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July 2024

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May 2024

Emergency Preparedness: Are You Ready?
05/28/2024

Farewell from the 2023/24 Social Work Interns
05/28/2024

Gina on the Horizon
05/28/2024

Mark Your Calendars for the Healthy Aging Research California Virtual Summit
05/28/2024

Meet Our New Development Associate
05/28/2024

Putting the Strategic Plan into Practice
05/28/2024

Washington Park: Pasadena’s Rediscovered Gem
05/28/2024

Introducing Civil Rights Discussions
05/22/2024

Rumor of Humor #2416
05/14/2024

Rumor of Humor #2417
05/14/2024

Rumor of Humor #2417
05/14/2024

Rumor of Humor #2418
05/14/2024

Springtime Visitors
05/07/2024

Freezing for a Good Cause – Credit, That Is
05/02/2024

No Discussion Meeting on May 3rd
05/02/2024

An Apparently Normal Person Author Presentation and Book-signing
05/01/2024

Flintridge Center: Pasadena Village’s Neighbor That Changes Lives
05/01/2024

Pasadena Celebrates Older Americans Month 2024
05/01/2024

The 2024 Pasadena Village Volunteer Appreciation Lunch
05/01/2024

Woman of the Year: Katy Townsend
05/01/2024

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January 2024

The Threads of Our Lives!

By John Tuite
Posted: 05/06/2020
Tags:
During the last month I’ve had a few very pleasant phone conversations with fellow villager, Dick Myers, which I enjoy mainly because Dick is a “muser”, he reflects at two or three levels beyond the obvious, the banal, the cliche.  Our conversations reminded me that these viral isolation weeks are an opportunity to do something out of the ordinary with our brains: thinking about what we might think about.  Usually, the beat of the day supplies the agenda for our minds, but until we get a vaccine we can experiment with self-chosen subject matter to challenge ourselves.

One of Dick’s musings I’ve chosen as our subject for May:
The Threads of Our Lives!

The genealogy, the geography, the historical era, the events, the parentage and familial characters, the institutions we were a part of, the formal and informal teachers, friends and acquaintances, the choices we made and the circumstances that led us to those choices, what we considered our crises, our losses, our beliefs:  all of these and more bundled to create the individual with your name today.

When I enter a new situation in life I am usually asked to introduce myself.  I find that as often as not I tell them what’s on my driver’s license and a pinch more, a teaser, but I hide or preserve what would fill a multi-volumed autobiography that would take me months to years of research and rethinking.  Other members of the Village are writing their memoirs.  I’ve talked to some of them, and inevitably they mention new discoveries, new insights, revisions of old saws they had used from the past.

Today, I want us to look back thru the maze, and tell us of something that still is an unfinished chapter or event, a choice you still find a mystery, a person you would like in your life still, a place that is still unfinished business, a talent or career that was an opportunity lost, a book or character which still echoes in dreams or a moment of reverie, unfinished matters of grief or visits to graves to say goodbye, loves or resentments that are unforgotten.  Let’s spend the hour thinking about what we’d like to think about.  Let’s take advantage of the space that the virus has offered.
 
John Tuite

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