“The conventional wisdom in a culture where youth is a national anthem, requires that at a certain age, people give up the ghost to the next generation and go into a kind of dotage that waits with patience and passivity for death.
It is no surprise, then, that in that kind of environment, people die in the doing of it long before their life is over. The process is a sad one.
For those who die before their time, the past gets immortalized and even the thought of a future, life-giving and fresh, becomes impossible to imagine.
Only what has been counts; what can be, must be, stands ignored. Without realizing it and for no reason at all, these doers of the living death become dull and doddering and boring people. Indeed they can get very boring very young”.
– Joan Chittister OSB