Welcome to Elder Journey

 A Warm Welcome

Welcome to Elder Journey—This is the first outreach from the Elder Journey website, and I’m pleased you found this site.

There’s no big agenda here, just a desire to share what I’ve been learning and to promote the idea that looking back at life in our later years is an important developmental undertaking. It’s a chance to self-actualize in a deeply meaningful way.

I believe there is a kind of healing and completion we all deserve after a long life of trial and error, success and failure, love and loss.

The End Game of Healing

Not too long ago I was listening to a podcast when guest Eileen McKusick, a pioneering sound researcher was asked, “What do you think is the end game of healing?”

Her answer was profound.

You’re just freer to enjoy the ordinary in your life, be more playful, laugh more.  The end game is sucking the marrow out of the mundane.

That feels right, doesn’t it? Especially as we age — finding joy in the small, everyday moments especially in today’s environment.

Remembering Diane Keaton

Recently, the world lost a legend: Diane Keaton. Her passing left a void; she meant so many things to so many people. Over the past week, I’ve been consumed with watching her past interviews, movies, and reading her reflections over time. I couldn’t help myself. I loved her.

As I lay in bed last night, turning over the day, I realized what made her so magnetic: we knew her story. We watched her live her life out loud for over fifty decades — with honesty, vulnerability, and humor.

We call her unique, but perhaps she was simply an example of what happens when someone chooses to live freely and fearlessly, in truth and openness.

Watching Diane live her story so fully, I was reminded; every life has patterns that can be seen, traced, and even mapped.

Life Mapping: A New Way to See Our Stories

This reflection connects to something I have been developing and writing about — an approach I call Life Mapping or Soul Cartography.

If cartography is the mapping of land, then Soul Cartography is the mapping of one’s inner terrain — a way to visualize the story of your life using symbols and shapes.

Our stories aren’t linear events but living patterns that repeat and evolve across time.

This is an ongoing project for me — new, exploratory, and not yet fully tested. I’ll be teaching a class on Life Mapping for OLLI in January and that will be my first opportunity to get feedback.

But back to Diane for a moment — if we were to map her life, we could trace not only her films but also the themes and patterns that surfaced in her life: her deep love of family based on her comments and books, her creative passions like architecture, photography, and design, her appetite for new experiences. We know so much about Dianes’ life because part of her personal joy was sharing herself with others and enjoying the journey.

In part, it is because we know so much about her, we can appreciate a life well lived.  

An Invitation

I’ve always loved the PBS series Finding Your Roots. When Henry Louis Gates, Jr. hands each guest the rolled-up map of their ancestors, their eyes light up. It means something. It represents belonging and continuity.

Over the next month, I’ll be working on creating my life map.  I think I am going to put it on a canvas and possibly use watercolors.   I have posted a How to Design your Map on the elder-journey website if you are curious about creating your own map.  Check it out    There are many things you can do with a map once it is complete, including passing it on to your children.

If you take to life mapping and find you are interested in exploring this practice more, let me know. We can set up a Zoom gathering with others that want to share what they discover and collectively think of ways to take it out into the world.

In the meantime, here’s to finding joy in the ordinary.

Take care always

Kathryn

kathryskrabo@elder-journey.com