Zitat des Tages von Gail Sheehy:
To be tested is good. The challenged life may be the best therapist.
Spontaneity, the hallmark of childhood, is well worth cultivating to counteract the rigidity that may otherwise set in as we grow older.
Sex and older women used to be considered an oxymoron, rarely mentioned in the same breath.
In 2009, I served as AARP's Ambassador of Caregiving. With a producer and cameraman, I traveled the country for months, interviewing hundreds of caregivers.
Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.
You have a new role: family caregiver. It's a role nobody applies for. You don't expect it. You won't be prepared. You probably won't even identify yourself as a caregiver.
It was so naive to think that there was nothing interesting that happened after 55. Come on, there's a whole second adulthood!
Like everyone else in the first weeks after the tragedy of 9/11, I was looking frantically for some way to help.
In rough times, pathfinders rely on work, friends, humor and prayer. They develop a support network.
When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking.
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another!
Most women have learned a great deal about how to set goals for our First Adulthood and how to roll with the punches when we hit a rough passage. But we're less prepared for our Second Adulthood as we approach life after retirement, where there are no fixed entrances or exits, and lots of sand into which it is easy to bury our heads.
Ah, mastery... what a profoundly satisfying feeling when one finally gets on top of a new set of skills... and then sees the light under the new door those skills can open, even as another door is closing.
I've had the experience of having a book praised but then it doesn't sell. Or not praised but then it sells.
If you begin to think you are solely responsible for keeping your loved one alive and safe, you will eventually find yourself playing God. This phase can develop into an unhealthy, codependent relationship.
No sooner do we think we have assembled a comfortable life than we find a piece of ourselves that has no place to fit in.
It is a paradox that as we reach out prime, we also see there is a place where it finishes.
Would that there were an award for people who come to understand the concept of enough. Good enough. Successful enough. Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough. When you have self-respect, you have enough.
Over the next few years the boardrooms of America are going to light up with hot flashes.
Be willing to shed parts of your previous life. For example, in our 20s, we wear a mask; we pretend we know more than we do. We must be willing, as we get older, to shed cocktail party phoniness and admit, 'I am who I am.'
Changes are not only possible and predictable, but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one's own unnecessary vegetation.
The secret of a leader lies in the tests he has faced over the whole course of his life and the habit of action he develops in meeting those tests.
I dare to do things - that's how I survive.
We have to move from the unbridled pursuit of self-gain at the expense of others to recovering appreciation for what we gain by caring and sharing with one another.
I actually like getting out of my comfort zone. It shakes me up.
This is something caregivers have to understand: You have to ask for help. You have to realize that you deserve to ask for help. Because you need to keep on working on your own life.
If every day is an awakening, you will never grow old. You will just keep growing.
If you're the person living closest to the parent who's going to need help, and you take on the whole role of primary caregiver, you can be pretty sure your sibling who lives farthest away is going to call you and say, 'You don't know what you're doing.' Because they're not on the spot, and they probably feel guilty.
Jill Clayburgh's life so closely paralleled mine, I feel as though a part of me lived a little through her and died a little with her.
Adapting to our Second Adulthood is not all about the money. It requires thinking about how to find a new locus of identity or how to adjust to a spouse who stops working and who may loll, enjoying coffee and reading the paper online while you're still commuting.
If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.
The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.
In the first phase of shock over, say, your mortgage being called in or your job washed out, it's essential to engage with others and share the fear, release the feelings, do fun things to take your mind off it.
Being a pathfinder is to be willing to risk failure and still go on.
Back in 1968, when I was 30, my entire life blew up. I had a life plan, and it collapsed for no rational reason.
Family caregiving has become a predictable crisis. Americans are living longer and longer but dying slower and slower.
