What can Halloween candy teach us about aging in power? Rediscover the joy of choosing what you love, trading what you don't, and savoring life's good stuff.

There's something wonderfully liberating about dressing up. We understood that as children. A towel tied around your shoulders became a cape. A blanket draped over two chairs was a castle. A cardboard box could be a spaceship, a race car, or a house.

What if not knowing what’s next doesn’t mean nothing is happening? Regeneration can begin quietly as we create the conditions for what comes next.

What are you keeping alive that is costing you too much? Release asks what becomes possible when we stop spending ourselves on what no longer needs feeding.

Life has a way of piling ash over things. Simply getting through the years when there wasn't much spare oxygen available for anything that didn't absolutely require it. Eventually, we can mistake dormant for dead. But an ember is neither. An ember is potential. One of the gifts of our third chapter is the opportunity to poke around in our own ashes and see what still glows.

Common ground asks us to see the whole person again. To recognize that the person we've put into that category may share more of our hopes, worries, values, and goals than the category allows us to see.

If we argue that age shouldn't disqualify us from leadership, contribution, or influence, then we also have to think about the responsibility that comes with that influence.

Across democracies, questions about age and leadership are getting harder to ignore. Who is too old to lead? When should one generation make room for another? And when does a legitimate question about capacity become an assumption based on the number of birthdays someone has had?

What if the life you worked so hard to build isn’t the life you want anymore? In our third chapters, better questions can open new possibilities.

Can we please have September? In a culture always rushing toward the next big moment, what if the ordinary days aren’t the space between—but life itself?

When life opens a sinkhole beneath you, resilience isn’t pretending it didn’t suck. It’s acknowledging what happened—and finding your way forward.

I got scammed on my birthday. What followed taught me how today’s fraudsters use urgency, fear, and even fake help—and why response beats reaction.

There comes a point in our third chapter when the arithmetic is difficult to ignore. Unless we are truly Blue Zone people, most of us are more than halfway through our lives.

A few weeks after a medical procedure, I’ve discovered that progress isn’t behaving the way I expected. Some days are better. Some aren’t. And my usual capacity has been replaced by a rather humbling rhythm of activity, rest, activity, rest.

Some days the world feels too loud.

The headlines race from one crisis to the next, and it can feel as though everything is shifting beneath our feet.

When that happens, I find myself in the kitchen.

Aging isn’t one thing. It is a landscape. And we have entered new terrain.

"She who doesn't have a head has feet." Discover how one Albanian proverb became a lifelong lesson in mindfulness and wiser living.

As the laughter settled, I realized we weren't really talking about jars. We were talking about life.

There comes a moment with every stubborn problem when we have to decide: Do I keep wrestling with this thing? Or do I ask for help?

As we age, friendships, ideas, and opportunities begin to converge in unexpected ways. How do we discern which invitations deserve our yes?

The final blog in the Darwin series reflects on agency, openness, and what it means to keep evolving through every stage of life.