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Musings Report 2018-35 8-31-18 The Brevity of Life and the Process of Changing our Lives
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For those who are new to the Musings reports: they are basically a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
Welcome to August's MUS (Margins of the Unfiltered Swamp)
The last Musings of the month is a free-form exploration of the reaches of the fecund swamp that is the source of the blog, Musings and my books.
The Brevity of Life and the Process of Changing our Lives
My friend GFB recently sent me a quote from Paul Bowles' novel "The Sheltering Sky" (1949). If you are under the age of 30, it may not have the same impact that it has on those of us on the downhill slope of life.
"Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
GFB reported that he came across this quote in a film documentary about composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, Coda. (The trailer certainly makes me want to see the documentary.) Sakamoto composed the soundtrack for a film version of The Sheltering Sky, and was so fascinated by the quote he used the spoken words in one of his music pieces.
Review: ‘Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda’ Shows a Composer Attuned to Nature (New York Times)
The quote triggered a week of contemplation, some of which I'll try to encapsulate here in the hopes that it adds to your own contemplations.
The song "When I'm Sixty-Four" came to mind. First composed by Paul McCartney when he was an unknown 16 year old, it was released on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band album (May 16, 1967) when he was 24.
The lyrics anticipate aging with sentimental whimsy, understandable from the point of view of a teen. I first heard the song at age 13, and now I'm 64, and what strikes me is how incomprehensibly distant 64 is to a 14-year old (or 16-year old), and how incomprehensibly fast the 50 years fly between 14 and 64 from the perspective of the 64-year old.
Those of us who are fortunate enough to reach 64 and have parents in their mid-to-late 80s know first-hand that if we're still healthy, being 64 is the spring of youth compared to being 85 or older. (My Mom is 89 and reports that she really started to lose her energy after 85. Needless to say, that gives us hope for a benign old age.)
At 64, one naturally contemplates the growing list of friends, relatives and colleagues who didn't make it to 64--some barely made it to 50--and those whose life ended a few years beyond 64.
So what do we do with the knowledge that life is brief, and the moment of our passing is unknowable? We are often counseled to be grateful, and gratitude is indeed an essential solvent for taking life for granted.
Beyond a contemplation of what we have to be grateful for, there is always a mindful appreciation of the present, and as longtime correspondent Bart D. recently reminded me, this can be as simple as taking the time to stop at places and scenes that one has passed for decades but never taken the time to actually stop and enjoy.
I wrote a blog post on this topic in 2016:
A Thanksgiving Suggestion: Stop at That Charming Place You've Zoomed Past for Years
The Bowles quote also made me consider the process of changing our lives, a process that requires greater sacrifices and effort as the inertia of our default settings grows ever heavier with age.
Everything requires effort and sacrifice to maintain: houses, yards, relationships, friendships, organizations, enterprises, roadways, social contracts--everything. If effort flags, things fall apart.
This is what sobers me about aging: the weight of our default settings rises while our ability to generate the willpower, effort and sacrifice needed to change our life declines.
When we think about the stages of life, the trajectories of our inertia/default settings and our ability to make sacrifices and exert effort define each stage.
When we're young and just out of high school or college, we have very little baggage (unless we married and had children at a tender age), and so the effort to change--to move, change jobs, etc.--is significant but modest compared to future costs.
This is when people pursue their dreams, and rightly so: start a cafe, move to NYC or LA to break into the arts, film, music, etc., or move to Silicon Valley (or equivalent) to seek one's fortune in today's tech gold rush.
Few gain the success they hoped for in these markets, and so most move on to some place and career that can sustain a livelihood, marriage, family, career or enterprise.
Then a decade or so hence, the inertia has piled up and we sense our ability to make a radical course change is fading as the costs of change--the effort and sacrifice necessary to throw aside the inertia and gamble on a different path--is steepening.
We sense it's now or never, and this can manifest as a mid-life/mid-career crisis.
The experience of this crisis varies with each individual, but in some way, the individual discovers they cannot continue doing what they're doing--they run out of the ability to keep making the sacrifices and effort required to keep their current life from falling apart.
In this crisis, there is no choice but to chance a major course change and risk the storms of the unknown.
In an astonishingly brief blur, we reach the age of retirement or if not retirement, of re-appraisal of our inertia/default settings and our ability to turn the ship of our life onto a new course.
This re-appraisal often feels like our last chance to have a more fulfilling life or pursue a long-suppressed dream. It's little wonder than the retirement of one spouse can trigger a divorce, as one or the other partner decides this is their last chance to jettison an unsatisfactory relationship and seek another way of living, despite the risks and the losses such wrenching changes incur.
What haunts me at 64 is the idea (shared by my friend A.G.) that many of the best ideas lie in the graveyard--ideas that were never developed and recorded and so they died with their originator. In this context, if one has ideas--for inventions, music, fiction, art, enterprise, organizations--the question in one's 60s becomes: If not now, when?
The answer, if we cannot muster up one final push of effort to make whatever sacrifices are needed to get our ideas out into the world before we die--is never.
Observation suggests that few people manage to change the course of their lives in old age; the ability to conjure up effort and willpower fades and so things fall apart.
I'll end with a quote attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci:
"Don’t underestimate this idea of mine, which calls to mind that it would not be too much of an effort to pause sometimes to look into these stains on walls, the ashes from the fire, the clouds, the mud, or other similar places. If these are well contemplated, you will find fantastic inventions that awaken the genius of the painter to new inventions, such as compositions of battles, animals, and men, as well as diverse composition of landscapes, and monstrous things, as devils and the like. These will do you well because they will awaken genius with this jumble of things."
From Left Field
The POW Cover-Up -- from 2010, but worth reading if you haven't come across the overwhelming evidence that hundreds of US prisoners of war were left behind in Vietnam and Laos due to the US refusal to pay a few billion dollars in a "redevelopment / reparations" bribe. I have read other accounts based on DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) and NSA (National Security Agency) intelligence; reports of insiders have circulated for decades. Another tragic story of betrayal that embarrasses our leadership so it's suppressed for decades. Unfortunately, John McCain was part of that leadership and hence his suppression of evidence that POWs were left behind. The suppression spares few if any of our political, diplomatic and military leaders. It doesn't say much for President Reagan that he reportedly had an opportunity to open negotiations on the POW/cash swap in 1981 and did not do so. (via LaserLefty)
Too Little Too Late’: Bankruptcy Booms Among Older Americans
How the World Elites are Going to Betray us: Lessons from Roman History
Five years in, China’s Belt and Road looks like a giant debt trap (via Cheryl A.) -- the cheerleaders are silent on this....
An Allegory for Our Time
Are there too many restaurants in Boston and not enough diners? -- too many restaurants in every metropolis--a painful thinning awaits the next recession....
Paradise lost? What happened to Ireland's model eco-village -- those of modest means priced out of eco-paradise...
Hothouse Earth Is Merely the Beginning of the End -- drought can trigger mass movements of people and geopolitical conflicts...
Greece is finally set to exit bailouts this month, but a local told me the 'recovery' hides a brutal reality for most Greeks
In 2008, America Stopped Believing in the American Dream--nothing new, but a good summary...
The Unrepeatable Architectural Moment of Yugoslavia’s 'Concrete Utopia' -- weird often brutalist structures...
‘Justice Is Not Neutral’: Rutherford Institute Issues In-Depth Report of Most Significant Rulings From the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2017-2018 Term (via LaserLefty)
"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it." Judge Learned Hand
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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