Coming Home

"Coming home to someone is many things. It is a literal action, an abstract idea, a physical feeling. It is more than the sound of the key turning in the door and the voice that calls from the porch. It is a choice, a promise, a declaration. It is a return, not as a person to a place, but as oneself to another. It is one individual saying to another: ‘You are the one I choose’."

~ source unknown

For No Good Reason

"One of the most difficult things to say to another person is, I hope that you will love me for no good reason. But it is what we all want and rarely dare to say to one another – to our children, to our parents and mates, to our friends, and to strangers. Especially to strangers, who have neither good nor bad reasons to love us. And it’s why we tell each other stories that we pray will be transformed in the telling ...made believable and about us all, no matter who we are to one another and who we are not."

~ Russell Banks, from The Angel on the Roof

Aging Well

Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

"At a time when many people around the world are living into their tenth decade, the longest longitudinal study of human development ever undertaken offers some welcome news for the new old age: our lives continue to evolve in our later years, and often become more fulfilling than before.

Begun in 1938, the Grant Study of Adult Development charted the physical and emotional health of over 200 men, starting with their undergraduate days. The now-classic Adaptation to Lifereported on the men’s lives up to age 55 and helped us understand adult maturation. Now George Vaillant follows the men into their nineties, documenting for the first time what it is like to flourish far beyond conventional retirement.

Reporting on all aspects of male life, including relationships, politics and religion, coping strategies, and alcohol use (its abuse being by far the greatest disruptor of health and happiness for the study’s subjects), Triumphs of Experience shares a number of surprising findings. For example, the people who do well in old age did not necessarily do so well in midlife, and vice versa. While the study confirms that recovery from a lousy childhood is possible, memories of a happy childhood are a lifelong source of strength. Marriages bring much more contentment after age 70, and physical aging after 80 is determined less by heredity than by habits formed prior to age 50. The credit for growing old with grace and vitality, it seems, goes more to ourselves than to our stellar genetic makeup."

See also:

• Read an excerpt from Triumphs of Experience at the PBS blog NextAvenue
• Read a Wall Street Journal Q&A with George Vaillant about finding happiness later in life
• Listen to an interview with Vaillant on WNYC’s The Takeaway
• In the New York Times, read David Brooks’s column on the lessons of the Grant Study
• Listen to an interview with Vaillant at Acculturated
• Read an interview with Vaillant in Maclean’s
• In the New York Times, read why Vaillant believes that personal relationships are the key to healthy aging
• In The Atlantic, read a 2009 cover story on the Grant Study and a 2013 follow-up

Passing through Light and Into Shadow

"While writing and recording Past Life, we worked to lift layers away, strip down and distill the core elements of the songs, which is reflected in the video. I want to create a world with as little as possible and the video speaks to these minimal aspects of the album. Visually, I was really drawn to the image of individuals passing through light and into shadow, this kind of fleeting glimpse." 

~ Ari Picker, Lost in the Trees

See also: Lost in the Trees Tiny Desk Concert

Worse or Better

"The Bed Song": from Amanda Palmer & The Grand Theft Orchestra's album, 'Theatre Is Evil,' get the track FOR FREE / NAME YOUR PRICE at AmandaPalmer.net: http://bit.ly/AFPshop. 

video script/concept written by amanda palmer. 
directed by Michael McQuilken http://www.qmotionpictures.com
produced by Jennifer Harrison Newman. Filmed on location at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College on August 22-24, 2012 as part of a Live Arts Bard residency.