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Daryl, a brilliant trumpet player and friend, wrote recently that for the first time, he felt that his playing was not improving. Daryl is in his 70s. There are several things here that I feel are important to address. It is hard to know where to start. First of all, this observation is likely correct. Daryl has far more than 10,000 hours of practice with his music. Once you’ve reached a certain level of aptitude, it is difficult to keep getting better. And it is true that as

Mary Pipher, a psychologist from Lincoln Nebraska, has made a call for less independence and more interdependence*. She claims that it would make the path to aging much easier to travel. How so? We Americans are known for our fierce independence. We don’t want to need help, let alone ask for it. In some countries it is more common to recognize that everyone has needs throughout their lifespan. This belief makes the transition to aging adult much less painful because you are n

That's Me with My Painting Accepted into the Northwest Watercolor Society INTERNATIONAL Show! Anyone who tries to make something—a painting, a poem, even a quilt—runs into the same problem. What’s in your head rarely shows up on the page the way you imagined. Ira Glass calls the distance between your brain belief and what you actually produce “the gap.” He claims that the more work that you put in, the narrower this gap becomes. Malcolm Gladwell famously suggested that it tak

More than 30 years ago I was working on a master’s degree in Kinesiology. One of my classes was in gerontology. Dr. Scheidt was known for his excellent teaching skills and his super creative exams. One of the things he liked to do was to print an obscure essay, which he would ask us to relate to aging. In one test, he used an essay reprinted from Newsweek called Here Be Dragons. The author, James Lipton, relates a story about the seconds before he gets on a bucking rodeo hors