James Woodward

  “At fifteen I was committed to learning. At thirty I took my rightful position. At forty, I was no longer totally perplexed. At fifty, I began to understand the unfolding of my true nature. At sixty, I was in harmony with contradictions and ambivalence. A seventy, at long last, I may follow my heart’s desire without going astray.”   -Confucius at the age of Seventy  

From 1998 through to 2009, I had the privilege of working with many hundreds of older people in an Almshouse charity. We lived together in rather splendid seventeenth-century buildings which were surprisingly adaptable for modern use. I remember meeting one frail older woman on her admission for care into our community. This move was for her and her children a last resort but keeping her at home with part-time support was simply no longer safe or feasible. When I met…

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  On my last birthday I was ninety-three years old. That is not young, of course. In fact, it is older than ninety. But age is a relative matter. If you continue to work and to absorb the beauty in the world about you, you find that age does not necessarily mean getting old. At least, not in the ordinary sense. I feel many things more intensely than ever before, and for me life grows more fascinating.

  When my friend’s mother developed dementia, he was discouraged that each day she seemed to be losing so much. Then he remembered a saying from Taoism: In the way of learning, each day we gain more and more. In the way of the Tao, each day we have less and less.   So often we go through life, hoping that enlightenment is “right around the corner.” Somehow, like a mirage on the horizon, the future recedes and remains out…

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  AGEING AND CARE OF THE SOUL   Thomas Moore has described the fundamental psychological problem of contemporary life as a lack of “soul.” As Moore understands the problem, “soul” is not exclusively a religious term but rather “a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart, and personal substance.”   Moore tells of a case of a young woman in distress, with ambivalence about being a woman. She was also…

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BEDE GRIFFITHS: THE MONK GROWS OLD Father Bede Griffiths was a a Catholic monk who spent most of his life as a “Christian Yogi” in India, where he expounded the unity of world religions: “(Father Bede) said at the age of 85 he begged to differ with those who think that life is all over at 40, and that from then on we go downhill… Father Bede insisted that the time from age 40 on is what life is all…

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In old age something special happens to reality. Its hardness is softened by the  experience of transitoriness. Persons who once seemed indispensable die. One after another disappears — parents, teachers, onetime superiors first, contemporaries next. One has the feeling that a former generation has come to an end and that the following, one’s own, is beginning to crumble… The danger in which aging men and women find themselves is that of capitulating to transitoriness, of having no more future, of…

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