When she recently crossed into a new decade of life, Reeve Lindbergh – author of several novels, nonfiction books and children's books – began exploring for herself a famous pronouncement by her mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh: 60 is "the youth of old age." Her musings on this subject are contained in a wonderful new collection of essays, Forward From Here: Leaving Middle Age – and Other Unexpected Adventures. The book's title leaves no doubt as to Lindbergh's viewpoint on growing older. "I am prepared for delight," she writes in the opening essay.

Speaking from the farm in Vermont which has been her home for the past 35 years and where she and her husband, Nat Tripp, still raise chickens and sheep, Lindbergh revels in what she terms the joys of growing older. "It has to do with a kind of freedom that you feel as you get older," she says. "You don't have to worry about being what one of my mother's friends called 'The Belle of Newport.' . . . It isn't all about what I see in the mirror." Whatever drawbacks Lindbergh may find in growing older – everything from the aches and pains of the body to the aching of the soul when a loved one is gone – she never loses sight of what is important to her. "Getting old is what I want to do," she writes. "Getting old, whatever the years bring, is better by far than not getting old. . . . I am going to be sixty years old on my next birthday. This seems very old to me on some days. Then my friend Nardi Campion, almost ninety, writes about aging with the words, 'Oh, to be eighty-seven again!' and my thinking changes. If I can't be twelve years old forever, then when I grow up I want to be Nardi."

Lindbergh's sense of humor spills over into much of Forward From Here, whether in a hilarious account of capturing a large snapping turtle as a gift for her husband or in the description of her friend Noel Perrin's adventures with the Department of Motor Vehicles. One of the strengths of the essays is the way Lindbergh uses everyday occurrences or small rites of passage as springboards to larger issues. Musing on another friend's habitual lateness becomes a question – can we give ourselves permission to go through life more slowly? The joy of a friend's annual visit at Thanksgiving becomes the universal grief we feel from death, grief manifested by the inability of Lindbergh's husband to make Brussels sprouts, the friend's favorite dish, for their next holiday meal. Helping her mother downsize becomes a metaphor for the mental clutter we often carry around for no good reason; it is also a prelude to what will inevitably come to pass. And yet, even in situations such as disposing of someone's ashes, she can find humor.

Laughter is an integral part of life for Lindbergh, and one she is gratified to see echoed in the senior citizens she teaches in her writing workshops. "They're very funny. In spite of everything else, they're living. Everybody has losses, and aches and pains, but there's no loss of sense of humor, no loss of enjoyment of life, and it's fun to be with those ladies. You look at them and think, being a little old lady isn't so bad!" And there's another advantage to gray hair and wrinkles Lindbergh hadn't anticipated. "I think for me it's such fun because I know I look like my mother. I knew her at this age. It makes me feel as if she's back again, a little bit." Lindbergh wrote about her mother's final months of life in 2001's No More Words. It was from her mother that she learned the habit of daily journaling, something she continues to this day. "It's not so much that it captures anything, although I suppose that's the way you think about it, but it's that you're marking your own life in a way that seems important," she says.

Reading her old journals also is a reflection of how Lindbergh has changed and the ways in which she has remained the same. "As a younger woman, I think I was much harder on myself for not getting things done, not doing things well – sort of a sense of berating myself quite a bit. And yet, I've looked at my mother's diaries about the same time, and she did the same thing, so that's interesting," she laughs. "And I think also, as a younger woman with kids and a career starting, you're apt to have pretty high expectations of yourself and your life. It's very different now. . . .

The kids seem to be OK and the work seems to be more or less OK. I don't have that pressure that I see in many young women." The final essay in Forward From Here is about Lindbergh's late father, famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. A postscript of sorts to an earlier memoir, Under a Wing, it was written after she learned her father had three secret families in Europe. Having listened to his many lectures on proper moral and ethical behavior while growing up, she now found herself with a bevy of half-brothers and sisters and a revised image of the man who lived by a different set of standards than those he taught his children. "I raged against his duplicitous character, his personal conduct, the years of deception and hypocrisy," she writes in Forward From Here.

Once her anger cooled, however, her viewpoint changed. The fact that her father had four families which he kept apart now seems to her "unutterably lonely." "Yes, that's the truth," she says. "People say, 'Oh yeah, right! All these women and all that.' But what a restless, lonely spirit. And so much secrecy. It makes me sad, actually, and not for us and not for the other families, because I know them now and they're OK. But for him. Unutterable loneliness." Although Forward From Here is Reeve Lindbergh's personal exploration of growing older, it is a book for all age groups to enjoy and appreciate. Its themes are universal and her opinions both realistic and comforting. As she writes, "Everything happens in life. Some of what happens is terrible. We know this is true . . . But there is another truth available. . . .

The living of a life, day by day and moment by moment, is also wild with joy."

Rebecca Bain was the host for many years of the public radio author interview program, "The Fine Print." She lives in Nashville.

For true believers who wish confidently upon stars and blow out their birthday candles with sure expectation, Noelle Oxenhandler's new memoir will surely please – while perhaps winning over a nay-saying wish skeptic or two. The Wishing Year: A House, A Man, My Soul follows a year in the author's life as she decides to try "Putting It Out There." An essayist and Buddhist practitioner, Oxenhandler is facing 50, with a painful divorce and spiritual upheaval behind her, when she finds herself ready for change. She openly, though doubtfully, plunges into "wishcraft" and declares three desires: to purchase a house, find a new man and heal her soul. With honesty, humor and soulfulness, the author chronicles her year-long effort to "desire, ask, believe, receive," exploring the ancient mysteries of wishing, facing her ambivalence about desire and negotiating the intricacies of focus and receptivity. Wishes can come true, she tells BookPage, with a bit of "vision, hope and hard work."

As an essayist who loves logic and rigorous argument, what led you to try your hand at the uncertain mysteries of wishing?

After having lived in the cold, gray snowbelt of upstate New York for 15 years, when I returned to California – which is where I grew up – it felt already as though a great wish had come true. It seemed natural, then, to reclaim other lost loves – like painting – and that led to my first real experiment in wishing.

How did you reconcile your spiritual background with your desire for material things?

I think there actually was a kind of conversion experience that happened for me in the course of my experiment. In various ways I was led to shed my previous incarnation as a "wish snob" and to open myself to the touching humanness of wishing for things – not just spiritual things, but very concrete and tangible things too. Now I've come to feel that so long as we stay aware of the relative importance of things, there's really no contradiction between wanting "a happy death" and wanting a puppy dog (to use an example from John F. Kennedy's childhood).

Though your three heartfelt wishes came true, you still take wishing with "a grain of salt." What is "the grain of salt that hasn't dissolved" for you?

I think the grain of salt is more temperamental than anything. I simply do have a skeptical nature, and I'm superstitious about courting too much earthly happiness! And then I really do believe that the greatest happiness of all comes when we are able to wish for what is. One of the supreme experiences in my life occurred years ago during a 100-day training period in a Zen monastery in northern California. One extremely hot day I was assigned to the utterly disgusting job of feeding rotting garbage into a compost machine, which then sent this stinking splatter all over me! For the first three hours, I thought I was in hell. It was so bad that at some point, something inside me shifted and I let go of all resistance. After the noon break, I found myself rushing back to the garbage heap as though I was going to meet a lover! I couldn't wait to get back there because I had discovered the incredible sense of freedom that comes when we realize that we can be happy no matter what our circumstances.

The Wishing Year could very well kick off a national wishing movement. Do you believe that, employed collectively, wishing could have greater positive impacts and benefits for humankind?

Yes, I really do believe that. In my now 50-plus years of existence, I feel that I personally have never witnessed such a globally dark and dangerous time – a time when the very fate of the earth is in question. The temptation to despair is so very great – and the act of wishing is a very powerful antidote to despair. But not passive wishing. What's needed is that good old-fashioned combination of forward-looking vision, hope and hard work.

Do you plan to continue practicing "wishcraft"? If so, what will you wish for when you blow candles out on your birthday cake?

Well, I really don't want to sound like a "wish snob," but right now – and to a large extent thanks to my wishing year – I'm feeling as though most of my significant personal desires have been met. So, apart from my wishes from this fragile planet of ours, I'm wishing that those who are younger than me and facing big transitions – in my own life, that would be my daughter, my sister and my students – will find happiness in their unfolding paths. As to my own more tangible desires for myself: I confess that when I blew out the candles on my last birthday cake, I wished that The Wishing Year would do well!