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me as a result of struggle i went through a period of malaise late last fall i was lethargic and lacking in motivation i found myself spending too much time reading mediocre online articles the world around me seemed off somehow i wasn t sure what was wrong i was somewhat bothered by the the us national election but it seemed there was more going on with me than that what was it i eventually concluded that the biggest reason that i didn t feel much like doing anything is that i didn t have to do anything life doesn t require as much from me as it used to as long as i can remember i was being pushed by activities that either someone else required of me or were important to me go to school and study find a job develop a career raise kids help my parents i had a life in which my purpose was clear and i had something to motivate me something to accomplish each day now there s not anything like that i have a few things to do every day and some days are busy but often there s nothing that demands my attention many days i don t have a mental list of things i need to get done instead i have periods of time when i m wondering what i should do i have six or seven clients a week but that s very much part time work add in three meals a day plus laundry and grocery shopping and there are still more holes in my schedule than full blocks of time here s some of what happens to the rest of my time i do quite a few things of a religious nature i start the day with the pray as you go app do morning and evening liturgical prayer at the house where i live attend church lead a community group at the church i attend study scripture and go to a men s bible study that s a lot maybe to the point of being unbalanced i exercise nearly every day whether by going to the gym jogging in the neighborhood biking when the weather s nice or doing floor exercises in the living room i meet with friends or talk with them by phone or videoconferencing when i moved to wisconsin i expected to make plenty local friends it s been harder to add them than i expected but friends from elsewhere have continued to meet social needs i read the new yorker always has excellent articles and i have plenty of books i want to read we have a book discussion group at the house and i ve been fortunate to participate in several catherine project online reading groups even with all that there is still some unscheduled time i ve decided to leave it that way that is partly an effort to maintain my awareness that none of my time is really my own it s a gift from god it s also a way of allowing some uncluttered mental space for god to intrude however he wants i ve found that the intrusion often takes the form of someone expressing a need to me will you take me to the store to look at an apartment to the courthouse i m glad that at least some of the time i can say yes my time is in your hands the psalmist remarked to god ps 31 15 those of us who are old old can appreciate that sentiment more than ever posted in psyche tagged aging elderly older adults purpose retirement seniors 9 comments traveling while old old posted on january 13 2025 by bob ritzema the last thing i posted on this site was a reflection on turning 76 i wrote that somehow seems much older than 75 i m not sure what the difference is maybe it s that 80 looms closer and that landmark seems not just old in a still vibrant way but old old six months on my change in perspective has stuck though i m not as preoccupied with being old old as i was at first i think that being old old is now a framework through which i filter experiences and that has led to some new understandings i m going to write some about these not so much to explain them to others but to better understand them myself in this post i ll discuss how travel seems different to me i really enjoy travelling particularly international travel i first traveled to europe in 1999 and have crossed the atlantic several times since then berlin and prague in 2002 budapest in 2003 a mediterranean cruise in 2008 london in 2012 israel in 2016 turkey in 2018 and england in 2022 i embraced tourism which the britannica website defines as the act and process of spending time away from home in pursuit of recreation relaxation and pleasure while making use of the commercial provision of services in accord with the definition i find travel pleasurable though i think my main interest is not in the things britannica lists but in gaining cultural and historical knowledge thus in london you re likely to find me at the british museum or the national gallery not at harrods or the london eye i m interested in growth of the mind more than in having a good time besides valuing these historical and cultural elements i gradually came to see travel as pilgrimage i ve visited sacred places and focused on my connection with god and on spiritual growth rather than on recreation entertainment or intellectual growth in september i went on another international trip to amsterdam and germany for the germany portion i and my son elliot were part of a group visiting the places where luther and other reformation figures studied worked and lived some of the trip was touristy the van gogh museum and a canal boat ride in amsterdam the reichstag in berlin and neuschwanstein in the german alps some sites i approached more as a pilgrim ould kerk in amsterdam the bonhoeffer house in berlin the castle church in wittenberg and the theatinerkirche in munich these evoked something of the sacred or an appreciation of how god had been present in these places as i age the pilgrimage aspect of travel takes on greater importance to me bonhoeffer house berlin germany besides sliding between tourism and pilgrimage i think that travel evokes something else in me that wasn t present at least not as strongly when traveling 20 years ago there s more of a sense of continuity with the past and a diminished emphasis on the present we all mostly view the world from the time in which we live from now we have a preference for the present and view times past as substantially different and probably inferior or if we see some similarity between past and present we ignore the substantial differences and assume that those living in earlier eras were thinking pretty much as we do as i ve aged i m less inclined to prefer the present and to reshape the past in conformity with the present one reason for the change is that much more of the past was once present for me than used to be the case as a teenager or young adult my remembered past was only a little over 10 years now i can remember things that happened 70 years ago many early memories are of family events or places i lived but i can remember more national and international history as well i remember the television broadcast of the 1956 political party conventions for example i remember sputnik and the cuban revolution when i was in berlin on my recent trip i certainly could remember when the wall went up between east and west berlin and also could recall television images of the berlin airlift it turns out that the airlift ended when i was 16 months old so the videos in my mind s eye must have been broadcast later but i still have a sense that the conflict over berlin was something that happened in my lifetime as such it doesn t seem particularly distant or unfamiliar to me so it s easy for me to sense continuity with that period my changed sense of history isn t limited to the years within my span of life i see similarities between my life and that of historical figures such as luther lucas cranach van gogh and bonhoeffer despite the significant differences in how we each lived the problems that luther tried to solve how to resist an ideology that seems to be exploiting human ignorance and need how to handle sudden celebrity how to respond to violent threats how to rein in a movement that one no longer controls all have present day equivalents the similarities seem more important than the dissimilar specifics indulgences papal authority and anabaptists the dilemmas faced by those who lived hundreds of years ago are quite a bit like the dilemmas we face i think i m better at seeing our commonalities while still respecting the tremendous differences in such matters as culture and technology statue of luther eisenach germany i m not quite sure what mechanism connects growing older with such changes in perspective there are many possibilities maybe it s a matter of having much more knowledge of history than i used to maybe i don t retain details as well so broad strokes are more salient maybe i m thinking more of ending up where forbearers did in the grave whatever the reason the change does make reading history and visiting historical sites more meaningful and pertinent to my life i m thankful for that and i hope to keep traveling posted in culture psyche tagged aging germany luther older adults pilgrimage travel 2 comments seventy six posted on july 31 2024 by bob ritzema age is just a number or so they say there s of course more to it than that age is the product of one s mind and body being subjected to innumerable influences some beneficial and some detrimental there s actual changing not just a count of passes through the turnstile of years possibilities shrink horizons constrict i haven t been bothered all that much by growing older three quarters of my life or more is behind me but i still felt physically healthy and mentally alert i m not able to climb mountains or run marathons or even see well at night or reliably pull words from memory but most capacities seem intact or nearly so so birthdays weren t an issue at least not until this year in june i turned 76 that somehow seems much older than 75 i m not sure what the difference is maybe it s that 80 looms closer and that landmark seems not just old in a still vibrant way but old old maybe i m comparing myself to my dad who traveled to europe at 75 though it was a strain for him but in just a few more years was showing signs of dementia maybe it s that i seem to be hearing lots more stories of people about my age needing institutional care developing dire medical problems or dying so i ve been trying to cope i live in a house whose residents are mostly in their 20s and 30s old or not i wouldn t want to change places with them i appreciate my life s worth of experiences both because of the richness of the memories and because of the value of the lessons they taught me i like it that qualities such as perspective judgment and patience likely signs of maturity have grown with time there s loss but there s also gain since writing poetry is one of my ways of processing what happens to me i decided to write a poem about being 76 in popular culture when i was young that particular number was associated with a song seventy six trombones from the music man a musical about a con man who convinces a gullible small town that he can save their youth from juvenile delinquency by creating a band led specifically by that number of trombones the song is rousing which i like the poem references not just my age but that musical number here it is seventy six just one more than seventy five the number said to lead the big parade sound scampering around the sliding tubing and blaring out the bell i m not trombone minded now i m shadowy and solemn a bow pulled slowly over cello strings seventy went past without a sound one and two were fine humming with a tone of quiet satisfaction seventy four brought a little more since it was a year of death though that was welcome mercy midway through my septepule span all still seemed decent though without particular delight then unexpectedly along came seventy six my body is a crucible for aches skin sags and puckers in unslightly ways the plans and purposes that most days carry have shrunk remarkably did i take a wrong turn to wind up here no this is where time s travel carries everyone the journey started with breath into the mouthpiece ran forward out the slide then bent back to make full circuit turned delightful only at the end why would i want to miss the music photo by mathias reding on pexels com posted in psyche tagged aging birthdays older adults 3 comments not at homeness posted on april 16 2024 by bob ritzema where i once felt at home in his book on the road with st augustine james k a smith writes about the not at homeness a translation of heidegger s term unheimlich that is a familiar part of the human condition it s a sense of frustration futility of never arriving never feeling settled with ourselves we re searching for home in other words for a place where we are welcomed where we belong where we can stop striving and rest smith notes that many people try to cope with not at homeness by distracting themselves from the sense of alienation and restlessness we get busy or immerse ourselves in entertainments there s value though in letting ourselves yearn for a home our not at homeness becomes a gift that creates an opening to once again face the question of who we are smith suggests we can better understand this condition by reflecting on the lives of those who are most acutely without home the exile the migrant and the refugee he thinks augustine was aware of such alienation since he left his african homeland to pursue his fortunes in italy only to find that he was too african for the italians and once he returned to africa too foreign for the africans the not at homeness that smith describes has grown for me personally over the last few years my greatest sense of home for most of my life came from my visits once or twice each year to my parents house in michigan in 2012 i returned there to live with them and provide care as their abilities diminished it still seemed like home while i was there though it had been diminished in many ways both of them eventually died and i moved to milwaukee about six months after my mom s funeral it s not a place i had lived before but is near my oldest son it doesn t feel like home here then again there s no other place that seems more like home nowhere that i belong i lived in north carolina for over 30 years but that almost seems like another life now my michigan hometown still is full of both friends and memories but it s definitely not home anymore after reading smith s description of not at homeness i thought of the last years with my mom she lived in the same city all her life and died in the house she and my dad bought back in the 1950s had it continued to feel lite home to her though her husband died eight years before she did her parents best friend and sisters were all gone she wasn t totally isolated she still had some friends and talked to her children and grandchildren but she frequently asked why am i still here her sense of home was only tenuously related to her surroundings instead she thought more and more about a home she had never visited but yearned for where jim and joann and marian and so many others she loved had gone before her ...