As I have slept on hospital recliners, created calendars for coordinating treatment transportation and meal drop-offs, and called on networks for everything from emotional support to equipment donations, one clarion call keeps echoing in my ear. We are not doing elderhood the right way around here. It is terrifying, isolating. It can break your back and your bank.
A few years ago, I started letting go of many films in my ritual because, as someone pointed out to me, I ostensibly wanted to bring change into my life and perhaps doing the same thing over and over again was not serving that purpose. And, hello, watching He’s Just Not That Into You on Valentine’s Day was perhaps not the most efficacious way to find my semi-permanent dance partner.
Having recently participated in a webinar about ChatGPT for nonprofits, I plugged in the parameters for a blog post on this topic. In less than 60 seconds, it spit out a fully articulated (if bland) exploration of the topic, including a laundry list of things to do to encourage or invite balance into our lives. If you don’t like it, you can hit refresh and it will do it again!!
There once was an island made up of seven kingdoms, evenly divided by high rock walls that emanated from the center of the island and ran all the way to the sea (kinda like a giant Trivial Pursuit piece). Unfortunately, there was no source of fresh drinking water on the island. Each kingdom hated and feared the next.
In my curriculum where I teach people how to cultivate and tell their own stories, an approach I affectionately call, ‘The Story Sandwich,’ I always refer to the importance of finding the change in our storytelling. I call it the meat (or spicy tofu) of the sandwich. In workshops, I break out these two figures side-by-side and talk about that moment in English class when they would talk us about the “beginning-middle-end” of a story (blah-blah-blah), and especially “exposition-climax-denoument” (again: blah-blah-blah).
Pittsburg: Past, Present, Future is an innovative, new storytelling project under the guidance of the Pittsburgh Community Market, which will culminate with a live, pop-up theatre at Pittsburgh Yards on Saturday, October 30 at 7:00p as a part of the ELEVATE Atlanta Arts Festival.