Aging Well: Finding Beauty in the Gray
Aging Well: Finding Beauty in the Gray is a podcast for everyone in or approaching the retirement years. There’s a lot to unpack here apart from the financial planning component, and we’ll do just that. We’ll explore new interests, priorities and goals and finding purpose for ourselves and in our relationships. Join me each episode as I share stories and chat with guests learning to live their best next act, lives. Have a question or comment? Please reach out to me, Hugh Willard, at willowwaycreations@gmail.com or via any of the social media links at the top of this page.
Episodes
108 episodes
Theresa Pierce and Laurie Zacco: Full-time Life on the Road
Theresa Pierce and Laurie Zacco had been a couple living and working in Florida for 19 years when they decided to rent out their home and make a go of living the full-time RV'ers life. They had some exposure to this through Laurie's father and ...
Beyond Retirement: Doing the Day to Day with podcaster Jacquie Ducette
Jacquie Ducette is a fellow podcaster and Retirement Lifestyle Planner singing from the same sheet of music as Hugh Willard. While house sitting in Mexico, she bumped into the world of podcasting by joining a friend for a presentation on how to...
Alternate Roads in Midlife: Ross Le Cras' Career Change
Ross Le Cras had cut his career teeth in radio and advertising for much of his career in Western Australia. Moving into the empty nest years with his wife Leanne, Ross began to feel the pull to a different calling. The wisdom of his years began...
Living the Creative Life Part II: Samantha Shad and Carl Nordgren consider story and it's place in the creative process
Creatives Samantha Shad and Carl Nordgren join us again this week with their thoughts on stories, storytelling, and their central role in our creative processes and lives. Samantha Shad is a successful Hollywood screenwriter, enter...
Finding Flow: Samantha Shad and Carl Nordgren on Living the Creative Life
Samantha Shad is a successful Hollywood screenwriter, entertainment attorney, and author of The Write To Happiness and Write Through the Crises. She teaches courses and workshops on creativity and writing in numerous settings. Carl Nordgren is ...
The Voices of Our Elders: Becky Stone and Her Life in Stories
Among Becky's many talents, her storytelling was discovered one day while reading to her children at the local library. From there, she was sought after by the Chautauqua Society of Greenville, South Carolina and encouraged to share her talents...
Making Music and Teaching Tail-waggers: Dr. Kirk Ridge and Living Legacies
Dr. Kirk Ridge has walked two parallel professional paths over the past 40+ years. While supporting students, teachers and institutions around students' writing, he also has been a musician and singer-songwriter. Overlapping the end of his main...
Amanda and Darrel May: Planting and Growing a Legacy of Life and Love
Amanda and Darrel are recent retirees and the heads of their four-generation deep family. They are also bloggers, hosting their website AnDweplant.com containing a bevy of blog posts, some playful, some speaking to the pains of recent losses, a...
In Search of the Fountain of Aging Well: Jody and Mark Rollins and Retirement Transformed
Jody and Mark Rollins were living their best career and family lives before uneven closings into retirement. While looking forward to their retirement years following successful careers and healthy financial stewardship, they quickly learned th...
Best Selling Author Diane Chamberlain and the Quest for Balance and Community
New York Times, USA Today, and The Sunday Times bestselling author of 28 books, Diane Chamberlain has maintained a powerful pace with her rich and varied novels over her 30+ year (second) career as a writer. She often draws from her first caree...
Our Furry Friends: Susan Kurowski and the Pets for the Elderly Foundation
Susan Kurowski parlayed her lifelong love of animals along with her business acumen into her work with the Pets for the Elderly Foundation beginning in 2006. In 2009, she was named the executive director. Since that time she has been instrument...
"This is Our Time" Leanne Le Cras and her Cresting the Hill blog
Leanne Le Cras has lived the length of her life in Western Australia. It is there that she and her husband raised their two children. It is there that she steadfastly worked for many years. She left a toxic work situation just prior to the pand...
Dr. Mia Yang: The Rectangularization of Aging
Dr. Mia Yang has a deep love for seniors that was born of her early years with her grandparents in China. Out of lifelong formative experiences that included quality of care decisions for her grandparents, she chose to become a geriatrician, a ...
Mary Ann Reilly and Patrick O'Dell: Double Cousins Reconnecting in the Canadian Rockies
Mary Ann and Patrick grew up with mothers who were sisters and fathers who were brothers. Mary Ann's family lived in upstate New York save for a 5 year stint in Texas and Patrick's family began in Nashville, Tennessee before migrating north to ...
Fun and Games, and Silver Arts Too!!! Lynn Harrell and the Senior Games
Lynn Harrell started college with the goal of working as a camp director for children. That is until a required project wherein she went to help with the North Carolina Senior Games opened her world to the joys of time spent with the senior set...
Gwen Buchanan: Making Memories in Hokas and New Hips. My Journey on the Appalachian Trail
Gwen Buchanan has packed a lifetime into her 50+ years. Two life threatening accidents resulting in both hips being replaced, and numerous personal challenges only served as renewable energy sources for her to complete multiple marathons and to...
Hugh Willard takes time to reflect on Independence Day in the USA, and what we are called to consider at this challenging time.
We take a brief pause from sharing the stories and expertise of our guests on this week's show to reflect on the current and substantial challenges facing the United States today. What is our role as Third Agers in this time? What is our respon...
Carrie Knowles Shifting Forward further into family and the next plain of life
Author Carrie Knowles joins us again this week to share from her latest book Shifting Forward: Fifty Reflections on Everyday Life. Carrie is a prolific writer and author having published dozens of short stories and hundreds of newspape...
The Last Childhood. Author Carrie Knowles and her family's journey through her mother's Alzheimer's disease
Author Carrie Knowles was awarded a North Carolina Arts Council grant to write her memoir in 1994. The Last Childhood: A Family Story of Alzheimer's recounts her arduous (is there any other word to describe this experience) and often r...
Peter Popovich: The Particulars of the Pickleball Party. Everyone's invited.
Pickleball is a racquet/paddle sport that has risen from its humble beginnings in Bainbridge, Washington in 1965 to becoming a veritable tsunami sport of passion and play and community building, particularly among Third Age folks. Today there a...
Dr. Peter Balsamo: A "true-line" for service and education in retirement
Dr. Peter Balsamo has spent the length and width of his life in higher education and service to the greater community. His story has an interesting turn in that he became a father in his mid-50's. A few short years later, with his daughter star...
Dr. Stevan Jackson: "Til I can't" Redirecting in the later years.
Dr. Stevan Jackson is a ethnomusicologist and folklorist. Having taught at several universities over the course of his career, he now spends much of his time writing and performing. He's written several nonfiction and fiction books and as a mul...
Dr. Jessie Piper: Grandparents Raising Grandchildren. Blessing or Burden?
Out of her own family trauma and into being raised by her grandmother, Dr. Piper followed a natural path into her study and research as a gerontologist and Assistant Professor at the Center on Aging with Kansas State University. Through the cou...
Dr. John Dempsey: When It Comes to Retirement, What's More Important: Math or Enthusiasm?
Dr. John Dempsey is coming to the close of a long and distinguished career. He started as a young naval officer in VietNam during the war, followed by a brief stint in the Carter Administration before finally settling into his home of academia ...
Nancy Ruffner: Inside the Kaleidoscope. Just When You Think It's Coming Into Focus, It Will Change.
Nancy Ruffner was a legal and financial specialist with a global EAP company for many years before facing the kaleidoscopic experience of her own parents' aging issues. Out of this, she pivoted to coaching and consulting as one of the nations f...