Another woman’s daughter, who recently lost her mother, passed along this excerpt, which so aptly draws from Mother Nature’s coffers to provide a template for our timeless connections to our maternal roots.

Nature often offers metaphors more elegant than any we can manufacture. In the redwood ecosystem, all seeds are contained in pods called burls, tough brown clumps that grow where the mother trees’ trunk and root system meet. When the mother tree is logged, blown over, or destroyed by fire the trauma stimulates the burls’ growth hormones. The seeds release and trees sprout around her, creating the circle of daughters. The daughter trees grow by absorbing the sunlight their mother cedes to them when she dies. And they get the moisture and nutrients they need from their mother’s system, which remains intact even after her leaves die. Although the daughters exist independently of their mother above ground, they continue to draw sustenance from her underneath.

–Excerpt from Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss, Hope Edelman

This passage struck a chord that resonates to my core as I launch my newest book, Visionaries Have Wrinkles: Conversations with Wise Women Who Are Reshaping the Future, which is dedicated to my mother, my daughter, and my granddaughter.

My mother’s unfulfilled, prematurely shortened quest for her Womanself inspired my lifelong journey to fulfill this quest, and to this day, it still influences my mission to seed and tend to generations of daughters into the future.

The 13 women convening within the pages of this new book form a sacred circle with deep roots in time and timelessness, each woman forming burls of new seeds where their trunks and root systems meet. Together we unearth ancient future wisdom to nurture our new seedlings, creating an ever widening circle of daughters. My wish is that generations of women everywhere will continue to draw sustenance from our roots.

Yesterday’s mothers are the roots of today’s mothers, and in turn our granddaughters are the new seeds we tend so that they too will sprout and create ever stronger roots for the future.

To all our mothers, daughters, and sisters, may this day be filled with remembrance and celebration.

Photograph by Esther Seijmonsbergen.

Pay equity is merely one thread of inequity within the fabric of our society. Focusing on one thread will at best give us a temporary patch. We need to tackle the issue whole cloth if we are going to create a future for our daughters and nieces, granddaughters and great-granddaughters, in which women are fully represented in government and business leadership, in legislation, in the highest echelons of academia, with equal power, equal pay, and equal opportunity.

So what is stopping us from having equal pay, equal opportunities for leadership positions, equal representation in government? What is stopping us from making misogynistic health- and life-endangering legislation an impossibility in our country? The answer crossed the lips of nearly every speaker and commentator at Monday’s event: Fear.

Fear of rocking the boat. Fear of being wrong. Fear of being “found out” for who we believe we really are. Fear of vulnerability, of being seen as a bitch, of not being liked. Fear of failing.

Did you know that only 7% of women negotiate their first salary vs. 57% of men who do? That it has been 30 years since women became 50% of college graduates, and that today, women are more likely than men to graduate and more likely to earn higher-level degrees? Yet of full professors, only 24% are women. This is on top of the roughly 15% of women who are top executives. CEOs? Barely over 2%. I could go on.

In other words, “We are the 51%!” And it’s about time we occupied Wall Street, academia, corporate America, Congress, state legislatures, and the White House.

Women see problems and solutions differently than men do, and as I’ve written before (see “How Being Successful Can Save the Planet”), women leaders and board members are correlated with increased revenue. And in Congress, would you believe that the 17 female senators, from both sides of the aisle, actually get together regularly and discuss their shared values and women’s issues? A far cry from the bitter divide we see in Congress-as-usual, isn’t it?

Whoever you are, wherever you are, your opinion does matter and needs to be heard. Your voice might be the one that changes the debate. Your voice might be the tipping point that unleashes the voices of many and quickens the pace of change.

And I’m going to let you in on a little secret. The more you speak out, the easier it gets. I would never call it easy, but you do get more comfortable in your own skin the more you decide to trust yourself and tell your truth.

Women need to start demanding proof for why men doing the same job (or even less) are making more than women. Women need to start asking for more, believing they are worth it. Turn the tables on the power relationship. Own your power. You know your stuff. Your voice matters. As Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg said in her 2011 Barnard commencement address: “Let the barriers you face—and there will be barriers—be external, not internal.”

Women working in the home, in the office, running their own businesses, going to school—all of us need to speak up to our government. Start locally, in your community, your district, your state. Find others, such as local organizations, to pool efforts with to effect change.

Be a mentor to other women, encouraging them to speak up in their personal, professional, and political lives. Teach them to ask for what they want and to believe that they deserve it. Get women of all ages to vote.

And above all, keep your eye on the fabric as a whole. A patch here or there isn’t going to be a lasting solution. We need to address equality in every arena, from controlling our own bodies and lives to the ongoing racism and ageism that is always present with sexism and misogyny. But first, we need to address our own sense of equality, our own feelings about whether we’re good enough. We need to recognize our fear and instead of focusing on making it disappear (which it won’t), we need to embrace it and speak up anyway. The best way to address a fear of failure is to fail—and then keep going.

Remember: You are not alone in this. You are the 51%.

According to Ariane Hegewisch, a study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, “These gender wage gaps are not about women choosing to work less than men—the analysis is comparing apples to apples, men and women who all work full time.”

On Monday, I attended the 6th Annual Equal Pay Day NYC, hosted by the New York Women’s Agenda (NYWA), Equal Pay Coalition NYC (EPC-NYC), A Better Balance, and NYU Law Women. The forum presented New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and other NY officials championing equal pay, as well as panels and discussions on related issues such as women’s representation in the Senate (only 17%!) and how many women turn out to vote (only 20% in New York, and only 46.2% across the nation).

The turnout at the event was wonderful, especially on a Monday morning, but with the dire economic situation for women, not only shown in the wage gaps but also in the low numbers of women finding employment post-recession, you would think this event would have been standing-room only, particularly in New York City.

Where are all the women . . . in elected office, in voting booths, in management, and especially at the forefront of their communities, states, and the nation, demanding change, demanding to be heard and recognized?

Are women too caught up in meeting their immediate needs to stop and look at the bigger picture? Are women unaware that this problem still exists to this extreme? Or are women simply unsure about what exactly they can do?

NYWA and EPC-NYC presented some great ideas for women to get involved and Get Even in the workplace, as put by the nonprofit organization for women and the workplace, Catalyst.

1. Email your governor, your senators and representatives, and your community leaders.
2. Talk about pay equity online, in your blog, on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. Turn your profile picture red because women are still in the red!
3. Write letters to the editor, call radio talk shows and suggest that they talk about pay equity, and start the conversation with others.
4. Host an Unhappy Hour with your friends to brainstorm ways to close the wage gap.
5. Support organizations and politicians that are actively fighting pay equity, such as those mentioned in this post.

Equal pay, equal representation, and more women leading and managing will improve the lives of families, the profits of organizations, and the national and world economy. (see “How Being Successful Can Save the Planet.”) If we all commit to doing just one of these ideas—go on, put it on your calendar—we can make a difference not only in the lives and work of women but in the future of our world.

Image credit: Photograph by Daria Miroshnikova

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

The top two regrets are unsurprising. The last three also make sense at a glance, but it is a little surprising to see them in the top 5. Of all the possible regrets people have when looking back on their lives, these come up again and again as among the most important.

The more I thought about this list, the more I realized something else interesting. Number 3 is actually at the root of all 5 regrets, especially for women. Although our society considers it more acceptable for women to express emotion, the range of acceptable emotions is limited. Most women are taught not to express anger, for example, or any feelings that could rock the boat. Even in the most liberated women, our Inner Patriarch whispers that people won’t like us or love us if we are angry or critical or even “too” direct, that our worth as women is tied into keeping the peace and caring for everyone else’s happiness—before and often instead of our own.

But why is this such a common regret among the dying? Suppressing our feelings clearly has ripple effects in our lives. In the moment, holding back seems like a minor act that avoids the discomfort of confrontation or the possibility of rejection. But the habit of holding back begins to define our relationships with others as well as defining who we are.

When we hold back our feelings, we create a dishonest foundation for all relationships. We might think we are keeping the peace, but doing this regularly has the opposite effect. Why? Because the feelings don’t go away just because we decide not to voice them. And even though we aren’t expressing them directly, we are expressing them, whether we like it or not—in our body language, our tone, our choice of words, and so forth. The other person picks up on something but can’t respond directly because we aren’t being direct.

The more we do this, the more distance we put into the relationship because the unexpressed is always there, building up. Intimacy becomes difficult, even impossible, because one or both people aren’t honest about how they feel or even who they are. Furthermore, we don’t give ourselves a chance to resolve the situations that are causing these feelings, so we set ourselves up to feel this way often and with increasing intensity. Too often, this leads to bitterness and resentment. The discomfort and rejection we seek to avoid each time we hold back becomes an almost inevitable result of holding back.

This impulse, holding back to please others, is quite clearly tied to the most common regret, living according to others’ expectations rather than our own. It is also a large part of regret #4, not staying in touch with friends. The healthier our relationships with others, the more likely we are to see their value and to prioritize them in our lives. This is especially important as we enter the time of life when we begin to lose more and more friends and family members.

But learning to express our feelings is also key to avoiding regrets #2 and #5 because it affects who we are in profound ways. After all, if we don’t have the courage to be honest about our emotions, how likely are we to have the courage to take chances on our dreams, to make necessary changes in our lives for our own happiness, including being honest (with ourselves, our colleagues, our bosses) about our work? The habit of holding back our feelings becomes a habit of holding back. Period.

One caveat, of course, is to recognize that you don’t need to express how you feel about every little thing to every single person you encounter. The closer your relationship with someone (or the closer you want to be), the more you should share with that person. Even then, learning to prioritize what’s important to express and what isn’t, an ability I call discernment, is essential to being honest without being cruel or self-centered.

Telling the truth, even the brutal truth when necessary, is a characteristic all visionaries share (See “We Are the Truth Tellers” and “Barriers to Truth Telling”). You can’t make a difference in the world, much less in your own life and work, if you don’t have the courage to see it—and tell it—like it is. No regrets.

Image credit: Photograph by Dar’ya Sipyeykina

Even those already in business frequently reassess how their business is doing, and not just financially. You might be considering how to add more meaning to your business and work life, how to combine what you are already doing with ways to make a difference in the world. You might be brainstorming new ways to make your business sustainable long past the usual retirement age, or you could be thinking about how to adapt it so that you have more free time and can continue to do meaningful work for as long as you wish—into your 80s, 90s, or even past 100.

Regardless of your situation, your first step is to consider what kind of business you want to create or reinvent. Take some time to answer the following questions as honestly and thoroughly as possible:

1. Do you want to continue in your current field or try something new? If new, is it related to your existing skill set or industry, or will you need further education and training before you can open your doors? If in your current field, are you in love with what you do, or are you choosing this field because it’s familiar? Choose something that you are genuinely, passionately interested in, that you are already drawn to read about, talk about, and learn about at every opportunity. If you are planning to reinvent an existing business, you need to go beyond what you’ve done in the past—beyond good service to extraordinary service; beyond meeting expectations to exceeding them and offering a lot more value-added services or products. How does this look in terms of what you could offer and how does that compare to what you do already?
2. How will your business address what matters most to you? In what ways do you want your business to also address what matters most to your family, your community, the world? Will it meet the triple bottom line: people, planet, profits? Where do your talents and passions intersect with what the world needs now and what it will need in the future?
3. Do you want to sell products, provide services, consult, some combination?
4. Do you want to go totally virtual with your business or a combination? Which option suits your lifestyle choices?
5. Do you want to be a solopreneur or do you want to be an employer?
6. If starting a new business, what kind of time and money are you willing and able to invest in the first three years (the average lag time between starting a business and breaking even)? If reinventing your business, what time and money are you willing and able to invest to revitalize and revamp what you’re already doing?
7. What is the income potential for your business? Will it be enough to meet your needs? Will it be enough to meet your desires? Make an appointment with an accountant and business growth expert who has experience with entrepreneurs to get a realistic assessment of your business costs and potential.
8. What kind of competition is out there? How are they doing, particularly since the recession? How will you do things differently to stand out, avoid the competition’s mistakes, and capitalize on trends so that you are ahead of change?
9. What does the day-to-day operation look like to you realistically? What do you want the day-to-day operation to look like?

• Consider how your lifestyle-compatible your business is. If you live near the top of a mountain, a business that requires a lot of in-person contact or travel will be tricky without easy and affordable transportation. If you need regular human interaction, don’t create a business model that chains you to your computer all day. If you want to sustain your business indefinitely, doing the work you love into your 90s or beyond, design your business to weather any physical changes you might encounter down the road. Consider how much freedom and flexibility you want—to travel, spend time with family and friends, do volunteer work, or just relax whenever you need to.
• Consider what everyday tasks you enjoy, which ones you find mundane but doable, and which ones you loathe. Will you have a balance? Will you be able to delegate the latter? Or will the day-to-day requirements of your business idea likely damper the passion you have for the business? Will you have enough variety or enough routine to suit your personality, needs, and preferences?

10.  How tech savvy are you now, and how tech savvy will you need to be to run your business successfully? What technology is required for the business itself? What technology is required for marketing, accounting, sales, distribution, etc.? What new technologies can keep your business on the edge of change? Even the most experienced, savvy professionals will need to be on a continuous technological learning curve to keep up with the changing marketplace. If you don’t have the interest or time to learn new technology, can you afford to get technical help as needed? If you are planning a business that you can run for the next 30, 40, or 50 years, consider now what technology can enable you to do that, including what you would need to keep your business running virtually.

The future of business, and of our world, lies in the hands of those who are taking steps right now to reimagine the marketplace, the workplace, and the small business in ways that intersect with where we are headed as well as where we want to head globally—sustainability, cooperative business models, flexibility in our work and our lives, and the ability to pursue what is meaningful to us in everything we do, at every age.

We are on the cusp of a new era, where the stereotypes of age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and so forth, are going to be washed away by tidal waves of change—in technology, in the economy, and in how we interact and connect with each other on every level.

If any part of you has ever longed to do something truly great in this life, now is the time to put legs on that idea and enter the race—the human race of tomorrow.

According to the Kauffman Foundation, people ages 55 to 64 consistently start more new businesses than those in any other age group, and this has been true for about a decade. We also know from this foundation that people over 55 are the most likely to be successful with their business startups, as I’ve mentioned before (LINK). The Sloan Center on Aging & Work estimates that about 38 percent of small business owners (including solo companies) are 60 or older.

Even more interesting is that in a recent Civic Ventures survey of 45- to 70-year-olds, about 25 percent indicated an interest in being entrepreneurs, and more than half of them wanted their venture to address a social issue.

In other words, as I’ve said before, the future of work is a future that works for all of us.

Parents of young children and 70-year-olds alike can find work or create businesses that are flexible in hours and location, among myriad other factors, to work with their realities and their desire to focus on what matters most. Organizations are already recognizing the need to customize the work world for every employee as well as the customer, because if they don’t, their employees will do it themselves, especially in midlife and beyond. These companies will not only lose the experience and wisdom of their post-50 staff, they are likely to lose money to many of them as former employees become entrepreneurial competition.

We are already creating a world where we can work how we want, when we want, and most important, why we want. Not only are more and more people starting businesses that make money and a difference in the world, more and more consumers are choosing to patronize these businesses over those that don’t combine profit with purpose.

The future belongs to visionaries, those who see where what matters most to them intersects with what the world needs. And this means that the future belongs to all of us, for we all have a visionary within, and we all will benefit from the Visionary Era we are creating.

Photograph by Tina Lawson

From Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” for her testimony on birth control to Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum’s contest to one-up each other on who can make the most disparaging comments about women—the misogyny is so extreme, you half expect it to all end up being a parody, some late-night comedy sketch.

But it’s not. And worse, these men and others of their ilk aren’t stopping at hate speech. As I’ve mentioned before (e.g., here & here), they are putting their anti-women views into our laws all over the United States, such as allowing employers to refuse coverage of contraception and even to fire women for taking birth control to prevent pregnancy. Romney wants to take this to an extreme and allow companies to refuse to cover any health care if they object to it for any reason. The implications of this are nothing short of life-threatening.

But something interesting is happening all over this country. The divisive rhetoric and legislation of the conservative religious right are bringing together women of all walks of life and all political persuasions. As the New York Times reported, Republican women all over are switching parties. Evangelical Christian Mary Russell explains her switch: “If they’re going to decide on women’s reproductive issues, I’m not going to vote for any of them. Women’s reproduction is our own business.”

Not only are women uniting over the issue of women’s health, they are taking action—from donations to organizations like Emily’s List and Planned Parenthood to speaking up in person, in blogs, in letters to Congress, in protests. In fact, if you’ve got any knitting skills, you might enjoy taking part in the Snatchel Project by knitting a uterus for a needy Congressman Their slogan says it all: Dear Men in Congress: If we knit you a uterus, will you stay out of ours?

Women are taking action, as are the men who support them. We are finding more and more ways to speak out, which in turn encourages others to find their own way. Not up for attending a protest? Knit a uterus! Not ready to switch political parties, start speaking up and writing letters within your party to open their eyes. Donate, create and display your protest through art, record a video, blog about the issues, share your story . . . or come up with yet another novel way to support women everywhere and lend your voice to change.

I would love to hear about what you’re doing to combat the right-wing attacks on women. Please share your story in the comments or post photos, videos, or stories to my Facebook page.

We are powerful. We are united. We are the future.

Yet our mindset about what it means to be 30, 40, 50, 60, and beyond tends to remain the same. Although we all tend to see ourselves as 15 years younger than we are, as a society, we still see people in general as over the hill past 40. At 50 and beyond, people are seen as increasingly irrelevant, out of step, invisible, elderly, even useless. It doesn’t matter that, as Seth Godin (“Fifty is the new thirty”) has pointed out, “fifty year olds are living, acting and looking more like thirty year olds every day.”

But this mindset is changing dramatically. As I’ve discussed many times in this blog (here, here, and here, for example), the boomer generation is redefining everything—from careers to entrepreneurship to what it means (and doesn’t mean) to be post-50. Now the generation that originated the idea of not trusting anyone over 30 is far beyond 30. This attitude still exists among millennials, but probably not for much longer.

The Kauffman Foundation discovered that the most successful startups are those founded and run by people over 55. More and more people post-50 are, by necessity or design, choosing flexible career arrangements, consulting, and entrepreneurship, reinventing retirement or abandoning the idea altogether.

As we choose work that is more meaningful, and develop the habit of approaching it in continuously innovative ways, “retirement” ceases to have any meaning. We don’t retire from being leaders, innovators, visionaries. We simply move on to what’s next for us and continue to adapt to our changing circumstances, just as women (and more and more men) do when they start families. The new way of working has nothing to do with age—beyond making it irrelevant.

This generation is also transforming the marketplace. Post-50 women in particular have more financial clout than ever, controlling three-fourths of U.S. wealth and making 95% of the purchase decisions in their households. Marketers, businesses, and organizations that are still youth centered are missing an enormous opportunity.

None of us can afford to ignore this market. Nor can we stereotype the post-50 generation based on generations before. They have different tastes, values, lifestyles, and goals, and they need to be marketed to as people who see a future full of new adventures, new life and work paths, and new opportunities for making a difference while making a living—just as 30-year-olds see their future.

The key difference, however, is that the inner psyche and development of the post-50 crowd does coincide with age. So a 50-year-old who looks and acts like a 30-year-old also has the earned wisdom and experience of her full 50 years.

Recognizing that 50 is the new 30, 60 the new 40, 70 the new 50, and so on, is not about vanity or denying that we all are aging. It simply means that we are taking one more step to bust another societal stereotype that holds us all back—just as we needed to combat sexism and misogyny and racism to remove the self-imposed limitations that prevent us all from reaching our full potential as humans, as visionaries, as people with the power to transform the world like never before. Who we are inside is ageless.

We are more than our gender, more than the color of our skin, and more than just a number. Don’t act your age. Act your potential.

Image credit: Photograph by Maira Kouvara.

At one WFS meeting, Dennis Bushnell, a chief research scientist at NASA, discussed seven major and simultaneous societal issues, any one of which will greatly change society as we know it. “The impacts of all seven,” he said, “including potential synergisms, is approaching the unfathomable.” Number one on his list: climate change and energy shifts. Number three, very much linked with number one: water and food shortages and environmental issues.

He discussed several climate change impacts on our future:

• The arrival of ice in summer waters
• A greater projected rise in CO2
• The ocean rising faster and acidifying faster
• Fossil methane being release from tundra and ocean
• A reduced ocean CO2 uptake, which causes temperature increases, acidification, and algae reductions
• Offshore and near shore methane “burps” caused by ocean warming inciting undersea landslides, causing great tidal waves, which would lead to millions and millions of deaths
• Rapid glacial melting leading to many of the world’s rivers, which are glacially fed, to dry up, affecting 1/6 of the planet’s humans—soon

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates, based on solid science, that by 2100, world temperatures will be 5 to 6 degrees centigrade higher and that the sea level will rise a meter to 2.6 meters. The IPCC is cautious, even, because its conclusions are drawn from thousands of scientists. It’s possible that the situation will be much worse by 2100, with temps as much as 12 to 14 degrees centigrade higher. This would melt ALL ice, cause the ocean to rise about 75 meters, and directly affect over 2 billion people.

Gaia is self-correcting. The question is, How big a catastrophe, and how many, will it take for us to reach our tipping point, to emerge from emergency and save our planet, our future, ourselves?

Even as the evidence of climate change and its effects has continued to mount, often tragically, and as an unprecedented number of scientists agree that climate change is a real, human-caused problem, naysayers continue to reject the science and our responsibility to act. A small number of vocal, politically and financially (not scientifically) motivated people claim that climate change doesn’t exist, or that it’s natural and not caused by humans, or that the Earth is actually cooling. They trot out the same long-debunked “evidence” and use scientists to support them, even though these scientists have no expertise in climate change, kind of like asking your vet to diagnose and treat your heart condition.

Yet here we are, still in denial, as the damage accelerates and grows. The latest in the long line of global-warming impacts is the increased chance of severe flooding occurring every few years along our coastlines, east and west, as a result of rising sea levels (“Rising Sea Levels Seen as Threat to Coastal U.S.”). We can even plug in our ZIP code at http://sealevel.climatecentral.org/ and assess the likelihood of flooding in our current or future dream location. But still, upon hearing this, many people are blowing it off: “Oh, well, we have to die sometime,” or “We can move again before it happens.”

These statements come from smart folks in their 50s and 60s who are planning to move as a part of downsizing. Yet anyone pouncing on the “deals” in the Hamptons, the shoreline of the Carolinas, Florida, California, . . . are going to be in deep trouble in the next few decades, before most boomers will pass on. This is a very real threat. To Coasters, it threatens their homes, financial security, and very lives. Why take the chance of having to rebuild your home and your life? Even having to sell and move again seems like a waste of time, in the years when we could be realizing our greatest visions yet.

In fact, this threat would hit all of us in the pocketbook, as taxpayers, not to mention the effects on the family members of those hit by disaster. Even those inland are likely to be cut off from services if a flood knocks out the coast, not to mention the effects a flood would have on food and water availability, and the ripple effect on the environment.

So what now? It’s time to reassess what truly matters. As you figure out what’s next for you, make a list of MUST HAVE criteria, then look at your options to see which ones intersect with your list. Of these options, use all tools and information available to you (like the ZIP code search above if your “what’s next” involves moving) to narrow down your list realistically.

Consider also how you can integrate your vision for the future with ways to work in your local community to improve the future for all of us. We are on the front lines. It is our responsibility to protect the future for the next seven generations. Even though places like New York are taking steps to protect the shoreline, just imagine what happens to the financial solidity of the world if Manhattan is deluged. We have to do more than just build a wall to cower behind. We have to do everything we can to stop, prevent, or reverse the causes of these floods and other natural disasters.

If we keep our heads buried in the sand, we won’t even notice when our future gets washed away—until it’s too late.

Image credit: Michael Wassmer

I agree with many of his excellent points about why cities aren’t exactly user friendly for people in or approaching their Fourth Age (80 years and beyond), and the solutions he offers make a lot of sense. But attracting more people to spend their later years in cities isn’t the answer to this crisis. In fact, I don’t really agree that this is a crisis at all. His perspective is that of “us” taking care of “them,” an outmoded view of older people as a burden, a perspective the boomer generation is likely to turn on its head.

For many people, ease of care simply isn’t as important to them as other factors in where they choose to live. Being in nature, low crime, low cost of living, being near family, smaller community, more space, lots to do to stimulate mind and body that’s easy to get to, clean air and plenty of clean water—these are just a few of the reasons people have for moving out of (or never moving into) urban areas. Many do so knowing full well that the nearest hospital is an hour or two away and that getting around will be more difficult if they reach a point where they can’t drive, but these are simply not as important as the other reasons for living in the suburbs or a rural area. And that’s their choice to make.

Others get the “best” of both worlds by moving out of the cities to retirement communities with onsite care, transportation options, and so forth, but this can be a painful compromise for those who would rather not be isolated from other generations, living only among those with whom they may not have anything in common beyond their age.

I do think it’s high time that we figure out how and where we want to live and what we want that to look like, then come together, all generations, to reinvent our communities—rural, suburban, urban, and everything in between. I’ve been exploring this for years with futurist colleagues and in my journalistic research, and more recently this is becoming a discovery conversation among my cohorts. The topic is buzzing even more today among boomers and matures (late Third Age, 65–80). Many of the ideas we toss around are similar to what Doig suggests for urban communities. What he doesn’t seem to realize is that these are just as workable outside cities.

• Intergenerational cooperatives (apartments, condos, grouped housing) in which the residents trade services—younger neighbors helping with driving, running errands, checking in on people, and so forth, and the older neighbors helping with childcare, cooking meals, business consulting, and other areas of professional expertise (particularly from the many boomers who will still be working).
• Self-sustaining “communes” of like-minded folks of all ages, people in our “tribe,” that is farm-to-table accessible (even in suburban and urban communes).
• Regular visiting health care specialists who see everyone in a building or small community in a single visit.
• Community-owned vans or buses for regular trips to far-off grocery stores, clinics, and so forth.
• “Granny flats,” where a resident stays in her or his home and rents out the rest to a young family.
• Homes built or retrofitted with elegant unobtrusive grab bars, nonslip level flooring, high sink basins, lighting, and so on.
• More rest areas, such as benches, and rest rooms in communities.

These are just a fraction of the possibilities, of course. One key thread in any community, though, is to make it intergenerational. Not only does this help buffer the intense loss and loneliness we tend to encounter in later life, it enables mentorship in both directions—the legacies of older generations and the new perspectives of younger, a stronger community because no members are swept under the rug, and a decrease in the problem of care that Doig was writing about in the first place—a stimulating active community prevents many health problems related to growing older and ensures that someone is always watching out to catch a problem early.

As some of us face this decision first for our own parents, we have the opportunity to start there in rethinking our communities and our families. For some of us, the extended family under one roof might continue to make a comeback. This is certainly happening with the children of boomers and their families staying with their parents because of the economy. And in the past, elders living with their children and grandchildren was common. Finding new ways to work the multigenerational household might be a part of the communities of the future.

And of course, even though the size of the boomer generation does mean more people retiring at one time, this generation is also less likely to retire at the usual time—or at all. I’ve written quite a bit about boomers working past retirement, full time, part time, as entrepreneurs, professionals, consultants, volunteers, and so forth. This is not only a necessity for many in this economy, it is also a desire. Post-50 women and men are the most active, long-living generation yet. Many of us don’t particularly want to retire at all. We’d rather reinvent work to adapt to our changing lives, changing bodies, and renewed focus on what really matters to us. In other words, for many years past the usual retirement age, we will be taking care of ourselves just fine, thank you very much.

The communities of the future do need to be redesigned, but not by younger generations solving their “problem” of what to do with the older population. All generations, especially boomers, need to be active in creating new ways of living and working together that reflect the changing workplace, the changing economy, and the changing face of aging in America.

What does your ideal community look like?