Somehow, instead of holding on to the lifelong identity that was slipping away from him, he managed to redefine it. He moved his line in the sand. Th… - Atul Gawande

You may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

He moved his line in the sand. This is what it means to have autonomy — you may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

This is what it means to have autonomy - you may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

We are increasingly the generals who march the soldiers onward, saying all the while, “You let me know when you want to stop.” All-out treatment, we tell the incurably ill, is a train you can get off at any time — just say when. But for most patients and their families we are asking too much. They remain riven by doubt and fear and desperation; some are deluded by a fantasy of what medical science can achieve. Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once. They have no experience to draw on. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come — and escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want.

Courage, Laches responds, “is a certain endurance of the soul.

THIS IS NOT, to say the least, an appealing prospect. People naturally prefer to avoid the subject of their decrepitude. There have been dozens of bestselling books on aging, but they tend to have titles such as Younger Next Year, The Fountain of Age, Ageless, or — my favorite — The Sexy Years. Still, there are costs to averting our eyes from the realities. We put off dealing with the adaptations that we need to make as a society. And we blind ourselves to the opportunities that exist to change the individual experience of aging for the better.