SUMMARY

Opus Optimus: A MODEL FOR RENEWING LIFE’S LATER YEARS

Kind and thoughtful individuals commonly think of their lives, looking forward and looking back, imagining their legacies for love ones following their passing.  The thoughts can be sources of illumination or confusion, determination or hesitancy, hope or regret.  Enter Opus Optimus: A Model for Renewing Life’s Later Years  and its framework for planning, resolve, and commitments to make the critical late-life segments meaningful and transcendent by considering the love we feel for fellow life-journeyers and the wholeness of our planet.  The Opus Optimus model offers ideas from the philosophical to the practical, all referenced to the extraordinarily positive and non-discriminatory effects that near death experiences (NDEs) have had on humans, possibly for hundreds if not thousands of years.  Thus, we read, for example of late life decisions regarding retirement and its adjunct physical, emotional, and financial challenges.  

Thereafter, we see how these practical considerations may assist with the fundamental Opus Optimus elements (e.g., finding goodness and value in all days, beneficence) and supporting Opus Optimus virtues (e.g., reverence and humility, unconditional love, creativity).  Throughout, the book offers short profiles of exemplars who have demonstrated elements and principles of the Opus Optimus way, even though the model is being codified for the first time through this work. When integrated through all of its elements, principles, and the creativity of its exemplars, the reader should realize personalized adaptations for making life’s later years as rich as one’s commitments and dedication to serving others and our planet as well as those who will become the beneficiaries of our love throughout their own lives.

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