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!

Nancy Phillips joins us today on the podcast. A retired nurse, writer, and Spiritual Director, she developed and now leads “Growing in Wisdom” a 2-year program focused on the spirituality of aging. Nancy spent the first year of her early retirement dealing with illness and the death of loved ones at a time when she needed to rest. She tells her story of finding a way out of the weary space she was in and onto a whole new path of healing, growing and discovery, one she now offers to others. Nancy describes the four things that she has found can assist us on our spiritual journey; establishing a contemplative practice; engaging and accepting our aging body with compassion; finding opportunities to talk about death and dying; and becoming a blessing elder. Listen as we talk with her, share our own stores, and explore what it means to age with wisdom and grace.

Ageism is not always obvious, and although it can happen to anyone at any age, it seems to particularly affect people at both ends of the age spectrum, older and younger. In our conversation we share times when we suspected ageism was involved like sitting in a queue for surgery or trying to find a job at age 62 and times where ageism was blatant. Often ageism is couched in a safety context, like when our children express concern for the activities we undertake, or when someone insists that we sit on public transit instead of stand. Ageism is built into many institutions, like health care, education, the insurance industry and into workplaces. When assumptions are made that we are vulnerable and need protecting, the wealth of knowledge, emotional maturity and experience that we have acquired is lost. We have all found ways to fight against these assumptions and not let ageism stop us from doing and learning new things every day.

What are those moments in our lives that we found moving, profound or life changing, those moments of mystery? Although difficult to define and at times difficult to describe, we explore the topic with a sense of charting unknown waters. Mystery is the unknown and those moments of mystery that change us, affect the core of who we are as we grow older. Experiencing mystery as we walk the Camino Trail or see geese fly up above our heads while wilderness canoeing, move us and unite us with something greater than ourselves. In those moments we can experience a sense of joining with generations before, or a deep appreciation for nature and its unknowns, or awe for the vast universe or how our bodies work. We are all explorers, unwrapping layers of mystery like an onion, looking for the greater depths. Being open to mystery creates room for questioning and standing before mystery keeps our curiosity and wonder alive as we age.

In the current political climate Canadian identity has been front and centre in this country. We have a lively conversation about some of the things that make us Canadian and what we love about Canada. Canada is multicultural, welcoming immigrants and their cultures as well as the knowledge that they contribute to the growth of Canadian culture. We are a peacekeeping nation and value that role in the world. We share our own stories of being/becoming Canadian. We speak to the matter that not all have felt welcome to be part of Canada. We also explored the tension we experience between thinking globally and particularly trying to balance world issues with our local and provincial lives. Climate change, for example, takes a world effort and is being challenged in that effort by nationalistic boundaries, although the scientific community is one that cooperates beyond those boundaries. Listen as we touch on Justice Murray Sinclair's four identity questions: Where do I come from? Where am I going? Why am I here? Who am I?

A mantra that we hear a lot today is that everything is broken. How do we respond when we hear that Canada is broken, or the climate is broken, or the relationship is broken and the only way to fix it is to throw everything out and start over? The notion that despair generalizes, and hope particularizes can be applied as a fundamental truth to help us look beyond the ‘everything is broken’ mentality to what is true about a situation. Looking at all sides of an issue in all its complexity helps to break it down into smaller components identifying those things that aren’t working and revealing those things that are working just fine. Listen as we share our thoughts and experiences on the topic that goes from fixing things, to complexity, to hope and despair and finally to being human.