Tag: Aging

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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Neuroscientists tell us that awareness of beauty in one’s environment for a long time, reduces stress, can have physiological benefits, perhaps even longevity,” he explained. “And I realized that there’s not a day of my life that I didn’t see something beautiful.” He said some days he’s captivated by the way a stream of sunlight hits the wood paneling. Other days, he said, he sits enthralled watching the leaves dance in the wind through the windows. After more than seven decades, he’s convinced. “That’s my explanation. That’s the secret.”

— Vanessa Romo, who interviewed Roland Reisley (101 years old at the time) about his experience living for over 70 years in the “Reisley House, a home in the Usonia Historic District of Pleasantville, NY, designed for him by Frank Lloyd Wright. for over 70 years in 101 years of age who live in his house. (July 16, 2025, NPR Interview)

DK Photo taken at 11:18 a.m. on Nov 29 2024 as the late morning light streamed into our living room. One of those Roland Reisley moments I’ll never forget.

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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Now that I’m deep in my 80s, I’d like to stay here forever, and I’ll certainly try. I enjoy being here. The decade is the October of aging. And October is a lovely month, don’t you think? […]

Things I can’t do any more: Run. Play basketball or tennis. I also can’t worry myself to death, or I choose not to. Before my October years, there seemed to be nothing, however inconsequential, that I could not stew over until it grew as big and menacing as Godzilla at night. Nothing was too trivial for my troubled mind. No small rejection. Not the slightest slight. I once came up with a rule, “Nobody’s thinking about you — they are thinking about themselves, just like you.” I wrote it but I didn’t believe it. Now I hardly care if anyone is thinking about me, or not. Hardly.

My love of nature has grown much deeper in this decade. I had always felt an affinity with the natural world, but it was general, casual and fleeting. These days you can catch me at the window, gazing in wonder at the East River (estuary technically), and mesmerized by the shapes in the blue-gray water, the welts and eddies, the tides, the invading armies of the waves, the clouds reflected, looking like submerged sheep.

It’s not what you do in this decade that’s so unusual, or what you think, but rather how you think. The air changes in October. I find myself thinking far less selfishly, giving much more of myself to my friends and family. […]

The general improvement is this: In my younger years I was always looking ahead for whatever would befall me. Now I look at what I have. And as those in their 80s appreciate, what one has is considerable. I don’t fear winter, and I don’t regret spring. […]

— Roger Rosenblatt, excerpts “I Don’t Fear Winter, and I Don’t Regret Spring” (NY Times, October 26, 2025)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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[…] I’m old but not when I go for a swim. A transformation takes place. In fact, it’s surprising how much younger the body feels in water.

What happens to the body in water — the flabby, bony, wrinkled body, I mean; my body, I mean — is a quiet miracle. You’re trudging along on land, reluctantly dragging the 1940s cargo vessel you’ve become, and then you step oh-so-carefully into the water.

As soon as your body feels the cool liquid element around you, you’re ageless. Memory takes you back to childhood, and you swim just as you did in your 20s, though this time you have brains.

And that’s the beauty of it. Age has endowed you with knowledge and experience. Now, in water, you have achieved the impossible. You’re young and old simultaneously. A wet Dorian Gray. […}

Obviously I feel none of that. I’m just an old man enjoying the water and the quiet, feeling peaceful if a bit tired, almost but not quite like an Irish selkie, who lives on land only temporarily, and whose true home is the sea.

— Roger Rosenblatt, from “Flabby, Wrinkled, Happy…I’m Old But Not When I Swim” (NY Times, August 2, 2025)

T.G.I.F.: Speed…

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I’d been away from New York for over three months. I returned to the city in the fall of 2018 only to discover that my local barbershop had turned into a Baskin-Robbins. Why do changes in the landscape accelerate as one ages? You take a quick shower and another Duane Reade opens. You wake from an afternoon nap and there’s a new president. The second you hit sixty, life becomes the unstoppable bus in the film Speed.

— Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir (Gallery Books, May 6, 2025)

Notes:

  • NY Times Book Review: The Brash, Working-Class Londoner Who Redefined New York’s Restaurants
  • Wall Street Journal book excerpt: Keith McNally: “I Had No Chef, No Toilets and No Budget. But I Was Determined to Open Balthazar.”
  • Photo Credit: Pixabay

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn18 Comments

The older I get, the less tolerance I have for affectation or insincerity in all things. It is why I am drawn closer to nature, family, and tradition. Give me the earnest, the true, the real.

— Ryan B. Anderson, @Old Hollow Tree, October 26, 2024

DK Photo. Sunrise. 7:32 a.m. October 27 2024. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.