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Winter connotes dark, cold, dreary days, most of which we spend indoors, in stark contrast to summer’s warm, long, lazy days, unless the heat and humidity are so high that we stay inside, cooled by air conditioning.  Winter takes work. Just going outside to pick up the mail or newspaper (yes, some of us still read the news in print) or walking the dog can be daunting. Boots, hat, gloves, scarf, puffer coat, hand warmers, two pairs of cute patterned socks, and multiple layers underneath. By the time you put all that clothing on, you’re too tired to move and...

  A war raging in the Middle East. Rampant inflation. Escalating prices. Cyberattacks. Rape on a college campus. Protests. Division. Runaway A.I. Political unrest. We’ve named just a few of our world’s problems. The entire globe seems pretty grim these days, but we remain optimistic that through the morass, chaos and darkness, light emerges. Here are some glimmers of optimism: 1.    Kindness is on the rise. Good souls act every day in a myriad ways—helping to provide directions, paying for someone’s coffee who’s short on cash, giving up their seat on a crowded bus or subway, letting another car into...

D Should seniors be discarded like used paper towels just because we’re old? Do we still have purpose? Yes, but the dynamics have changed, and we are adjusting. As we age, it is important to feel needed and useful, a healthy path to longevity. Without it, we would wilt and die like cut flowers.  Let us count the ways we still have resolve and importance.  When we were younger, finding purpose was a no-brainer. We might have been needed as a study partner during college or graduate school. We were needed for a fourth in doubles tennis or a golf...

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., American physician, poet and essayist, once said: “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”   Many seniors who are retired or have cut back on their work hours find Holmes’ statement to be true. They want another adventure in their lives and are traveling to destinations on their bucket list, especially to far-away places with diverse cultures, sights, foods and languages, from South Africa to Japan, the Arctic and Easter Island, to name a few.    These places and others require long flights and lots of...

Being left out of a group can be excruciating. Trying to fit in can be as formidable as hand-to-hand combat.  For example, the opera Peter Grimes (by Benjamin Britten), named for a gruff and nasty fisherman living in a fictional small village on the East Anglian coast of England around the year 1830, is about an outsider and emotionally wounded man accused of killing his apprentice, a child from the workhouse. Is he guilty? The answer is ambiguous. Yet he wants nothing more than to fit in with the townsfolk (a collective clique) and imagines this will happen if he...