There’re a world of baby boomers not going gently into the night.
They struggle with thoughts of retirement plans that cover them with each and every successive year they remain working. They wonder if they will have saved enough if and when the time comes for critical, medical care.
The answer to this for most people so affected is no answer at all. And they keep working as much as they can.
Challenges abound, not the least of which concern ageism.
And there are no solutions to accommodate each and every scenario.
What it amounts to for every person is the establishment of tenability.
Tenability can sometimes include a bridge from the past to the present and subsequently, the future. I made a choice recently regarding tenability.
I’ve established that there is no figure with which to strive for with respect to an end sum financial retirement game. What I’ve established that needs formulating is the ability to accept what it is I have today and make it so my mind can allocate the slot in time for which it should be reserved.
In terms of lighting my life, I’ve recently gained some tenability.
And with it, I can live for the now and also the future.
I’m a minimalist by choice. I’ve been doing with the bare minimum since Christ was a little boy. I don’t decorate my life so much as find things that augment the space I live in with enough nourishment to sustain me.
Accordingly, I don’t follow the rules so much as bend them so that I might more readily accept them.
The best choices, not to mention chances, are the ones that involve adjustments that may appear simple in the short term yet have an ungodly and otherwise worldly sophistication-like quality to them. So much so, in fact, that they end up providing the impetus for the very transitions that we look back on when we are octogenarians, as life-altering.
In my case, and very recently, I’ve chosen to let new light (that is simultaneously old) into my life once again.
I’ve had an old lamp hanging in my office, which was formerly the basement, for the past five years.
I’ve hung it as an homage to my past, a tip of the hat if you will to my youth when growing up on Long Island.

In my memory, this was situated in the sun porch of the home I grew up in for the entirety of my walking existence on this planet.

Old things have power that lies dormant until summoned. Sometimes the ability to draw on their importance, their structure and their ability to lessen worry or anxiety regarding changes of all kinds, is right under our noses, yet seemingly so far out of reach for our inability to rebirth them.
In my case it took simple external stimuli to revisit the old lamp.
The lighting fixture I had in place, and was utilizing, was located adjacent in Kentucky to the old, hanging lamp that spent the bulk of its working life in New York. The lighting fixture activated with the flip of a wall switch, but the old lamp was not even plugged in; it was just hanging on a ceiling hook, calmly waiting its turn.
The hanging lamp never prompted me for attention. In fact, I avoided it each and every time I walked to and from my desk. I had to take measures to avoid bonking my head into it—which I did on countless occasions, before deciding to revisit its functionality and the possibility for its light showing the way in a new state.
I ran an extension cord from the old lamp to an outlet in a figurative link from the past to present. I needed to find a bulb that would fit it; the last time it was used the light bulbs were different and of the old Thomas Edison variety—no vanilla soft serve swirls here.
I found a newer style bulb of reasonable wattage that fit and screwed it in.
I turned off the lighting fixture that was my previous mainstay.
I turned the ancient switch on the old lamp hanging on the hook.
And it lit up my life to the point of acceptance once again.