“Recent and not so recent surveys confirm that a majority of us people over seventy-five keep surprising ourselves with happiness,” writes Roger Angell in his essay in the February 17, 2014 edition of The New Yorker, This Old Man: Life in the Nineties. “Put me on that list. Our children are adults now and mostly gone off, and let’s hope full of their own lives. We’ve outgrown our ambitions.”

We’ve outgrown our ambitions. Angell’s article is a beautiful piece, full of mellifluous prose and images, about how our culture makes elders invisible, shunning the reality of aging, and, God forbid, death. And I am thinking about my own ambitions now. Maybe I had already outgrown mine by my mid-fifties, when, after 25 years with multiple sclerosis, my mind and body were slowing. I’d published a book about my life and my work with chronic illness. I still saw a few clients and ran the local clinic’s psychotherapy group for people with illness and disability. Letting go was hard to do…

Read more of this insightful essay by Dana Snyder-Grant at the Joyous Paradox Blog: http://joyousparadox.com/2014/07/04/you-are-already-there-adapting-to-illness-by-dana-snyder-grant-licsw/.

Photo by Jim Snyder-Grant.