Watching the skies outside my window alternate between overcast and emerging light. I love the anticipation. Suddenly it’s sunny out. I feel my spirits lifting. I keep turning to look out the window. My favorite oak is newly green in this season of rebirth. It’s one of the last trees to keep Autumn in view a while longer until winter makes its presence known definitively in the landscape of bare trees intermingled with the green of pines. That always makes for a nice contrast, which I note on my walks.
I often think of what has changed in my life over the past few years, and what has remained the same since I moved to a small apartment and life settled into the routines I now faithfully adhere to after my caregiving days ended in 2020.
When I was working, up until I retired in 2017, I usually had an undeniable feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment because my job involved helping people. When I was starting my long caregiving journey in ernest back in 2006, I wrote this in my journal.
This year also marked a new stage in my mother’s health as, at 82, she continues to cope with aging, diabetes and getting more frail and less able to do what she wants to do. I am doing more and more of the caregiving, with support from my brother and sister, but it falls on me to be there in person and tend to basic tasks like grocery shopping and picking up prescriptions, getting all the various little items that are needed all the time, and assuming more responsibility for financial affairs, bills, and the like. This is a progressive thing. In the coming year I anticipate doing more of everything, even though she maintains a significant level of independence, such as fixing her meals, doing laundry and cleaning, tending to her garden and general upkeep of the house. …
Progressively, during the later years of her life, I spent more and more time each day after work visiting and helping her however I could. Again, I had a deep sense of purpose throughout that time.
There is a lot that has remained the same this year, but now I am more ambivalent than ever about changing anything much. Yes, I still spend too much time on the Internet and not enough on outside involvement and friendship with people here in my area, for one thing. I continue to deal with the clutter in my apartment, a consequence of a lifetime of solitary pursuits and living alone for most of that time.
Can I resolve to change bad habits? Yes, of course. That certainly can be done. The hard part is actually wanting to make what will amount to major changes in my lifestyle. But I really don’t need that pressure. I just want to “be.”
I find that my room, my homey apartment, my books, and my music tend to become the all-in-all, the sanctuary that affords me escpape from the messy realities outside the walls of this comfort zone. And now in the spring of 2026, current events are more frightening than I can ever remember them in my lifetime, except for the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, which I was too young to fathom and remember nothing about. I was 11 years old at the time.
So to preserve my sanity, I pass hours in quiet time after I get up and have breakfast, fixated and glued to the familiar routines I am accustomed to, the comforting daily habits that make life endurable, even pleasurable at times.
All this tends to blend and merge into one state of being, enjoyment of the passage of time instead of fearing it, and embracing, to the extent I can or want to, the endless possibilities for entertaiment and stimulation provided by the Internet, and yet sadly feeling twinges of regret at the time that is truly and lamentably wasted on online activities, people and pursuits, which, when not self-defeating, are a depressing reminder that the online world is an escape, albeit for me a necessary one, a retreat from reality in so many ways.
This can lead can lead to a kind of pleasant and yet stupifying indifference and apathy toward doing anything differently.
We all know we are creatures of habit, routine and custom. I was, even when I was young. What matters is how we live and nourish ourselves, spiritually, mentally and physically on a daily basis. This allows room for ephiphanies, joy and adventures of a stationary kind, as any sage armchair traveler knows, reflecting maybe too much on life past, instead of making plans for the future. But isn’t that mostly for the young?
Years ago, I frequently took actual day trips in the country, hard as that is to imagine today.. I always looked at signs, and some of them I remember, most are forgotten naturally. But I liked this one: “New Journey Community Church.”
Isn’t that what I am alluding to here? The fact that maybe I need to embark on some form of “new journey” of my own, casting off the heavy woolen blankets of habit and familiarity and embarking on a new path, a new way of being that is both spiritual and relgious, contemplative and action-oriented.
Okay, that’s inspiring as a goal, but is it realistic or even necessary at my age? I don’t think so.
I’ve taken many “new journeys” of over the course of a lifetime. Now those day-trips are interior, they are within me, in my memories, thoughts, and, for the foreseeable future, never-ending times for deep reflection on a life lived and life now, assimilating and trying to make sense of it all as life nears its end.
How far will these frequent, mindful interior journeys take me? I believe life is still exciting, and can be ecstatic and wondrous, despite everything we might see, hear and be exposed to that says the opposite.
Decades ago there were times when I had nothing much left to lose. Now time has soothed old wounds, many grievous, but it can’t completely heal some of them. Old habits and negative thought patterns can still obscure the newer life that arrives each day, the “new journey” that is waiting for me, whether I am aware of it or not, and which awaits all of us when we have found our way back home and remain there.
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