Retirement is a time of life that brings uncountable openings to joy. It’s a time to travel,  enjoy friends and family, be creative, learn, volunteer, reflect, and yes, relax after long years of work. Yet we age in retirement, and aging brings with it challenges in terms of finances, living arrangements, staying happy, maintaining health, and dealing with inevitable illness, as well as — ultimately — death.

On this blog, you’ll find discussions of both the opportunities and the challenges of retirement and aging. We’ll offer our own insights along with links to timely articles and informative websites that can offer guidance on your own journey.  Down through the ages, philosophers, writers, and artists have had much to say about aging, happiness, and mortality, and that’s why we’ll be including posts on books, films, poems, and works of art that can offer guidance and inspiration to today’s seniors.

We try to take a practical, common sense approach to retirement and aging on this website.  The opportunities are many, but we want to be realistic about them as well. You won’t find us suggesting that you retire to Patagonia or climb Mount Everest at eighty.  The challenges must be met in the same spirit, without denial or self-deception.

Ray and Donna Copson are retired civil servants now living in the Finger Lakes region of western New York. We’ve lived long enough to experience some of the problems of aging and retirement ourselves, and we’ve been witnesses as family and friends have done the same — making decisions both good and bad. We don’t have all the answers, but we hope to offer insights and information that can help you find the answers that are right for you. And we hope that you’ll participate in the discussion by responding to our posts.