Seniors in the Building

Reading is a big part of all our lives, and we have thoughts on that! In this episode we share what reading means to us; how it helped us find calm in large, chaotic families; legitimized being introverted; and was a means to pursue knowledge. We talk about our reading journeys and what books mean to us now. We debate e-books versus physical books and discover a place for both. We laugh with a chi...

Is our world more chaotic now? Are we living in unprecedented times? How are we impacted? More to the point, how will our children and grandchildren be impacted? What will they inherit? After a brilliant introduction, our conversation wandered somewhat from climate change to Artificial Intelligence (AI) to whether there were any historical precedents to what we are experiencing to getting overwhel...

What are the hard times that we have lived through? Is hardship also suffering? And what about wild times, does that equate with hard times? What are the hard times that have left a mark on us? What is that mark? How does it impact our tolerance or compassion? We take on these questions and have a compelling conversation about how our lived experiences have shaped us and what we learned from them....

How would you characterize your childhood? When we jokingly refer to our childhoods as feral, we are really talking about the kind of childhood that had fewer rules, with parents that didn’t hover and where we learned how to trust our wits when the ground gave way. We share the funny stories, the daring stories and the stories that leave us shaking our heads. We share what we learned about fairnes...

Nancy Phillips joins us today on the podcast. A retired nurse, writer, and Spiritual Director, she developed and now leads “Growing in Wisdom” a 2-year program focused on the spirituality of aging. Nancy spent the first year of her early retirement dealing with illness and the death of loved ones at a time when she needed to rest. She tells her story of finding a way out of the weary space she was...

Ageism is not always obvious, and although it can happen to anyone at any age, it seems to particularly affect people at both ends of the age spectrum, older and younger. In our conversation we share times when we suspected ageism was involved like sitting in a queue for surgery or trying to find a job at age 62 and times where ageism was blatant. Often ageism is couched in a safety context, like...

What are those moments in our lives that we found moving, profound or life changing, those moments of mystery? Although difficult to define and at times difficult to describe, we explore the topic with a sense of charting unknown waters. Mystery is the unknown and those moments of mystery that change us, affect the core of who we are as we grow older. Experiencing mystery as we walk the Camino Tra...

In the current political climate Canadian identity has been front and centre in this country. We have a lively conversation about some of the things that make us Canadian and what we love about Canada. Canada is multicultural, welcoming immigrants and their cultures as well as the knowledge that they contribute to the growth of Canadian culture. We are a peacekeeping nation and value that role in...

A mantra that we hear a lot today is that everything is broken. How do we respond when we hear that Canada is broken, or the climate is broken, or the relationship is broken and the only way to fix it is to throw everything out and start over? The notion that despair generalizes, and hope particularizes can be applied as a fundamental truth to help us look beyond the ‘everything is broken’ mentali...

How important is hope in our lives? How do we maintain hope as we grow older? What supports hope day to day? Through our conversation, we grapple with what hope means to us in our daily lives. As we share our stories, it becomes evident that having a community is crucial to having hope. From immigrants hoping for a new life in freedom, to moving forward together after the death of parents, hope is...

What does it mean to be human in today’s world? Philosophy and Religious writings through the ages have addressed this, but we wanted to talk about it from our perspectives. And perspectives we had! Humans are complex beings and out of this comes the range of emotions, thoughts, beliefs and values. How do we maintain human rights for all and offer respect and dignity to even those we oppose. How d...

Making a podcast is fraught with all kinds of crazy things that can happen, like our false start for this one that we didn’t edit out. It also takes on a life of its own as we talk through our topic, moving in lots of directions. We do eventually cover the reasons why we started it in the first place, why we are still doing it, and how we hope to shape it in the future, acknowledging that conversa...

Active Living Week is coming up in our province which prompted this lively podcast about our relationships with exercise. We share our exercise stories, whether it has been part of our life or not and how we view it now. How does exercise affect our physical health and mental health? How do we make it a habit? Our conversation explores the benefits of exercise, the difficulty of keeping it up, how...

Rick and Elaine celebrated 50 years of marriage this year and honoured that, in part, by embarking on a month-long trip to Great Britain. Hear about their adventures tillering a long boat on the canals, visiting Wrexham in Wales, touring Scotland, glamping and even a trip to the A&E (emergency room). Throughout the discussion, we talk about the changes we have made in travelling as older adult...

“Good aging” - Words of wisdom from Signe’s mother! This was a fun episode to share with all of you. Ninety-two year old Joan (pronounced Joanne) has experienced much in her life and she is willing to share some of the wisdom she has gained in her own aging process. She speaks to what we face today in our political and social world, that we need to be grateful for having a life, for sharing life w...

An interesting discussion on celebrations and what they mean to us and in society. From very personal celebrations to national holidays, celebrations can evoke a lot of different thoughts and feelings. Canada Day, for example, is a celebration of Canada, but it does not reflect the Indigenous experience in Canada. Holidays can be hijacked by commercialism and fuel expectations that can take away f...

We return to the topic of being “retired” and explore what it means to be in the space of retirement. Staying connected to our past work, exploring other interests, moving from one city to another or taking temporary contracts have impacted our retirement so far. But we are starting to see elderhood as a time to explore new opportunities, nurture others and use our newfound freedom to curate what...

Without engaging in nostalgia, we begin by talking about trends in fashion, music and sports that started out on the fringes and are now mainstream. How we act on our beliefs and values is changing. For example, our participation in the women’s movement has gone from participating in protests to supporting female businesses, authors and influencers daily. Technological, automotive and other such t...

Inspired by a retreat with granddaughters, we look at those people who have had an impact on our lives. From Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, to family, to colleagues, to teachers, pastors, great thinkers and leaders, we identify the folks that have helped shape us. We acknowledge our children and grandchildren as our mentors in learning new things and being culturally appropriate. We discuss theo...

There are many kinds of power and we try to identify where our sense of power and agency now resides. Gendered power in terms of white male privilege, our complicit roles within it, and our struggles to push against it is primary to the discussion. Sharing our agency, leveraging our life’s journey, and supporting the inclusiveness we value is imperative to redressing the inequalities that exist. R...

We’re cautious about sharing our wisdom for a variety reasons, especially without being asked to share wisdom. Though, we did give ourselves permission to talk about wisdom in this podcast. Story telling is a good way to share wisdom, especially with grandchildren, inviting them to make their own decisions without telling them what to do. We laugh about some of the wise sayings we learned from our...

Do we think of ourselves as seniors? What does the word senior mean to us? The word senior when applied to older people can have a negative connotation, but its origins have more positive, stately meanings. Youth culture, capitalism, privilege and lumping everyone over 65 as a senior may all contribute to the negative connotation. The boomer generation has redefined what being a senior means. They...

Having fun elevates our spirit and connects us to others. Keeping fun in our lives as we get older can be more of a challenge when things happen to derail us. It helps to have good role models, intentionally taking moments to laugh every day, and not taking ourselves too seriously. Being open to new ways to have fun as we age can take the place of old ways. From scatological humour with grandchild...

Our topic is introduced by a reading from The Wisdom of Morrie : Living and Aging Creatively and Joyfully , written by Morrie Schwartz and edited by his son Rob. Morrie invites us to make a choice in our later years to grow and change, in short to continue to learn. Our conversation explores the ‘unlearning’ we may need to do in order to grow, such as throwing off our binary thinking and seeing li...

Aging is complex and sometimes gratitude is difficult to practice. Our conversation about gratitude exposes some of the barriers to practicing gratitude as well as the opportunities. Worry, anxiety, pain and loss of function all get in the way of being grateful. Yet, there are natural, familiar ways to incorporate gratitude in our lives that can occur both spontaneously and intentionally, without...