Is our world more chaotic now? Are we living in unprecedented times? How are we impacted? More to the point, how will our children and grandchildren be impacted? What will they inherit? After a brilliant introduction, our conversation wandered somewhat from climate change to Artificial Intelligence (AI) to whether there were any historical precedents to what we are experiencing to getting overwhelmed by news and how to discern whether it’s true or not, back to AI and then positivism. We conclude we are living in turbulent times and that they are unsettling but continue to be present to our children and grandchildren in the chaos, facing it together and in community.

What are the hard times that we have lived through? Is hardship also suffering? And what about wild times, does that equate with hard times? What are the hard times that have left a mark on us? What is that mark? How does it impact our tolerance or compassion? We take on these questions and have a compelling conversation about how our lived experiences have shaped us and what we learned from them. We are forever changed by events that affect us deeply and are always working through them on some level at different times in our lives. Retirement is one of those times that brings the unexpected resurfacing of the traumas of our younger selves at a time when we may be declining in health and experiencing new hardships. We explore how we manage and cope, the unrealistic societal expectations around hardship and loss, and how we continue to care for our retired selves and others in the face of human suffering

How would you characterize your childhood? When we jokingly refer to our childhoods as feral, we are really talking about the kind of childhood that had fewer rules, with parents that didn’t hover and where we learned how to trust our wits when the ground gave way. We share the funny stories, the daring stories and the stories that leave us shaking our heads. We share what we learned about fairness, justice and courage. How did our childhoods affect the way we parented our own children? What were the skills that we came away with that we still use today? From building tree houses out of stolen materials and protesting being banned from the playground to running free on the beach all summer and sleeping alone in the bush, we have a lot of fun telling our stories from a feral childhood!