Article prepared and submitted by Wally Lazaruk, Ph.D.

“I like being old because the view from the brink is striking, a full panorama of my life – and a bracing breeze awakens me to new ways of understanding my own past, present, and future.” Parker J. Palmer

What lessons can we learn about aging from author Parker J. Palmer’s book On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old?

Palmer suggests that we:
1. Aging
 Consider aging as a privilege and a passage of discovery and engagement, not decline and inaction.

2. Gift of life
 Appreciate the gifts so freely given to us by the natural world.
 Pass on our gifts to the world.

3. One thing at a time
 Enjoy doing one thing at a time.

4. Simple things
 Be grateful for simple things: talk with a friend, walk in nature, watching sunsets and sunrises, a good sleep.

5. Beauty
 Be grateful for the beauty around us.

6. Self-examination
 Examine our life with compassionate self-acceptance.

7. Embrace
 Embrace all that we have been and done.
 Embrace the whole of who we are with love.
 Accept the good, bad, and ugly in each person.

8. Inner life
 Develop our inner life. Reflect and reclaim the “ground of our being” and root ourselves in something larger and truer than our own ego.

9. Perspective
 Put our life in perspective. Embrace our shadow and our light. Transcend our regrets and fears. Reconcile ourselves to the heart’s feast of losses.

10. Welcoming everything
 Welcome everything that comes into our lives – good, bad, ugly as teachers with lessons for us; enriching our lives by lessons we were not really ready to learn when we were young. In the poem by Rumi “The Guest House”, we treat each guest honorably. Meet our thoughts and emotions with courage, warmth, and respect. Be grateful for whoever comes. Each is sent as a guest from beyond. Acknowledge our human condition. Guests help us to become more human.

11. Human frailty
 Consider our human frailty as falling down and getting up again and again.
 Embrace human frailty with reverence and respect.

12. Wholeness
 Practice integrity. Integral means whole and undivided.

13. Survival needs
 Appreciate our survival needs: grace, forgiveness, unconditional love of family
and friends, openness of friends.

14. Young and Old
 Consider that youth bring gifts of energy, vision and hope.
 Learn from our youth and offer them our gifts.

15. Keep reaching out
 Keep up our serious engagement with the world. It gives vitality and purpose to life and allows us to share our unique gifts.
 Care about our shared world, and acting on what we care about, if only in our minds and hearts.

16. Keep death daily before one’s eyes
 Look more deeply into our lives.
 Be more fully present. Pay attention to what’s right here, right now.
 Life is a gift that we will not have forever.
 Share our gifts while we have them in hand.

“I’ll be asking if I was faithful to my gifts, to the needs I saw around me, and to the ways I engaged those needs with my gifts—faithful, that is, to the value, rightness, and truth of offering the world the best I had, as best I could.” Parker J. Palmer.

Reference (available from our public library): Palmer, Parker J. (2018). On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.