Graceful Aging

Graceful Aging meets at the Elting Memorial Library the first and third Wednesday of each month from 10:30AM to 12:00PM. Register to receive an email reminder the day before the program. Registration is optional.

From facilitator Peter Pitzele:

"At the beginning of 2020, when my wife Susan and I were in our late 70's, we returned to the Hudson Valley after decades living elsewhere. It is not uncommon for elders to come back to family, and in our case grown kids, ex'es, memories and a few old friends. This delicate re-engagement occupied the early period of our resettlement. We were keenly aware that we were getting not just older, but old.

As we faced into our 80s, we came up with a resolution: 'Let's do our aging as gracefully as we can.' And, we thought, perhaps we can do that with others. Drawing on our varied experience in leading and being part of groups, we proposed to form such a group. We called it Graceful Aging.

This group, necessarily irregular in attendance and varying in age from the late 60's to the mid-80's, has been meeting together for more than a year. Together we have originated some guidelines that enhance our ability to listen deeply to one another, to value silence and to share what is uppermost on our minds; there is laughter and story-telling and a lot of compassion. We are like explorers mapping a common terrain from our own co-ordinates.

Here are a few of the questions that recur in our conversations:

• What does the word "graceful" bring to the possibilities of aging?

• What is the wisdom and gratitude we find in our aging?

• How do we discriminate between what to let go of and what to hold onto?

• How can we navigate our duties and responsibilities to our families while respecting our own limitations?

• How do we tolerate the diminishment of our faculties without feeling unmoored?

• How do those of us who are unpartnered deal with new levels of loneliness?

• How do those of us still connected to a significant other enhance our support of one another in aging?

• What are the practices and routines that we value and protect?

• And always: What can we learn from one another?

Graceful Aging convenes on the first and third Wednesdays of the month, from 10:30 a.m. to noon at the Elting Memorial Library in New Paltz. It is an open group; there is no charge to attend. Folks come and go, return or not, but there is a core of regulars. We welcome you to drop in any time.

To inquire further, be in touch with the library at the following e-mail. They will give you my email address if they can't answer your questions or concerns: [email protected]."