I\u2019ll be travelling Saturday and Sunday.\u00a0 I\u2019ve got a meeting with the boys up in northern New England.\u00a0 I\u2019m driving up Saturday morning and driving home Sunday late morning.\u00a0 Then I have two long days at work Monday and Tuesday.\u00a0 So, posts will be on a best-efforts basis.<\/p>\n
But my life has always been (from my point of view) on a best-efforts basis.\u00a0 None of us has much (if any) control over the vicissitudes of life.\u00a0 The weather, our health, the actions of family, friends and especially enemies and total strangers intervene to make the best laid plans of mice and men playthings for the gods.<\/p>\n
So, all that is true.\u00a0 But working our way through all of the twists and turns of life is infinitely compelling.\u00a0 Even if we have a mundane, even boring week we hear about someone\u2019s disaster, someone\u2019s tragedy.\u00a0 Someone sentenced to death, someone struck down with awful injury.\u00a0 And when these are good friends; good people, you\u2019re stunned for a second, \u201cHow could that be?\u00a0 I just saw him.\u00a0 He was solid and animated; busy!\u00a0 How could he be dead or dying?\u201d\u00a0 But very soon he\u2019s gone.\u00a0 Pretty soon you struggle to remember details of recent visits.\u00a0 People fade out of our lives.<\/p>\n
Well, it\u2019s a matter of bandwidth.\u00a0 I can only concentrate my mind on a very few things at a time.\u00a0 So, the periphery has to stay there at the edge.\u00a0 If someone I haven\u2019t seen in almost exactly fifty years dies, even tragically, only a moment can be spared to acknowledge the loss.\u00a0 You can only hope that the last fifty years were packed with significance and striving for some lasting impact on the people around him.<\/p>\n
I guess what\u2019s important for me is to reflect on whether I have achieved any lasting impact on those around me.\u00a0 I know of at least one affirmative.\u00a0 I have impacted Camera Girl in a lasting way.\u00a0 She has been irritated by me for fifty years now.\u00a0 That\u2019s got to be significant to her!\u00a0 To a lesser extent I\u2019ve left some impact on my children and an even more tenuous impact on their children.\u00a0 I\u2019ve had friends and family in my life.\u00a0 That counts for something.<\/p>\n
Well, I guess it\u2019s the nature of life that as we age, we begin to anticipate death.\u00a0 How will it intersect with life?\u00a0 How much warning will there be?\u00a0 I\u2019ve known some people who were terrified of it.\u00a0 I\u2019ve known others who were serenely calm about it.\u00a0 I remember many years ago as a teenager I was working in a hospital and I asked a middle-aged man why he was in the hospital.\u00a0 He smiled at me and said, \u201cI\u2019ve got a touch of the C.\u201d\u00a0 I looked at his chart later and he had metastatic bone cancer.\u00a0 He died a day later.\u00a0 But he took it all in stride.\u00a0 So, there is a continuum of human attitude toward mortality.<\/p>\n
Recent events around me have got me thinking of such things.\u00a0 I used to say that the break even point in life is fifty.\u00a0 If you were allowed fifty years of healthy life then you couldn\u2019t rail against fate as having played you dirty.\u00a0 If you didn\u2019t dawdle fifty would allow you to raise a family and leave a mark on the world.\u00a0 Of course, as you get older you can see how sixty and seventy enhance the satisfaction of seeing the future come to fruition.\u00a0 But the fifty number still makes sense to me as a break-even point.<\/p>\n
Okay, enough maudlin sentiment.\u00a0 Mortality is a fact of life.\u00a0 But every once in a while, something around you catches your attention and you realize that the stage is changing.\u00a0 Faces appear and then disappear.\u00a0 You have to acknowledge the losses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ll be travelling Saturday and Sunday.\u00a0 I\u2019ve got a meeting with the boys up in northern New England.\u00a0 I\u2019m driving up Saturday morning and driving<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3366,1263],"tags":[4788,4754],"class_list":["post-33700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-in-dunwich","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","tag-death","tag-life"],"yoast_head":"\n