what I use because as I understand it this is the tool that conducts itself most ethically) and poor old Claude didn’t get it. Neither did the writing program I beta tested. AI is so trained to be systematic that it does not seem to understand the idea of withholding a surprise. Over and over again it insists that I should be leaving hints, give the reader warnings (like every three pages) that set up the identity of the bad guys “so the reader won’t be surprised.” I have argued but it doesn’t get it. This is what it’s like. If any of you have ever had a child who knows what a sibling is getting for their birthday and has been told to keep it a secret what does that child do? Say “I can tell you the one thing you’re not getting is a doll.” (Said while the one with the secret is jiggling on their feet.) “You present does not have eyes that close when you lie her down. Or a pretty pink dress and matching shoes. No you’re not getting anything like that.”

   Does this make sense? Also the prose in AI writing can be flawless but bland. It feels like you have read it before because both of you undoubtedly have. Not saying that there isn’t a market for books like that, pulp fiction has been read and enjoyed forever, and they may be fun to write (most easy things are) but they don’t pull from inside the writer which is where the deep experiences come from.

5. AI is very useful for doing the labour intensive, sometimes tedious and even boring jobs many projects require. It can zip around the universe of information at lightening speed and in seconds give what you need back, incredibly organized. It is the speed of correlation of data and organization that is most impressive. Research question? Here you go. Like it in a PowerPoint? Handout for a meeting? An email? A report?

   The usefulness of this cannot be under estimated. AI has a lot of potential to eliminate drudgery, to be the intellectual equivalent of the dishwasher, washing machine. To fly us in seconds where it would take us months to walk. I don’t use, I’d never use, AI to write, but I do use it to edit, to catch all my typos (there are always many). and to spot inconsistencies like calling the same characters different names. I have used it to catalogue information in the series, to make sure it is consistent (what colour did I say her eyes were in book three?) and in those areas it has been useful.

6. Yes, it can also make mistakes. That is stated on the package. The best analogy of this will be immediately recognizable for anyone who has ever taught. This is how it works. AI has been trained to always give an answer. It does its best and will fill in the blanks if it has to. If you have ever been in front of a classroom and asked a question and called on a student who had no clue what to say, you know that look they get? When they are about to open their mouth with something they made up? Their best guess, because they have to come up with a response for you? That kid is AI sometimes. The trick with AI research, therefore, is to ask it for research citations and to check them yourself. Best not to forget you are the grown-up in the room.

7. It is important not to underestimate people and to be honest about the jobs being lost because of AI. Can we say out loud that much of that work did not make the best use of the humans? I remember when the internet first hit the scene being told that this was the end of public libraries. If librarians didn’t have to retrieve information any more what would they do? Ha. If any of you have been in a public library lately you’ll have the answer to that. Liberated from the card catalogue librarians are out from behind the desk these days, teaching research and critical thinking skills, creating vibrant centers of community engagement. Libraries are hopping, exciting places these days. Lifting the burden of clerical work did that.

8. AI is really, really good at sifting through information and giving a result that is tailored to specific needs. This is a huge saver of a person’s own human energy which they can use for better ends. The trick is a question that tells you who you really are. For instance if my mom was still alive I might have written a query for her that read like this:

Hi Claude. I am a woman in her late nineties who cooks for herself in an assisted living apartment. I do not have a stove but I have a microwave and a fridge. I hate cooking and am of Scottish decent and do not like spicy food. I have celiac disease and cannot eat any gluten. (This is why I cook for myself and do not eat in the dining room - they can’t get it right.) I am also a retired nurse and know the importance of a healthy diet at my age. I need a seven day rotating menu of three nutritious meals I can cook of myself with very little effort. I also use a walker. I can have any groceries I want delivered. Can you give me some menu ideas and a weekly shopping list to go with it?

Now because this is so interesting here is the answer I got from Claude: (Bear with me, this is long, but I feel instructive)

A Few Notes Before We Start (From Claude)

Everything here is:

• Gluten-free (no wheat, barley, rye, or hidden gluten)

• Microwave-friendly — no stove needed

• Mild and unfussy — no spicy ingredients

• Nutritious — good protein, calcium, and fiber for healthy aging

• Simple — minimal prep, easy to handle

Seven-Day Rotating Menu

Day 1

Breakfast: Gluten-free oatmeal (certified GF rolled oats) with banana and a drizzle of honey Lunch: Canned salmon mixed with mayo on GF crackers, sliced cucumber on the side Dinner: Microwaved baked potato with cottage cheese and steamed frozen broccoli

Day 2

Breakfast: Scrambled eggs (microwave-safe mug, 2 minutes) with sliced tomato Lunch: GF lentil soup (canned, check label) with GF crackers Dinner: Canned tuna mixed with mayo, frozen peas microwaved on the side, sliced cheese

Day 3

Breakfast: Plain yogurt (full-fat, good for bone density) with berries and GF granola Lunch: Sliced hard-boiled egg (microwave egg cooker) with GF crackers and sliced tomato Dinner: Microwaved salmon fillet (fresh or frozen) with microwaved frozen green beans and rice

Day 4

Breakfast: GF oatmeal with apple slices and a little cinnamon Lunch: Cottage cheese with cucumber slices and GF crackers Dinner: Canned chicken heated in broth with frozen mixed vegetables — a simple, hearty soup

Day 5

Breakfast: Scrambled eggs in a mug with a side of sliced banana Lunch: Canned salmon on GF crackers with sliced cheese and cucumber Dinner: Microwaved sweet potato with a pat of butter, canned lentil soup alongside

Day 6

Breakfast: Yogurt with sliced banana and a spoonful of honey Lunch: GF lentil soup with sliced cheese and GF crackersDinner: Microwaved frozen fish fillet with microwaved frozen broccoli and a small portion of rice

Day 7

Breakfast: GF oatmeal with berries and milk Lunch: Egg salad (mashed hard-boiled egg with mayo) on GF crackers with cucumber Dinner: Baked potato topped with canned salmon and a spoonful of sour cream, green beans on the side

Weekly Shopping List

Proteins

• Canned salmon (4–5 tins)

• Canned tuna (2 tins)

• Canned chicken (2 tins)

• Canned lentil soup (3–4 tins — check labels for GF)

• Eggs (1 dozen)

• Frozen fish fillets (4 portions — plain, not breaded)

Dairy

• Full-fat plain yogurt (large container)

• Cottage cheese (medium container)

• Sliced cheese (cheddar or similar)

• Butter

• Sour cream (small container)

• Milk (for oatmeal)

Grains (all certified gluten-free)

• Certified GF rolled oats

• GF crackers (Schar or similar brand)

• GF granola

• White rice — microwavable packets are easiest

Vegetables (frozen is perfectly nutritious and easier than fresh)

• Frozen broccoli

• Frozen green beans

• Frozen peas

• Frozen mixed vegetables

• Fresh cucumber (2)

• Fresh tomatoes (4–5)

Fruit

• Bananas (bunch)

• Fresh or frozen berries (blueberries are excellent and easy)

• Apples (3–4)

Pantry

• Mayonnaise

• Honey

• Cinnamon

• Chicken or vegetable broth (cartons or tins)

• Gluten-free chicken or vegetable broth (check the label)

Starches

• Baking potatoes (4–5)

• Sweet potatoes (3–4)

A Few Practical Tips

Microwave egg mug: Crack two eggs into a microwave-safe mug, add a splash of milk, stir, and microwave for 90 seconds — scrambled eggs with no pan to wash.

Hard-boiled eggs: A microwave egg cooker (inexpensive, available online) makes this safe and easy without any boiling water.

Frozen fish fillets: Place in a microwave-safe dish, cover loosely, and microwave 4–5 minutes. No mess, no fuss.

Microwavable rice packets: These cook in 90 seconds and are a much easier option than stovetop rice.

Label reading: For celiac safety, always look for the certified gluten-free symbol on oats, crackers, granola, soups, and broths. Brands like Schar, Bob’s Red Mill (GF line), and Progresso (select soups) are widely available for delivery.

This menu rotates every week, so the shopping list stays the same and you always know what to expect. Simple, safe, and genuinely good for you — just as a retired nurse would insist on!

I then went on and told Claude that I wanted the information for an article. Here was the response:

What strikes me about that exchange is how much the answer depended on listening carefully to the whole person. Your mother’s situation involved several overlapping needs at once — a medical condition, a physical limitation, an equipment constraint, a cultural preference, and professional knowledge about her own health. A generic internet search would have required her to visit multiple sites, filter out everything irrelevant, and somehow piece it all together herself. Here, she described her life once and got a single, coherent answer tailored entirely to her.

That’s really the heart of what makes AI useful as a support for older people, especially those living independently. It’s patient (she could take as long as she needed to type that out), it doesn’t make her feel like a burden for asking, it remembers everything she said within the conversation, and it can handle complexity without getting overwhelmed.

A few other angles you might want to make in your article:

She could follow up. If she wanted to ask “what if I can’t find GF lentil soup?” or “can you give me a simpler Day 3 dinner?” — she just types it. The conversation continues.

It works at any hour. There’s no waiting for a family member to be available or a doctor’s office to open.

It meets her where she is. She didn’t need technical knowledge. She just described her life in plain language, the way she’d talk to a person.

The goal isn’t to replace human connection or professional care — it’s to give people like your mother a capable, tireless, judgment-free resource that helps them stay independent and informed on their own terms.

So there you have it. (this is me talking now).

And my observation. AI (in my mind assisted intelligence) can be useful as long as you realize the definitive intelligence is yours. I regret when I read this that I was not able to provide my mom with anything this clear and simple when she needed it. She would have used it too. At 97 she was active on all social media and Googled everything. The thing about her own mind was that she kept it open right to the end.

Which is the point.

Use the tools but remember whose project this is, and who is the craftsperson.

Since we last visited together, I have traveled and been with family. Busy, but also aware that the world has been too.

Strange times, definitely.

A bit of background. Because I have a crazy person’s resume, one of my activities is I do some work for local CBC as a political commentator. That means that I have to follow the news, even when I don’t really feel like it. And as I write this there is a lot going on, too much conflict in too many places. My observations on this state of affairs belong in another space. But I remember what an old union guy told me once about strikes. “Never go out unless you have a plan how to go back in.” This seems to me, even if reversed, to be true in so many contexts.

What interests me most now too is how often people are sharing despair. I was in the US when I was away and this was often a topic of conversation. Even social media, which I take with a truck load of salt, is full statements that “It’s okay if you are not okay.” Depressed overwhelm seems to be the state of many nations and many minds.

People seem to l feel powerless. It’s hard to know what to do, or how to be, when there is so little you can personally do to fix it all.

I get that.

Which brings me to resilience, as a counter balance, to the importance of grounding yourself for better days.

The key, I think, is in rituals, routines, observances, and relationships that reflect the best of this world, rather than the worst. There is so much precedent for this in our human past, when what was endured was often so, so much worse. This is wisdom we should access.

I’ll give you some examples.

My late, first, father-in-law survived the Second World War in forced labour. He was determined to last if he could. He had his rules. One was that no matter what happened, he always made sure to wash everyday, as he had at home, even if it was in snow. He also told stories of he and his friends, all educated men, being sent off ahead of the regular troops to walk over mine fields to clear them. As they went these men, most of them professionals, used to think of a word and see how many languages they could say it in. They remembered their education and kept walking.

Again in that era, I sometimes read a book about a hobby or individual passion and note that the publication date was during the war. In the middle of all of that someone was still breeding dogs, collecting stamps, cataloguing birds. Nothing could stop an interest.

This evidence of the endurance of ordinary life matters. So, I want to share what I do to remind myself I am sane at this stage of my life when the news often isn’t.

I start with small children. However you can make contact, I think it is essential to see the world through their eyes. Their play, priorities, and preferences are insights and balms. There is a lot to be said for dressing like a toddler in knit tops and corduroy pants, for toys and naps, for pushing away the food you don’t like, for crouching down on the sidewalk, holding everyone up, looking for ants.

And then there are animals. I count my own life in my dogs, each one walking with me through a phrase of my life. What a privilege it is to have in your own household another soul who can see right into yours. A face at the window, a paw on your arm. The sound of a cat purring on your pillow, or the feel of a dog’s body when they lean into yours, is a gift from larger forces.

To this list I will add public libraries. Think of what they are. Refuges for thinkers and learners, intergenerational community centers staffed by the helpful, lighthouses of generosity and kindness in worlds that are not always that. The next time you feel overwhelmed or down, get yourself to the closest public library and give yourself time there. And then report back to me. Don’t you feel better?

Finally, it is so helpful to have a ritual to observe. A prayer in the morning or tea at four o’clock. Something you do for yourself, no matter what, when no one is watching, for no other reason than a promise to yourself.

We need tools and connections to keep going, always our job. Maybe our one job.

After all life is full of challenges, personal and wider, some of them nearly unbearable. But there is a way through them and sometimes out of them by the observance of persistence, of ladders constructed with small rungs, one after the other, of ordinary materials already on hand.

And this is how I build mine. Now tell me yours.

Places like this run all over the world, in cafes and clubs in Europe they are common. Here in Canada, groups of old guys meeting at Tim Horton’s to drink coffee and solve the problems of the world. I see casual gatherings like theirs in food courts at malls. I saw veterans of this kind of socializing in the rows of chairs in the lobby of my mother’s assisted living. Spots where people can hang out, drop in, pass by, no obligation to arrive, no time to go.

I’ve been reading a lot lately, and I am sure you have too, about the “three secrets of super-agers.” Social contact matters to well-being.

For many of us one of the big losses of the end of formal work, or of a house full of family, is the decline in inconsequential, incidental, conversation. Water cooler chat we used to call it, bits of news, information, and opinion shared whenever people are close by.

It’s a very human need this kind of unscheduled interaction. My husband, at 72, has gone back to work on a consulting basis. When he comes home he tells me about something one of the guys said, and isn’t that interesting. I know that’s why he goes out. For the chit chat.

Sometimes the little things in life are what matter most. I don’t know how many times I have to learn that.

Which brings me to my hanging plants.

A while ago I got it into my head that a few of these were what I needed near my entry. Not a great indoor gardener, I just figured how hard could it be?

Hard it turned out.

These plants have not done well. Bigger pots? I wondered. More light? Different species? How about repotting? More fertilizer? I scoured the internet and read the advice. None of it worked. Then I picked up an old book, written by one of those English eccentrics who knows what she’s doing, and she said hanging plants dry out quickly. Make sure you give them a bit of water every day. So that’s what I did. I found a small pitcher left over from some cream and sugar set and started giving each plant a splash of water every morning. Guess what? My hanging plants started to flourish.

What they had been waiting for was no big solution, only a little of something every day.

This has made me wonder if we over complicate our own solutions. After all we live in an over ambitious culture and are trained to feel we are not measuring up.

But what if a little bit is the answer, if small solutions are enough?

What if we are ourselves are all simpler than we believe? What if the lift comes from nudges, not monumental efforts, or programs? What if we don’t need to sign up, take on, resolve to, launch, join anything big at all?

Think of Boro.

Boro is a Japanese technique of mending. It was used to prolong the life of textiles, bed linens and clothing, sometimes for hundreds of years. Patches were applied with the simplest of stitches, layered over the years to create something quite beautiful. Quick little effort that added up over time to the spectacular.

I’m thinking the same approach might be considered in our lives. That the isolation and sometimes loneliness of retirement years might be best met with a casual response. Maybe we don’t always need a board to join, a course to take, bridge lessons or any other variation of an obligation, based on us trying harder.

What if that little bit of water we are missing is less organized?

This is what works for me; the two things that keep me in some kind of balance.

I walk my dog four times a day on streets where we stop and talk to the other dog walkers. This is my mobile, four-legged assisted version of hallway chat. In addition, I also am part of a group of knitters who meet randomly at various coffee shops around town. It’s a drop in no obligation sort of thing, and I go when it’s what I feel like that day. There is no responsibility to any of it. We knit and we chat and we connect.

It’s my Greek club. We all need one.

And in this long cold Nova Scotia winter, is that little extra that’s mattered most.

This got me thinking.

I have taught in so many venues, including university classrooms for years. Teaching is a wonderful thing, and there is nothing like explaining something else to make you understand it yourself. But at this season of my life, I don’t want to do it anymore in an organized way. Teaching is about taking what’s inside you and sending it out. I really think that there is a time when the activities that empty you reach their conclusion. That you need to step back and open yourself up to some kind of replenishment.

Before I go any further, I want to say I am not talking about retiring from activity, of adding even more things to the list of “it’s too much trouble.” Too much trouble to go out, to cook, to celebrate the holidays, to get dressed up for no one but yourself. No not that. It’s a way to erase yourself from the board of life.

No, what I want to consider is the increasing feeling I have that the later decades of life are not for sharing your wisdom, but for becoming wiser yourself. For learning something new, for being a student, a mistake maker, an enthusiast, a beginner, a failure, and a try-againer. Now is the time to explore what an incredibly interesting place this world is, to have new passions. To be the absolutely not the smartest person in the room, but instead the one who is absorbing. To do hard things, that hurt your head, that frustrate you, make you feel clumsy and inadequate, just before that moment when you realize you have a new skill.

But you can’t learn if you are always teaching, continuing to practice what you know, be who you were, seeing if you can extend your reputation or long-time occupation just a few more years, repeat as long as you can the execution of your expertise. Those are fine aims if you are still learning, but not so if you’re not.

A doctor taught me this.

I was his patient for years, and he knew what he was doing. He came from medical generations, everyone knew his name; it was expected he would continue to practice for years. But he didn’t. Instead, one day he sat across from his desk and told me he was going. The thing, he said, was that he was increasingly interested in gardening. He had a son starting up a garlic business. He worried that one day he would read some medical test results, and his mind would wander off to thinking about plants and soil. That he would look out the window and want to leave. Which is of course, is what he did. To do something new, even to do it for a long time a little badly. He went.

I wasn’t happy to lose my doctor, but I understood. He’d heard the call of later life, the learner somewhere outside. He retired not from something, but to something.

It’s not always a popular choice. If you go this route be prepared for some noses to get out of joint. Lots of people liked who you were, maybe you do too. The unfamiliar is unsettling, and for some folks, they were comfortable with who you always were.

But maybe that means a learning time for them, a signal that it’s their turn to be the teacher.

You know, I wasn’t all that bad teaching university, or even sewing classes. I use those skills every day, without performance pressure, in my life now. But I’ve gone onto new hobbies. I want to knit Norwegian sweaters, can’t tell you why, can’t do it now. I write every day, with varying facility. I read editing books at night before I go to sleep. I am writing this now before breakfast. I’m taking online classes in different approaches to faith. I’m lifting weights in my sewing room, studying animal communication, noticing birds, talking to new people, listening closely to what they say. Hearing some pretty interesting stories.

Some nights I wake up and look at the clock because I want to get up and get at it. These are my bonus years, my scholar years, the refill and refresh after years of output.

With something new. Because life always is.

I am sure you can make your own list. Some people, or phases of life, that were taken from you, or you were forced to let go. A partner, health, heaven forbid a child, or the sibling or friend who was the only one who really understood you. The job where you were respected when you worked in your zone, at your peak. The social life that filled your weekends. The days when your children were small and you stood behind a swing at a park and thought, these are the best years of your life, because they were.

The losses accumulate over time. That person you were going to call now has been disconnected, like their phone. The realization that the due date for all those things you were going to get to one day has expired.

These things return to you in the night. The string of absences, hurts, regrets, wrong turns on roads with no way back.

Hardest of all to give up in that dark is struggle to hold onto expectations that have drifted away, forever. The plans of what the two of you were going to do together when you retired. The expectation that the family unit would always be the same. The belief that they would never leave you because you would never leave them. The conviction that you would always be able to do what you did best, forever. The idea that you would never end up aging like your mom, or your dad. That everything you built for yourself, would well, last.

Do any of us need to be told one more time that aging isn’t for sissies?

I think not.

Perhaps, instead, it is all in one word. Loss.

But what happens if you change that one word to completion?

What if you thought those same thoughts but when you got to the last paragraph said to yourself, that phase in my life is now complete?

I am a person who makes things. I have been tearing up my living spaces with projects, some successful some not, from before I could walk. I use my hands a lot to make what I do, even now when it’s often on a keyboard. My mother said that before I could walk she once found me sitting behind the living room curtains systematically unpicking the hems.

I have always liked a project.

Lately, I have understood I am living one.

And the thing about projects is that there is never just one. It really is the process not the product that counts. Some projects are disasters, or disappointments, or even “the best thing you’ve ever done.” They all consume materials and energy and when underway they can make time stand still.

But they have a beginning, a middle, and a conclusion. When I write a book there is that time when I type “The End,” when I hang up a garment, give someone the knitted socks, pass it from my hands to someone else’s. There is a moment in the journey of every experience of creation when it is complete.

And what ever you are making there is there is a definite point when it is time to stop. Not one more word, stitch, or brush stroke. The art lies most in knowing when that time has come and not stepping past it. The perfection is honoring the wrap up. The last note is often the best, and most important one.

But then, what do you do next?

You clean up your workspace and let yourself rest. Making anything takes a lot out of a person. Then one day you look at the materials on your shelves, the ideas in the catch all drawer of your mind, and you feel the spark to make something new, return.

And so you start a new project. You make and complete. Maybe find a new craft, maybe working towards a form of conclusion, but you keep going, reconfiguring, surprising yourself, letting whatever has not introduced itself to you yet, to arrive and teach you.

Not what it is, but who you are.

We were made to be makers, of ourselves.

· Ours involved a cat in a tree

· Plus, turkey, potato latkes (which my husband is perfecting which meant fourteen nights in a row) fruitcake and shortbread the dog ate

· The high point at dinner was a two-year-old

· They know how to have a good time

· Auld Lang Syne is a wise song

· Not sure about the resolutions

· Wouldn’t have anticipated Greenland would not be safe, so not sure where to go from here

· We’d be better off with that cat in charge

· Read on my phone that the one thing we all need to do is put down our phones

· Since I lose mine forty-six times a day, I can do that

· Might be time to do three things.

· Be kind to each other

· Elevate eccentricity and humour

· Work with what we’ve already got

· Like we’re holed up for the long haul

· Because maybe we are

· It is easy to think like this in Nova Scotia this winter

· When even the dogs wear boots

· And there is so much dried salt on my laces I can’t tie them

· My grandmother knit socks

· And when they were worn out, she cut off the tops and made crazy quilts from them

· Backed with old sheets

· So heavy it was like sleeping under a sidewalk

· A woman I know gave her middle-aged son a jar of pickles and a bed skirt for Christmas

· That’s the spirit

· Raise your hand if you have said “Talk to a human” when the AI assistant asks what you want

· That’s something we should all do

· Maybe bring back party lines, card tables, and bridge nights

· Sitting in circles in nylon webbed lawn chairs in the front yard with cups of coffee and chatting with the neighbours

· Borrowing an egg from next door

· Taking over a casserole

· From down the freezer

· Pay no attention to 30-year-old influencers who say if you can’t get off the floor without using your hands you are doomed

· Listen, my mother lived to a very sharp and active 97 and never lifted anything heavier than the receiver of a phone

· But she talked to people

· My father taught cross-country skiing one winter

· He figured it out from a book he read in the library and signed students up

· This week go to a public library and sit

· They are breeding grounds for eccentrics

· Look around

· You’ll be glad you’re there

· I belong to a writer’s group at a library

· We read chapters to each other that don’t make much sense

· I’m back there this week

· Can hardly wait

· In the meantime, here are my plans for 2026

· Play golf a lot less and go bowling a lot more

· Learn to knit with my left hand

· Finish a mystery set in the Nova Scotia Legislature written entirely to make me and my former assistant laugh

· See if it makes one other person laugh

· See if anyone sues me

· Eat more sauerkraut

· Send Valentine’s cards

· Pay attention to the birds

· Now what about you

??

One of the pleasures of my life is my walking my dog, four times a day, and talking to our dog-walking friends. Animals, who I consider to be sent to teach and when necessary heal us, give me connections with people I might not otherwise know. And my days are richer for this.

Yesterday, we ran into one of our friends, a loose and easy young man and his canine companion, Bruce, pictured above.

We have had a lot of snow lately, and being in Nova Scotia next to the ocean, it was gone in a few days because of the rain. A few patches remained here and there. And Bruce, a husky bred for life up at the Arctic circle, found one, lay down on it and refused to move (it’s covered by his body in this shot). He had found his own true environment and didn’t want to leave it, even though what was left was a fragment. There was a lesson there. Bruce is wise, you need to know that about him.

On my own leash is Dolly, a rescue abandoned as a small puppy in a field in Texas. She was mauled by street dogs and even now, as sweet and optimistic as she has become, is afraid of big dogs. Bruce seems to understand this. When we first met him, Bruce would sit a distance away from Dolly and let her be, radiating calm and I think some acceptance of her. Over time Dolly’s fears have faded away. That Bruce brought her a long way.

Yes Bruce is deep. He knows things. And he knows in his ancestral Husky bones that he is supposed to lie on snow. So he watches for it and makes the best of every small white patch when he can find it, between the storms.

It seemed to me as Dolly and I walked on yesterday morning, that we all have our snow. If we are lucky, we have each had some time in our lives when we were in our zone, doing what we were destined to do, or be. Think of an athlete at the top of their game, that one time when they scored the winning goal. Or the teacher in tune with a whole classroom of students. Or the medical professional walking the floor. I know for certain you know exactly what that was for you.

But the point is, that we don’t get to spend all our lives in those places, or moments. All of us who admire the professional athlete at their best, do so with some relief we don’t have to live with ourselves with peaking at thirty. Even though in some sense we all, one day, walk off the field. It can break our hearts. Or not.

Bruce’s little patches of snow make me think of how important it is to acknowledge two things.

One, is that it is essential to hold on to and honor that part of ourselves that was able to speak clearly, authentically, in certain times and environments. But when we leave that place where we were most in the zone, we should consider that this does not mean we should leave what we brought there behind too. Our core is our anchor. And anchors stay were they are.

The second reality, if we recognize what it was that made us feel most like ourselves, is to find, places, or patches when we can still express it. Our souls still need to take those breaths. For me, I go there when I write, or, as a person who was happiest in her life with children, when I can be with someone not an adult. Life is full of opportunities, if no longer served out, that can be sought out, found in a different, even smaller shapes.

The last thing we should give up is the best of ourselves.

And in doing so, we need to acknowledge that expressing what we were meant to do changed and developed us, reamed out invisible places of new aptitudes, skills, gifts. The teacher becomes the listener who hears what someone needs. The doctor, never loses the ability to shift through the details and find the one that matters, or the one that doesn’t. The athlete retains always the knowledge that capacity could be increased by persistence. Perhaps these secondary skills are the ones that are most permanent, most valuable.

And Bruce’s snow, even urban patches not drifts up north, have given him a capacity to be still and accepting. And that, when everything else is washed away, is exactly what another of his tribe, come here from so far away to find safety, needed most.

The best of us, even if no longer consuming, can remain, always, on call.

But lately I have been thinking of the 20%. And how we don’t maybe make enough legitimate space for it.

This is why.

Last weekend I attended a celebration of life for a young mother who is not expected, as hard as she’s trying, to make it to, or much past, Christmas. She was so beautiful and gracious that day, surrounded by family and friends, and the love was stronger than the sadness. But she was leaving. There was no way around that.

I was there because I have known her parents for decades and my boys know her well. They couldn’t be there, living on the other coast, so I represented our family.

I thought that afternoon of what this experience was doing to the parents. In their mid seventies now this will be theirs to carry for the rest of their lives. The mother said to me that many people don’t want to talk to her about what that means.

This seems to me to be an area of modern life where we have not improved things. The word all the time now is closure. The pressure to get better, get over, and get on has become relentless. If you have ever had bad news you will know what I mean. All the well-meaning folks who ask “How are you doing?” and you know already what they want to hear. “One day at a time” to be interpreted as getting better. Over it.

But what if some hard things are not to be left behind? What if they are meant to be carried on with us on our journey? What if they are intended as companions, maybe one day not debilitating, but always walking with us, familiar?

The celebration of life I attended was a ritual of a certain kind, a preparation for the future survivors as much as anything else. It was so important to do that and be there, but it made me wonder of how often we don’t give ourselves the gift of coming together like this. I wondered that day that if when we let go as a society of other rituals of grief and loss, if we have perhaps championing the closing off of people and their right to feeling, instead of closure. Closure, not a word but a contemporary requirement.

I know I widow trying hard to rise to the pressure of doing widowhood well. She wants to be a success at it, as fast as she can. She refers to this as her new life stage, which of course is accurate, but not all there is. She has jumped back into activities, moved home as suggested, and is applauded for it, but I wonder at what cost.

This isn’t how humans have always done this. I wonder if we are denying ourselves part of our own reality.

Do you remember the wreath on the door, or when people wore black armbands? Growing up we had a Welsh doctor on our street who wore one on his sleeve after he lost his infant son. And anyone who has sat shiva with the family knows what I am talking about, or has left stones at the grave. Or been to a wake in Newfoundland, all night in a living room. Or had a Greek grandmother in black. Or listened, like the Ingenious people do, for the voices of the ancestors, accepting their continued presence.

I wonder if we all need to do that. Carry our ancestors, our sorrows beside us, honorably, while we make the most of all we have been given, including, and maybe particularly, the extra time they didn’t have. Why do we work so hard to send our griefs off as orphans? When they deserve to travel with us, a reminder not of what we have lost, but what we once had and were given. So we can give each of our days back to them like a gift.