Brian Alger
Aging: Senescence as Creative Inspiration
[Exploring Life] It is strange to contemplate aging. The process of getting older often seems so gradual as to be imperceptible. The idea of getting older can create a sense of discomfort since the very mention of it requires us to come into closer proximity with the reality of our own impermanence. We have an [...]
Aging: An Acquaintance With Absence
[Exploring Life] Absence is an emotional state of awareness in which we feel a deep sense of loss; the death of a loved one or friend invokes the deepest sense of loss. The feeling of absence originates in the poignant contrast between the presence of someone or something and the impossibility of ever being able [...]
Aging: The End of Retirement
[Exploring Life] To retire means to withdraw, retreat, or remove oneself from a particular circumstance in order to engage in something different. The traditional view of retirement is that it brings one period of life to a close while simultaneously ushering in a new beginning in some other mode of life. The origins of retirement [...]
Memory: The Cult of Remembrance
[Exploring Life] How many misleading or false beliefs and assumptions do we preserve in our memories? And how many of these false beliefs and assumptions have been assimilated as a result of cultural conditioning? It would be immensely difficult to conduct a statistical inventory of our memories in order to quantify the exact number of [...]
Spiritual Endeavour: Dark Night of the Soul – 5
[Exploring Life] A dark night of the soul is an invitation to our own renaissance. The curse of seemingly inescapable psychological and spiritual burdens is a threshold that immerses us in a dark unrelenting entanglement with our own spiritual-renewal. It is deep within the midst of our most intense struggles in life that we are [...]
Aging: An Unexpected Life
[Exploring Life] Life expectancy embraces a statistical assumption about how long, on average, we will live. We might also think about is a projection of when, on average, we can expect to die. For example, newborn Canadians will on average live to approximately age eighty-one. A sixty-five year-old Canadian can expect to live into their [...]
Aging: Creating A Foundation for Fulfilment
[Exploring Life] November mornings somehow inspire reflection. It’s strange to wake-up while it is still dark and this seems to be something that I never quite adjust to. Our natural internal rhythms somehow feel more forced as the amount of available light during the day decreases during the fall and winter months. On this November [...]