Life After Life and Before

I doubt that the hereafter will hold anything as engrossing as our quadrennial presidential elections; as absorbing as the cultural and political clashes between the Eastern and Western worlds; as portentous as the debates about global warming and stem cell research, as much fun as the World Series and the Super bowl. Nor is the next world likely to offer the intriguing, awesome, ludicrous, shameful comic and noble manifestations of human conduct reported in the newspapers every day.

I would like to live long enough to know if there will be a cure for cancer; if there is life on other planets; if terrorism will be wiped out; how history will treat George W. Bush; how high and how low women's skirts will go; and if songs will ever sing again. I'd like to be around if and when the limits to the universe are discovered and when physicists find the tiniest bit of matter that can possibly exist. Will Social Security be saved and will scientists learn how memory works? There, from the cosmic to the comic, from the crises of life to its circuses, are reasons enough to be affectionately attached to living and living and living.

Have a Happy 4th of July!

More Later, Joe

Just Like Starting Over

My seventies were for summing up. I thought about the person I had become and what I meant to others. I thought about the after-life of fatherhood when the true pleasure of being a father is found in happiness for what the children have become, for what they have done and how they have grown in the doing.

In the nineties one must find new motivations for going on. The goals I had set for myself earlier had given me a destination. Goal setting is an art form, combining inspiration with self-expression. Art is said to mirror life. Well, a symphony ends with a flourish, a drama with an internal logic, a song climaxes on notes of beauty, a ballet ends with grace. The mirror must be rigged to break up in one's nineties. Then, as I tugged at this paradox, the solution came to me. Life is hugely interesting. As a man in passion allows himself to get involved with a woman, I, overcome with interest, understand that I want to live on.

More Later, Joe

When I'm 94?

In a few months I will be ninety-four years of age. No wonder I have been thinking about how long I want to live.

Thoughts like that sneak up on you. When I "retired" from my career (I have had three more careers since then), it felt like playing tennis with the net down. For the first time in my life there were no expectations of me. No one could fire me, flunk me or flay me. But now that I am in the nineties, there isn't even a net. What's different now is that all previous decades had a purpose and a destination. The twenties were for completing education (Master Degree), starting a career, falling in love and getting married. .

The thirties were for raising children and getting ahead in work. The forties and fifties were the time to consolidate gains and accomplishments, as well as to find new purposes so that the years ahead would not grow stale. The sixties were for final spurts and then winding down and wrapping up a career.

More Later, Joe