The Tibetan proverb, which may be neither Tibetan nor a proverb, stabs my heart a little; at least, the part about walking double does.

Due to osteoarthritis in my right hip, my walking has been curtailed recently.

Which makes me sad. I love to walk.

As my decades have progressed, I have gone from being a committed dancer to an indifferent runner to a stationary cyclist, but I have always been a walker.

I love a good hike, alone or with company.

The kilometres feel good.

The world is beautiful.

I always thought of walking our dogs as a daily therapy to clear out my brain. I took my ability to walk, the smooth cooperation of my feet and legs and knees and hips, oiled cogs in my biological machine, for granted.

I could blame my mother's brittle Irish bones for my condition, but let's face it: my age has more to do with the breakdown of my hip.

Over the years, we wear away the cartilage that cushions the moving parts of our joints.

No one tells us that this precious cartilage does not replenish itself.

It cannot be restored or fabricated or grown in a lab (at least, not yet).

Once we lose it, we experience pain in the joint.

Eventually, we arrive at the need for surgical replacement.

I could blame my mother's brittle Irish bones for my condition, but let's face it: my age has more to do with the breakdown of my hip.

That's where I'm at.

I tried a steroid injection, which seemed miraculous for a time—Look at me, I can bend and walk and dance and kneel again!—but the effects gradually wore off.

Subsequent injections will likely be less effective with each dose. Surgery is in my future if I want to keep walking.

For now, I try to ignore the pain.

I try to carry on with life within my limits.

Now, my husband usually walks our one remaining dog, who is old and cranky (like I am) and doesn't always want to go that far anyway.

I go about my daily activities with a thought to which ones are going to hurt and how to ration my energy to get the most done.

I creak like an old house in the morning, and I need a few minutes to relearn how to walk after a long car ride.

As I navigate the mazes of health insurance costs and surgical options, I set my course for a hip replacement.

And all shall be well.

My doctor says I am a good candidate, and my surgeon cites a 96 per cent success rate. ("What's the deal with that 4 per cent?" I silently wonder.)

I will have to get a cane and a walker for my weeks of recovery time.

My husband will have to cater to my needs (the "for worse" part of our vows, my poor darling). I will heal. I will hike again. I hope.

I've long dreamt of walking the width of Spain on the popular pilgrimage known as the Camino de Santiago, or the Way of St. James.

I consider this 800-kilometre trek to be the ultimate experience of walking as a spiritual journey.

The walk is quite physical; the progress of faith is symbolic.

You take five weeks to walk west through Spain to the Atlantic Ocean, travelling through bad weather and blisters, relying on the kindness of strangers and the camaraderie of fellow hikers, and fellow searchers on the trail.

It is my kind of walk.

It was one of my retirement goals.

Then Covid-19 delayed all travel plans.

Then the hip.

Walking the walk has always been my metaphor of choice for growing closer to God, following the path to a sturdier faith, for keeping my feet on holy ground.

My doctor told me to keep walking in moderation but to avoid hills.

If only he could see the giant hill that is my driveway that I had been power walking up and down every day, thinking it was good for me.

He told me to limit high-impact exercise, probably like the series of jumping jacks recommended on my Jillian Michaels workout DVD.

The activities I thought were good for me have turned out to be bad for my impoverished cartilage.

My doctor told me to swim.

I am so not a swimmer.

I hardly recognize this less-active person I'm supposed to become, and that's before I glimpse the crone in the mirror.

I'm too hard on myself, I know.

But also: Perhaps I am too grandiose, another boomer who is somehow the first human ever to age and must document the details, right?

My hip is hardly unique in the annals of arthritis. We grow old, and we deal with it.

Still, I worry that the left hip will go next, and then each knee, followed by every joint that is put in and shaken all about for the hokey-pokey eventually needing surgery.

I worry I will spend too much of my remaining life waiting to walk again.

Maybe the secret to ageing gracefully is understanding that we have already made a lifetime of progress on our spiritual walk.

Walking the walk has always been my metaphor of choice for growing closer to God, for following the path to a sturdier faith, for keeping my feet on holy ground.

Who am I if I am unable to walk?

Maturity has become a lesson I don't particularly want to learn.

The breakdown of physical and mental ability is surely leading me somewhere, but do I want to follow that map?

I think of Jesus' words toward the end of the Gospel of John: "Amen, amen, I say to you, when you were younger you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go" (Jn 21:18).

This is traditionally thought to be a reference to the way St. Peter would be martyred.

I used to think of my parents when I heard this Gospel read at Mass, how at the end of their lives, they needed intimate assistance from their children but complained about it mightily.

Now the verse seems more personally pertinent. Yikes, I think.

Age is definitely leading me where I do not want to go. Continue reading

• Valerie Schultz is a freelance writer, a columnist for The Bakersfield Californian and the author of Overdue: A Dewey Decimal System of Grace. She and her husband Randy have four children and three grandchildren.

One said to his friend, "At last I've found the solution! I'm going to a wonderful memory school. They give you strategies you can put in place to remember things."

The other said, "I'd be interested in that. What's the school called?"

The man held up his hand. "Just a moment and I'll tell you. There is a very popular flower.

It's fragrant, it grows on a bush and it has thorns - "

"A rose?" suggested his friend.

"That's right!" the man replied. He then turned to his wife. "Rose? Rose? What is the name of that memory school?"

While we can laugh at the inconvenience of aging, there are also gifts given us. Here are a few that hold my gratitude.

1. In the earlier stages of life, it seemed that I was all over the place. When I look back now, I see a straight line from there to here, and all of it appears right and necessary for growth.

2. Some of the hardest times can now be seen as the richest. Pain makes good compost for growth but it takes a while to break down. Looking back, I see times of pain associated with a rebirthing in myself.

3. I thought I was mature at 16. People told me I was mature when I turned 21. I discovered that the real age of maturity is 50.

4. When I was in my twenties, I was full of questions about the meaning of life. I don't think I got any answers. The questions themselves just disappeared. I realized if there was no answer to a question, I was asking the wrong question.

5: I cannot tell young people how to live. They would not understand. We can always see where we've come from but not where we are going. But I can listen to young people and be with them where they are. A good honest memory is important in this, and I need to resist the temptation to rewrite my own history.

6. I smile when I remember the anxieties of youth, the shyness, the embarrassment, the fear of making mistakes. Making mistakes was and still is, an important part of learning. This makes me eager to tackle new things without fear. Learning something new is one of the richest gifts of life.

8. There is a saying in Judaism that we live in only one per cent of reality, knowing only what comes through our five senses. The other ninety-nine per cent, they say, is the spiritual realm all around us. One of the lovely things about getting older is that we are getting nearer the ninety-nine per cent, and the spiritual world sometimes creeps in by osmosis.

9. We get a sense that everything that happens to us is a teacher. From day to day, we experience amazing coincidence. We ask a question: the answer turns up. We have a need, it is met. Possessions become less important, and we seem to have grown beyond our earlier definitions of material values. We realize that the only wealth we really keep, is the wealth we give away.

10. As the old prison of a body starts breaking down, we become more aware of the life within us. We can't describe that either. It is like a light that shines through the cracks, like a weightlessness, like a song, like a smile that is waiting for a homecoming.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

Health worker Aeziel Niegos came to New Zealand in 2008 with a dream of settling here and becoming a Kiwi.

But the 39-year-old, who is earns $19.54 an hour as a house leader in an Albany health care facility, said changes to Immigration rules will make that an "impossible dream". Read more

He says retirement has given him the gift of silence to enter more deeply into prayer, especially with the Psalms and the writings of early Church theologians.

He also says the approach of death makes his failings and God's judgment a more pressing concern. Read more

Research from the University of New England showed many couples in such facilities are unable to have normal sexual relationships.

This is because of systematic and illegal breaches of their privacy, the study stated.

The study is to be published this month in the journal "Elder Law".

The research stated vehement opposition from religious conservatives meant Australian lawmakers failed to adequately protect the rights of elderly citizens.

"Couples may be separated or provided with single beds only, unable to push them together," the paper stated.

"Staff frequently enter without knocking, commonly ignore ‘do not disturb' signs and often gossip about residents.

"Some Australian aged-care facilities will still segregate sexes, including married couples, and many ignore the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and interest residents."

It was also noted that there was no mandatory staff training about how to respect and respond to consensual sexual relationships between residents.

The paper's lead author, Alison Rahn, noted that a charter of residents' rights was instituted in the 1980s.

"The original version protected the sexual rights of residents," she said.

"But the Catholic Church made sure that was expunged.

"However, the charter still says their privacy must be respected and they have the right to socialise with whoever they choose and to take risks.

"You could read into that to say residents have the right to have their relationships protected, but the reality is much different in most facilities, which are commonly run by religious institutions and charities."

Ms Rahn is a self-described sex therapist and sex educator.

She said rooms in aged-care facilities needed to be built large enough to allow for double beds.

She added that institutionalised separation of couples once they entered aged care should be stopped.

The paper calls for specific human rights legislation for older Australians.

It also calls for laws to be strengthened to protect couples entering aged care together.

Those who form relationships after entering aged care should also be protected, the paper stated.

Sources

• The Guardian
• Alison Rahn website
• Image: Patheos

Most of the news is focussed on welfare issues, while increased advertising suggests there is money to be made retirement villages, rest homes and funerals. Very little is said about the gifts of wisdom that can come only with a life fully lived.

Most of the advantages of getting old are emotional, intellectual and spiritual. Most of the disadvantages are physical. Because the physical tends to demand more attention, we don't always appreciate what we have gained through the aging process. Let's look at some of the benefits.

1. We've spent many years in Life School and our experience is a part of our faith. We have come to a deeper place where we see God in everything. There is no separation. The world is full of God.

2. We know that while the head has language, the heart has no words, only feeling. We have learned that words are not idols to be worshipped: they are signposts that lead us to the heart space. Here there is a knowing of God that fills us with freedom and peace.

3. We are comfortable with the way we are made, and are not bothered by public opinion. The incidents that used to bother us, now seem trivial, almost laughable.

4. We have learned that insecurity and doubt are not enemies but good friends of wisdom. Both allow us to grow. The security and certainty we once sought, have tended to prevent growth.

5. We value the beauty of lectio divina, especially in the gospels when we walk with our Lord. In the company of Jesus, the words cease to be "law" and become "life," meeting our every need.

6. We value our uniqueness, aware that God has formed us as individuals and continues to do so. We have let go of the need to be like others, or to see them as like us.

7. Judgement and division belong to the smallness of human understanding. We know that God's love is much bigger than human ideas, and that no one is ever lost to that love. In our thinking, we avoid making God too small.

8. We live in an understanding of paradox, knowing the strength in weakness, the richness of poverty, the fullness of emptiness, the gain that comes from loss, the resurrections that follow our little crucifixions. We have learned to trust that the lessons in life school have all been for our spiritual growth.

9. When we were young we had a lot of questions about life. Maybe we didn't get the answers we wanted; but now the questions themselves have disappeared. In life of faith, those questions seem irrelevant.

10. Our faith has become much simpler. It is all held in three words: God is love.

11. We no longer identify with our bodies. They are like coats we've worn for many years. They have served us well but now they are getting old and threadbare. When they no longer serve us, we will discard them and return to the love for which we were made.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

Yet people with dementia can still find meaning in life, she says.

MacKinlay is professor of theology at Charles Sturt University in Canberra and an Anglican priest.

She has been presenting workshops in New Zealand, "Spiritual Reminiscence in Dementia", on ageing and spirituality, particularly spiritual reminiscence for people with dementia.

Some of the work Prof MacKinlay does looks at unpacking what people think is ‘spirituality'. "It's not religion, although religion may be a way of working out one's spirituality," she says.

"A lot of Australians and New Zealanders don't have a religious faith. Yet they still search for meaning."

MacKinlay's work in this field started when one of her friends, Christine Bryden, was diagnosed with early onset alzheimer's at age 46.

"She asked me if I would journey with her because I was both a geriatric nurse and an Anglican priest. She thought that she needed both."

"She challenged me in many ways over the coming years and I found that it was possible to talk with her quite naturally."

Bryden has since published several books including "Who will I be when I die."

MacKinlay was brought to New Zealand by the Selwyn Foundation for Ageing and Spirituality.

She is the author of a number of books

Her book, "Finding Meaning in the Experience of Dementia: the Place of Spiritual Reminiscence Work ," won an Australasian Journal of Aging book prize last year.

Source

• Taranaki Daily News
• Scoop
• Image: Shutterstock

Chittister uniquely combines strong advocacy—especially on behalf of women in both church and society—with a contemplative spirituality rooted in the Benedictine tradition. One of her recent projects is "Monasteries of the Heart," a web-based movement that shares Benedictine spirituality with contemporary seekers. Meanwhile, the Joan Chittister Fund for Prisoners distributes free spirituality materials in 90 prisons.

"There is no such thing as having only one life to live," Chittister insists. "The fact is that every life is simply a series of lives, each one of them with its own task [and] . . . its own plethora of possibilities." And for our later period of life, she invites us to discover new ways in which we can live out our responsibility "to give the world back to God a bit better than it was because we were here."

Aging, Chittister says, is not enough in itself. "Aging well is the real goal of life."

What led you to write about what you call "growing older gracefully"?

I was actually in my early 40s at the most when I first decided that, someday before I died, I wanted to write a spirituality of aging. I was a social psychologist, and I watched the older sisters in the community and noticed there was something really different about them. Everybody took it for granted that it was because they were older or holier or quieter, or that they had been formed in another period. But that wasn't it.

I watched them and studied them with a lot of interest. It was always an unfinished work in the back of my head. Continue reading

Sources

• U.S.Catholic
• Image: What Lottie Loves

The report - Our Futures: Te Pae Tawhiti - released today by an expert panel of the Royal Society of New Zealand, analysed data from the 2013 Census and other sources.

Seven key themes from the Census data and analyses were identified for the report — diversity, population growth, tangata whenua, migration, households and families, regional variation and work. Continue reading

Citing a report from the UN's secretary general, the Vatican mission to the UN stated that "no fewer than 80 countries now register a fertility rate below replacement level".

That trend is dangerous, the Vatican statement observed: "Support systems for the ageing can only be sustained by a larger, not smaller, next generation."

Continue reading

We, and all our institutions, as a result, are a greying breed.

At the same time, we are, in fact, the healthiest, longest lived, most educated, most active body of elders the world has ever known.

The only real problem with that is that we are doing it in the face of a youth culture left to drive a capitalist economy that thrives on sales.

So, what we sell is either to youth, about youth, or for the sake of affecting youth. But after all the pictures of 60-looking 80 year olds going by on their bikes fade off the screen, the world is left with, at best, a very partial look at what it means to be an elder.

Especially for those who never did like biking much to begin with.

The truth of the matter is that all of life, at any age, is about ripening. Life is about doing every age well, learning what we are meant to learn from it and giving to it what we are meant to give back to it.

The young give energy and wonder and enthusiasm and heart-breaking effort to becoming an accomplished, respected, recognized adult. And for their efforts they reap achievement and identity and self-determination.

The middle-aged give commitment and leadership, imagination and generativity. They build and rebuild the world from one age to another. And for their efforts they get status, and some kind of power, however slight, and the satisfaction that comes from a sense of accomplishment.

The elderly have different tasks entirely.

The elderly come to this stage of life largely finished with a building block mentality. They have built all they want to build. It is their task in life now to evaluate what has become of it, what it did to them, what of good they can leave behind them.

The elderly bring to life the wisdom that comes from having failed as often as they succeeded, relinquished as much as they accumulated. And this stage of life comes with its own very clear blessings. Continue reading

Image: Twitter

More than half the world's population—now lives in societies where the fertility rate has been dropping, like a stone in some places, for decades. Among demographers, the prevailing narrative for this sea change in human affairs talks of economic development finished off by cultural change. As countries grow wealthier and more urban, with higher levels of education for women, as well as men, women naturally wish to have fewer children; add in access to safe and effective means to that end—contraception and abortion—and that's precisely what they do.

True enough, but not the whole truth, argues Harvard demographer Michael Teitelbaum, co-author (with Yale historian Jay Winter) of The Global Spread of Fertility Decline. At the core of the change, Teitelbaum believes, lies the rational belief of young adults—especially the highly educated, those most aware of the weak points in their society's institutions—that they live in "risk societies." The risks they see can reach to the apocalyptic (will there be another Chernobyl, another 9/11, how many more Lac-Mégantics?) to macroeconomic pessimism (can today's social welfare entitlements last?) to individual concerns(will we ever be able to own a house?). Marriage- and child-aversion are among their risk-management strategies. Continue reading

Sources

• MacLean's
• Image: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand

The Castor Bay Presbyterian Church is being disposed of after its dwindling and ageing congregation accepted it was impractical to keep it. Reverend Don Hall says the 15 remaining parishioners, who range in age from 60 to 80, will join a nearby church in Mairangi Bay.

"The more popular churches these days typically offer a wide range of services and activities and can be very busy centres," he said.

"Rather than seeking to maintain a presence in every suburb, the older denominations are often pooling resources in order to meet this demand.

"In some ways there is a lot of competition out there - but churches are also choosing not to compete everywhere."

Source

• The New Zealand Herald
• Radio New Zealand
• Image: Stuff.co.nz

People also learn how to deal with social conflicts more effectively. For a 2010 study, researchers at the Univer- sity of Michigan presented "Dear Abby" letters to 200 people and asked what advice they would give. Subjects in their 60s were better than younger ones at imagining different points of view, thinking of multiple resolutions and suggesting compromises.

It turns out that man- aging emotions is a skill in itself, one that takes many of us decades to master. For a study published this year, German researchers had people play a gambling game meant to induce regret. Unlike 20-somethings, those in their 60s didn't agonize over losing, and they were less likely to try to redeem their loss by later taking big risks.

These social skills may bring huge benefits. In 2010, researchers at Stony Brook University analyzed a telephone survey of hundreds of thousands of Americans and found that people over 50 were happier overall, with anger declining steadily from the 20s through the 70s and stress falling off a cliff in the 50s. Continue reading

Sources

• Smithsonian
• Image: Express Milwaukee

Many older churches are up for sale as congregations dwindle, populations shift, traditional designs prove unsuitable for the uses congregations want to put them to and ageing buildings require high maintenance and possible earthquake strengthening.

Continue Reading

And the first person to live for 1,000 years could be less than 20 years younger.

A biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of a foundation dedicated to longevity research, de Grey reckons that within his own lifetime doctors could have all the tools they need to "cure" aging — banishing diseases that come with it and extending life indefinitely.

"I'd say we have a 50/50 chance of bringing aging under what I'd call a decisive level of medical control within the next 25 years or so," de Grey said in an interview before delivering a lecture at Britain's Royal Institution academy of science. "And what I mean by decisive is the same sort of medical control that we have over most infectious diseases today."

De Grey sees a time when people will go to their doctors for regular "maintenance," which by then will include gene therapies, stem cell therapies, immune stimulation and a range of other advanced medical techniques to keep them in good shape. De Grey lives near Cambridge University where he won his doctorate in 2000 and is chief scientific officer of the non-profit California-based SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Foundation, which he co-founded in 2009.

He describes aging as the lifelong accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage throughout the body. "The idea is to engage in what you might call preventative geriatrics, where you go in to periodically repair that molecular and cellular damage before it gets to the level of abundance that is pathogenic," he explained.

"Stem cell therapy is a big part of this. It's designed to reverse one type of damage, namely the loss of cells when cells die and are not automatically replaced, and it's already in clinical trials (in humans)," he said.

Read more of Aubrey de Grey's predictions about Living forever: A cure for aging

Source

• Image: Seattle Weekly