I know it’s coming but I hope not too soon.

I’m talking about that time when I will have to downsize. Inevitably. Move to a smaller home, or maybe an apartment.

What got me thinking about this was an old lady I met who told me about her mink coat. By old, I mean 90-something. By mink coat, I mean full-length politically incorrect coat that she can’t wear anymore because she’s shrunk so much it drags on the floor, and she now lives in a climate so warm that she’d melt under its weight even in January.

She showed me the coat and told me how proud her late husband had been to be able to save enough to finally buy it for her. I couldn’t help but think about what the coat must have actually cost the family if it was so hard for them to afford it. But she loved having that coat and she loves it still. Even though all it ever does now is catch dust in her closet.

And I thought about how many useless possessions I’ve acquired in my life. Items I love that no one else will care about when I’m gone. Do I really love them? Are they really important? Were they ever? Some day I will have to cut back. On something. And where will I start? And stop?

This is not meant to be a sad story. By realizing that I may need to move on to smaller digs, I’ve come to really appreciate what I have now. To savor the view of the mountains on my daily walk. To think about the things I have: How much do I love them? Could they maybe serve a better purpose if I pass them on to someone else? Now. Or in a year or two, after I’ve loved them for a while longer. I’m less inclined to take what I have for granted. I know how lucky I am. And when I find a sweater I haven’t worn for five years I no longer think that maybe I’ll wear it some day. I think: someone can use this now. I can give a gift that costs me nothing and would mean a lot to someone else.

Maybe this is part of growing up. Or growing old. However you want to look at it. But it makes me more happy than sad. It’s a good new chapter.

Norma Libman is a journalist and lecturer who has been collecting women’s stories for more than twenty years. You can read the first chapter of her award-winning book, Lonely River Village, at NormaLibman.com.

The workplace is still a gray place as baby boomers hang on to jobs and careers. How long can they hold out? That depends upon their ability to change and adapt.

Over 40% of baby boomers stayed with the same job for more than 20 years. And 18% stayed at least 39 years. And you thought the days of working for the same employer for your entire work life went out with your parents’ generation.

But now everything has changed. There is no loyalty to an employer. Millennials make up 35% of the workforce and they are mobile. Not only do they work from anywhere, they may well work for six or seven employers during their worklife. Five years might be considered a long stint with the same employer. They are less focused on making a product and more focused on being part of a team that solves problems. Bottom line: boomers are not in Kansas any more.

Many companies now consider age a disadvantage and an obstacle to rising talent. Ouch. What happened to the eminence gris thing? We were supposed to be the knowledge base that could be tapped when you needed that whole “experience thing.” Now days, not so much. It would appear that experience has lost its cache and maybe boomers were just kidding themselves when they thought that corporations really needed that understanding of solutions that used to work.

Boomers who are kicked to the curb have only a few choices if they want to keep working. Some are getting the training they lack to be competitive with younger workers, a reboot if you will. Many more boomers are going to work for themselves. About 16% of seniors are now self-employed. Not only they happier, they also say they have more job satisfaction than they did when the worked for “the man” in the corporate world.

As the title of this post says, our only option now is to hang in there. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer noted that “once you’re over the hill you begin to pick up speed.” Of course that could mean we are moving faster toward our own demise, but I’ll take the more positive spin on this one.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept. His mystery novel, Head Above Water, is available on Amazon and Kindle. You can also visit his author page here.

Any day now, if you are still working, there’s a good chance a robot will do your job. Really? – you’re saying to yourself. Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming and there’s not much we can do to stop it (maybe pulling the plug or removing the batteries?).

If your job involves making simple decisions and repetitive tasks, a robot may be doing it in two to three years. They (I’m using pronouns to talk about robots…what does that tell you) will do  payroll, review contracts, copy data to storage and handle simple insurance claims. They are already building cars so what did you expect? You just have to hope motor vehicle departments are not staffed by robots. On second thought, robots don’t need coffee breaks and have no incentive to slow down in order to convince supervisors that the job cannot be done any faster. Bring on the bots!

The upside, if you want to look up, is that AI has the potential to greatly enhance the lives of those of us whose work involves a lot of human interaction and judgement. We can continue to interact with other humans while robots reduce the drudgery of repetitive tasks (now we’re back to payroll and basic computer tasks). Imagine how much more productive you could be if you didn’t have update software, organize files, and make breakfast. AI will in fact add new jobs as more people will need to get involved in programming the robots to add more capabilities. Lots of job openings for bot wranglers coming soon.

The other promising factor is that when push comes to shove, humans prefer humans. It’s very unlikely that any of us will want to meet with a robotic therapist, CPA or dentist. Deep down, we crave human interaction even though there are an awful lot of humans who are just plain awful. Most of us would still opt for the human interaction over the robotic one.

So what do you do if your job is threatened by AI? Start thinking about moving into careers that call for skills such as selling, negotiating, strategic thinking, and creative design. And soon. Those bots are persistent. They don’t know how to behave any other way.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept. His mystery novel, Head Above Water, is available on Amazon and Kindle. You can also visit his author page here.

For my piano lesson, I follow an eight-year-old girl and her brother, who is twelve. Their older sister, tattoos up and down her arms, waits to drive them home when the lesson is finished. At least I thought she was their sister. But, no, she’s their mother. They’re all children, from my viewpoint. And what am I doing there, a seventy-something woman waiting, books in hand, to sit at the teacher’s piano for a half hour and hit the all the wrong notes?

Fair question. It was one of my not-so-smart ideas a few months ago. I read that learning a new language or playing music are two ways to delay dementia. I could never sing, was told I was tone deaf and would never be able to carry a tune, and couldn’t read music. Seemed to me that this was just the challenge I needed to keep my brain humming. Whether or not it’s working, I couldn’t tell you. But I have learned to read the notes and I found out I’m not tone deaf because I can actually tell when I hit a wrong note. I’ve also learned that there’s a bunch of other things besides the notes that you have to know before you can play very much.

I hit the same wrong notes over and over so I fear I may have waited too long to start the project – beginning dementia may already be taking its toll. But let’s not dwell on that. There is something else I learned from this adventure and that is what it feels like to have to do something you really don’t like, over and over, every day. This caused me to call my oldest son and apologize. Between the ages of eight and ten he used to sit at the piano daily and practice with an alarm clock set for twenty minutes. When that bell rang he stopped, mid-song if necessary. He’s fifty-one now. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I had no idea what that must have felt like.” A smug chuckle was his response. Over the phone, alas, so I couldn’t see his face. But I can imagine. How often does your mother admit to the error of her ways decades after the fact?

Four months into this I’m still trying. My practice sessions are shorter than twenty minutes. No alarm clock necessary. My back starts to hurt after about ten minutes so I quit when I feel the first jab of pain. Even in the middle of a song.

Norma Libman is a journalist and lecturer who has been collecting women’s stories for more than twenty years. You can read the first chapter of her award-winning book, Lonely River Village, at NormaLibman.com.