cool old guys - revisited

Spiritual resource to share: ageless living

When I grow up, I want to be like these guys. My dad and my two uncles are adventurous, always trying new things, traveling, reading, teaching others or joking around. Life is never dull here.


About a year and a half ago, I was inspired my my parents and aunts and uncles and wrote this blog and called it celebrate the octogenarian. Enjoy!


Here are some of the activities from the last few years of my favorite octogenarians: downhill skiing, travel to Italy, sailing across the Black Sea, writing as a regular columnist for the local paper, canoeing, managing a specialty bookstore, getting back into real estate, memorizing Shakespeare, etc.


Even Mary Baker Eddy is on my list of favorites -- she was the one who put the finishing touches on the Christian Science world wide movement and started up The Christian Science Monitor when she was eighty-something. All before women even had the right to vote!


These guys have got a wonderful sense of agelessness. Who says you can't play at any age? The Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures written by Mary Baker Eddy certainly confirm this:

And thine age shall be clearer than the noonday; thou shalt shine forth, thou shalt be as the morning - Job

The measurement of life by solar years robs youth and gives ugliness to age. The radiant sun of virtue and truth coexists with being. Manhood is its eternal noon, undimmed by a declining sun. - Science and Health

I love how Mary Baker Eddy characterizes growing older. She says,

Men and women of riper years and larger lessons ought to ripen into health and immortality, instead of lapsing into darkness or gloom. - Science and Health

As my lessons are getting larger and my years more ripe I remember years ago, when I went to a talk (later written up as an essay entitled "Doing Sixty") by Gloria Steinem. It was unforgettable. "I love sixty" she said "there are no rules anymore."


So I am now asking myself, "Whose rules am I following? Material health laws or God's laws?"


The choice is, of course, God's laws. My expectation is that year after year, I will grow into understanding more about beauty, power, abundance and peace. One day, after skiing down some slope, hiking up some mountain or writing a prize winning blog about spirituality and agelessness, I, too, will become someone's favorite octogenarian.