The Future Me: Authoring the Second Half of Your Life (A Guided Journal) by John Beilenson

Even if you are on the right track you’ll get run over if you just sit there. --Will Rogers

It is the day after New Year's day and the house is quiet. I think back on the lines of the old poem Desiderata and these lines ring true: Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.  I am at peace...

New Year's is characterized with resolutions...read more, exercise regularly, save more...and often is characterized by cleaning out drawers and closets to organize one's life once again.  There is no doubt it is time for a fresh start, out with the old and in with the new. It is also a time to reflect and plan for the future. John Bielenson’s book The Future Me: Authoring the Second Half of Your Life is the type of book I have found hard to resist:  A workbook that can help me map new directions in my life.

I love the look and feel of this book with the soft binding over the spiral spine and I love how it lays flat so that you can use it as a working journal. But not a word has been written in five years! Maybe it is just not my time to seriously reflect on retirement and aging…but yet again, maybe it is…

Each chapter outlines the strategy of self-illumination; “cognitive, emotional, social, and spiritual aspects of aging well and is premised on the notion that the past is merely prologue.” (5) It is riddled with quotations and that is another reason why I picked up this book. Quotations trigger such a strong response in me…and since high school, I have had no other choice but to write them down, memorize them, and then use them again and again.

Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow. --Helen Keller

I cannot part with this…and I think I will place it next to my bedside for evening reflections or in the drawer by the bathtub to pull out when I am ready for a long bubble bath. If it is still blank in a year, it will be given to someone who is retiring!

Worldcat