New Bonds As We Age

RAM DASS





As our roles shift in older age, so does our sense of community, and feelings of isolation often accompany elder life. Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh says that despite the information age and advances in technology , which allow us to communicate with each other so rapidly , one human being can't be with another human being [through technology]. It often seems harder to find new connections to replace the ones we lose as we age.However, cyberspace can afford us a different way of maintaining connections. Unbounded by geography , we can meet and spend time as companions in virtual reality. A woman recently reported on a radio programme how she'd used the internet to get through her depression and loneliness after the death of her husband.
A year later, she's become the one who is counselling and supporting other recent widows in a chat group on the web.Such creative solutions to how we want to live as we get older are more available than we think. But many of us are too caught up in the cult of independence to see these possibilities; either we don't wish to be a burden on others, or we don't wish to be burdened by others.
The `achievement' of living on one's own is diminished by the sense of being ignored or left behind. To offset it, we might seek out meeting places where peers congregate, or consider alternative arrangements such as assisted living, spiritual communities and multipleage communities set up specifically for bringing people of all generations together.