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    “6/17/10 My dearest Ruth—You are the only person I have loved in my life, setting aside, a bit, parents and kids and their kids, and I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell some 56 years ago. What a treat it has been to watch you progress to the very top of the legal world!! I will be in JH Medical Center until Friday, June 25, I believe, and between then and now I shall think hard on my remaining health and life, and whether on balance the time has come for me to tough it out or to take leave of life because the loss of quality now simply overwhelms. I hope you will support where I come out, but I understand you may not. I will not love you a jot less.” — Handwritten letter from Marty [her husband] to Ruth”

    Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

    John C. Maxwell Quote on Birthdays and What Each Passing Year Can Mark In A Person’s Life

      “Now more than ever I am aware that a person’s significant birthdays can either mark the passage of time, or they can mark changes they’ve made in their lives to reach their potential and become the person they were created to be.”

      John C. Maxwell, Leadership Gold

      Beyond the Quote (233/365)

      As I sit and reflect on completing my first full year of my thirties, the saying that keeps coming to the forefront of my mind that I would say has guided me more than any other saying in this past year has been: Control what you can control, let go of what you can’t, and take what time is needed to understand where all things in your life fall. Without this expression in my mind, 30 would have turned out completely different for me.

      Read More »John C. Maxwell Quote on Birthdays and What Each Passing Year Can Mark In A Person’s Life

        “I recently read about a famous actress who died in her eighties. As her beauty started to fade and became ravaged by old age, she grew desperately unhappy and became a recluse. She, too, had identified with a condition: her external appearance. First, the condition gave her a happy sense of self, then an unhappy one. If she had been able to connect with the formless and timeless life within, she could have watched and allowed the fading of her external form from a place of serenity and peace. Moreover, her external form would have become increasingly transparent to the light shining through from her ageless true nature, so her beauty would not really have faded but simply become transformed into spiritual beauty.”

        Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 186)

        David Bowie on Aging Being An Extraordinary Process

          “Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.”

          David Bowie via Happiness is a Choice You Make

          Beyond the Quote (Day 7)

          It must have been around my mom’s 50th birthday when I asked her, like any good kid would on their parent’s birthday, how it felt to be so old.  Expecting an uproar of mixed emotions and frustration, I was surprised when she rebutted calmly that for her, each decade has gotten better than the last—and that she was… Excited!  Not quite your everyday answer.  She explained that while youth has its perks, age brings with it insight and wisdom that allows you to connect more deeply with who you are and what your purpose might be—which, for her, has been the most valued experience of life overall.

          Read More »David Bowie on Aging Being An Extraordinary Process

            “In Tibet people don’t seem to worry as much about aging.  When I hear my mother and her generation of Tibetans talk about getting old, the tone in their voice is proud.  They’re proud to have lived so long.  They’re cheerful.  They have young minds.  They’re continuously curious, always learning.  One of my favorite Tibetan saying is ‘Even if you’re going to die tomorrow, you can learn something tonight.’  With this attitude we don’t feel so old.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 152)

              “Only the young think they aren’t dying, or that aging is something that affects other people.” ~ John Leland, Happiness is a Choice You Make (Page 211)

                “This may be the one-sentence essence of what I learned in my year among the oldest old: to shut down the noise and fears and desires that buffet our days and think about how amazing, really amazing, life is.  Could I do this?  Before the year began, my answer would have been no, that the noise and fears and desires were life itself.  But as the year went along I found myself shifting my focus to the quiet beneath the noise—how unlikely the moment was, how each sliver contained a gift that might never return.  Maybe this was what it meant to think like an old person.  I couldn’t live wholly in the moment, because I had a future to think about, but if I had learned anything, it was to live as if this future were finite, and the present all the more wondrous as a result.” ~ John Leland, Happiness is a Choice You Make (Page 210)

                  “The challenge, then, is to find a purpose in life that will sustain you through the latter years.  Kickboxing might not be a great choice, but painting, political activity, time with family, or passing along your skills to the next generation can be a reason for living at any age.  Practice law, feed the hungry, teach piano, harass your congressman, tell your story.  It’s your purpose in life: make it a passion, not a hobby.” ~ John Leland, Happiness is a Choice You Make (Page 206)

                    “If you believe you are in control of your life, steering it in a course of your choosing, then old age is an affront, because it is a destination you didn’t choose.  But if you think of life instead as an improvisation in response to the stream of events coming at you—that is, a response to the world as it is—then old age is more another chapter in a long-running story.  The events are different, but they’re always different, and always some seem too much to bear.” ~ John Leland, Happiness is a Choice You Make (Page 114)

                      “Old age is the last thing we’ll ever do, and it might teach us about how to live now.” ~ John Leland, Happiness is a Choice You Make (Page 23)

                        “No one wants to lose his partner of sixty years, or to give up walking because it hurts too much, but we have some choice in how we process the loss and the life left to us.  We can focus on what we’ve lost or on the life we have now.  Health factors, as shattering as they can be, are only part of the story.” ~ John Leland, Happiness is a Choice You Make (Page 13)

                        Happiness Is a Choice You Make [Book]

                          Happiness Is a Choice You Make by John Leland

                          By: John Leland

                          From this Book: 43 Quotes

                          Book Overview:  In 2015, when the award-winning journalist John Leland set out on behalf of The New York Times to meet members of America’s fastest-growing age group, he anticipated learning of challenges, of loneliness, and of the deterioration of body, mind, and quality of life. But the elders he met took him in an entirely different direction. Despite disparate backgrounds and circumstances, they each lived with a surprising lightness and contentment. The reality Leland encountered upended contemporary notions of aging, revealing the late stages of life as unexpectedly rich and the elderly as incomparably wise.  Happiness Is a Choice You Make is an enduring collection of lessons that emphasizes, above all, the extraordinary influence we wield over the quality of our lives. With humility, heart, and wit, Leland has crafted a sophisticated and necessary reflection on how to “live better”―informed by those who have mastered the art.

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