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LIFE & LIVING
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stephanieraffelock
- Mar 24, 2020
- 3 min
What It Means to Age Gracefully…
To age gracefully is to age with gratitude. I embrace, believe and experience this truth every day. Walking life in gratitude is not just a desired quality to aging well, it’s also an antidote for fear, anxiety and mistrust. Our evolution, our awakening as loving human beings is a lifetime journey that constantly asks us to practice gratitude. As a young woman, I read Ram Dass’ book, Be Here Now. It’s the title that inspires me today. Recently we’ve all experienced worry
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stephanieraffelock
- Mar 4, 2020
- 2 min
What It Means to Age Gracefully…
One definition of the phrase aging gracefully means that we look younger than our years. But that’s a sorry and shallow definition, and one we’d do well to put aside. Our worth has never been about how we look. The message that older women want younger women to receive is that value in life has nothing to do with our looks and everything to do with what’s in our heart. And that message is one that we need for ourselves too as the years increase. The body changes. Wrinkles a
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stephanieraffelock
- Jan 11, 2020
- 2 min
In the Age of Me, Me, Me, Me . . .
Writing is one thing. Marketing yourself to the world is another. On the one hand I don’t think that the desire for readers is an unreasonable one for a writer to have. On the other hand, I feel like that little kid on the diving board screaming across the pool to her parents: “watch me, watch me, watch me,” just before she dives into the pool. Marketing myself, my message and my book is in part exciting because it will bring me readers. But another part of me, the old-s
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stephanieraffelock
- Sep 5, 2019
- 4 min
Living Out This Idea of Love
It seems to me that the universe is bound together by dancing molecules of love. I’ve had a couple of rough weeks. Free floating anxiety. Restless sleep. Self doubt. It was as if my psyche developed little cracks and all of that seeped in. I didn’t immediately recognize that I was in distress. Then, this morning, I was awake at 4:00am, swimming in worry and anxiety that wasn’t attached to anything real: would I lose my wallet in the airport when I travel next week? Is my
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stephanieraffelock
- May 27, 2018
- 3 min
The Size of a Parakeet’s Heart
Breakfast happened in a sunny corner of the kitchen on a plastic tablecloth whose flowered print had faded in spots from the sun and the plates that scraped across its surface. The table was pushed against the windows, and looked over a struggling garden in which I had once planted the watermelon seeds saved from a late summer afternoon. When the green shoots found their way up into the light, turning into vines, I imagined opening a watermelon stand and selling pieces of fre
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stephanieraffelock
- Jul 9, 2017
- 3 min
8 Steps to Dynamic Living After 60 (Or Really Anytime)
Is it the need to heal some childhood wound of wanting to get it right? Or is there a deeper reason, like wanting to get the most from life? On some level, no matter how successful you are, or how right you get it, we all know the truth, that life is only temporary. And that’s what makes me want to live as fully as I can. Satisfaction and Success: Satisfaction is sustainable, and success sometimes unattainable. Success is results oriented, often associated with fame and pros
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stephanieraffelock
- Jul 27, 2014
- 4 min
Is Age Just A Number?
The impervious feeling of youth is a delicious drunk of newness and firsts: first apartment, first true love, first heartbreak; the delight of garage sales and thrift shops, that furnish the backdrop upon which one begins to build a life, blissfully unaware of the baggage of childhood that follows them into independence and self-sufficiency. In my twenties, I surfed in the mornings with Bernie, napped in the afternoons and then waited cocktails at night to pay for a life styl
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stephanieraffelock
- Mar 22, 2014
- 3 min
Young At Heart
Today “The Daily Writing Prompt” arrived in the email. Like a siren of the sea, I was seduced to put down the packing tape and pick up the lap top. Scaling a blank screen, my energies having been elsewhere is scary. The theme for today’s prompt “How do you stay young at heart?” Here’s the thing, you get to be to a certain age and you realize that the life you have already lived is longer than what is in front of you. While that may seem bleak, it does provide an immediate opp
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stephanieraffelock
- Feb 8, 2014
- 2 min
The Last Chapter
These past months have brought about a whirlwind of change and resolve and there are days that I marvel at how life continues to build upon itself regardless of years and days that I feel I should just lay down and take a nap until it all passes. My husband and I retired from our business late last summer–thirty-seven years worth of work that came down to some boxes for storage and a few tearful goodbyes. Then we started a consulting business that allowed us to work from home
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stephanieraffelock
- Mar 26, 2013
- 2 min
The Story You Are In
Sometimes it seems so clear; where I am and who I am and what story is unfolding. I had grandparents that slept in separate bedrooms; that spat and grunted communications that were interlaced with whiskey bottles and wooden rosary beads. I vowed to never be like them. My husband and I dance a different dance. We will not, cannot sleep apart. I love this story. It is punctuated by small acts of tenderness that reach out like vines into shared cups of warm ginger tea, someone t
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