Thanks for posting the link, Nancy, and, Una, I'll be cheering for your sister at my GF's annual Oscar party on Sunday.
I love what Una said here: "We tend to think of those attributes as something to attain, and instead of looking at other choices as a gain, we think of the results in terms of "giving something up". Not necessarily a good way to think, but a direct product of who we have become as a culture."
In fact, the subject of the film is even more beautiful, because she believed in herself and followed her true nature. This reminds me of a couple of shorts I saw this week on mindfulness in a San Francisco middle school and at a senior center.
After the film, a man commented on aging and our perceptions of the physical (seeing an old person rather than the whole person) as not so much aging, but "experiencing." He said we all only have so many steps we take in life, and how nice to see our lives as ongoing experiences rather than what we have done in our youth. It's a lifetime of experiences, if modern culture didn't have such a powerful way of redefining these things. Wow! There's a lot to think about here on this thread.
