Welcome to Aging with Gratitude™: It's About Humanity, Wisdom, and the Art of Living

Because growing older is inevitable. Wisdom is optional.

Image credit: author.

Retirement is overrated, and I am at retirement age. Instead of sitting around, moving my sheckles, and being a quiet, content introvert, I’m facing my fear and getting out of my comfort zone to meet new people.

I am beginning a new photography and storytelling project called Aging with Gratitude™. My project isn’t about money. It’s my love of art, humans, and their stories.

Especially people who are fifty-five and older. The older, the better. But everyone must be willing to be on camera with me.

It’s time to launch this project on Substack, so welcome aboard.

The conversations I value the most.

They aren’t about success as much as about human struggle, suffering, and life-changing stories. Reinvention, regret, grace, recovery, meaning, purpose. The quiet wisdom that only comes from living a long, difficult life, because life is hard for all of us.

My mission is to capture black-and-white portraits alongside the stories behind them. Conversations with people who have lived, suffered, recovered, lost, rebuilt, loved, failed, forgiven, and kept going.

People who carry wisdom in their wrinkles. People who know life is both beautiful and hard—people who have become more fully human.

For example, even though my project is only a couple of weeks old, I met an eighty-one-year-old woman earlier this week who was born in 1945 in Germany. She barely made it out alive, and her story, her black and white portrait, will be ready to publish shortly.

A stranger became a friend. More to come.

Aging with gratitude means we’re at a stage in life where we can look back and be thankful for the journey through hell and back. The suffering hurt so much that it profoundly changed us.

The photography side of it.

I’ve been practicing photography since 1978, when I learned to make my first prints in a darkroom. Then, life happened, and even though I had a camera my entire life, I didn’t discover the inner artist within me until 2020.

Since then, I’ve been learning the business of art, photography, and painting, which is brutal, just like with writing and selling any decent book. I practice art for love, like most artists. For some of us, money trickles in. But this particular project has nothing to do with money.

Aging with Gratitude™ includes portraits that could be worth 10,000 words written in the wrinkles.

If you’re fifty-five or older and you’re still carrying something—the failure, the loss, the comeback, the forgiveness that took thirty years to find—I want to meet you. I don’t care if you’ve never been photographed before, never thought your face was worth looking at twice.

That’s not how I see it. I want to sit across from you, let you talk, and then point a camera at the kind of face that only comes from staying alive through things that should have taken you under.

Find me on Instagram. Send a message. Tell me where you’re from, what you’ve survived, what you’d want a stranger to know about you before you’re gone. I’ll bring my camera, my questions, and the kind of patience I didn’t have at thirty.

The project is off to a great start.

Because here’s what I’m starting to understand, two weeks and one extraordinary German grandmother into this project: we don’t earn wisdom by living long. We earn it by living through.

Wrinkles reveal our wisdom.

The wrinkles aren’t the story—they’re just where the story chose to settle. Somewhere underneath every one of them is a person who got knocked down by something life-sized and decided, for reasons even they can’t always explain, to get back up.

That’s what I’m after. Not nostalgia. Not a highlight reel of a life well-lived. The real thing—the grit and the grace, the unbearable and the unbelievable, sitting in the same face at the same time.

Aging with Gratitude™ isn’t about pretending the hard years didn’t happen. It’s about what’s still standing after they did.

Come find me. Let’s talk. Help me inspire millions to age with gratitude.

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