Aging Capriciously

Is it your time to go or the pilots time to go? I had an aunt who refused to fly anywhere no matter the circumstances or situation. I was young and naïve and tried reasoning with her. I told her about the airline safety facts and how airlines per mile traveled were much safer than automobiles. None of my rational persuasion had any influence. Finally, I resorted to an irrational or emotional argument. I said “well, if it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go.” Without batting an eyelash, she replied “yeah, but what if it’s the pilots time to go.” Stumped by this counter-intuitive logic, I gave up. Was this a battle between fatalism and realism or between rationalism and irrationalism? Was my aunt the fatalist or was she the realist? Was she rationale or irrational? Can you prevent your death by playing it safe or is your death already in the cards?

In the story “Appointment in Samarra”, a sheik finds out that Death is looking for him in the marketplace. He grabs a horse and rides quickly away to another town called Samarra, only to meet Death there. Somewhat surprised, the sheik asks Death what he is doing there and receives the reply that “I had an appointment to meet you here today.”

Can we escape fate or are our fates already decided? Would it make a difference in how you lived your life if you knew the answer to this question? Would you take more chances or less? Would you ride a motorcycle, skydive, scuba dive or climb mountains? Do you act like you could die tomorrow or do you act like you will live forever? How many risks do you take in your life? Do you think you are a fatalist or a realist? Are you trying to escape your “appointment in Samarra”? Or are you ignoring your appointment?

Dinner time – “The word “dinner” comes from the French word dîner, the “chief repast of the day”, (Wikipedia). It is a time for family and bonding in some homes. In others, it is simply a time of eating. Dinner time in many cultures is associated with ceremony and a degree of formality. There once was a time in the U.S when people dressed up to come to dinner on a regular basis. Traditionally, the head of the household said a blessing and then dinner was served. Increasingly, in our strapped and harried culture, dinner time has become a time simply to grab a quick microwave meal and catch the latest sports event on TV. The time for socializing and sharing the day’s experiences has been traded for time in front of the TV watching the news. Mom’s homemade cooking has been traded for Mrs. Field cookies and Papa John’s Pizza. Dinner is simply a time to stock up on high fat, high calorie pre-processed foods. Witness the current obesity in American society.

You can yearn for the past, but the past is not always as we remember it. Dinner time in some historic periods has been a time of fasting and even deprivation. There simply was not enough food to go around and many would go hungry. A blessing would have been said to simply help find food and to survive until food could be found. Today there are still places in the world where people do not have enough to eat. The following facts are from the site: “Bread for the World” ( http://www.bread.org )

• 854 million people across the world are hungry, up from 852 million a year
ago.
• Every day, almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes–one child
every five seconds.

In essence, hunger is the most extreme form of poverty, where individuals or families cannot afford to meet their most basic need for food. The figures above come from studies done by Global organizations working to reduce poverty. Perhaps in twenty years or so we will have made a larger dent in these figures. Perhaps we will not, if the world has to keep struggling with war and terrorism, if we do not see the urgency or we do not make it a global priority to help reduce poverty. The value of sitting together at a well stocked dinner table gets trumped by the value of security and freedom from oppression. Have you ever wondered why we cannot have both? How do we bring this choice upon ourselves in the first place? Are war and poverty inevitable? Have we accepted that they are beyond our control? Is it simply our nature as human beings to have to suffer? Would we really want a world that was like the Garden of Eden? Or would we soon become bored and start throwing apples at each other?

Have you ever sat down at dinner and not had enough to eat? Have you ever passed the plate so someone else could eat and you could not? Have you ever passed the plate to help others in the world to eat? Is dinner time a time of joy for you or a time of strife? What would help to make it more joyful? Would more food help? Would more socializing and talking to each other help? Would doing more to help those who have no food help?

Do you measure journey time or measure destination time? I have a patch on one of my jeans which says “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” How often in life do we get so wound up with what we are going to do, or where we want to go that we forget the joy in the journey. Our destination, our goals become so overpowering that we forget the process, we forget to live each day. We live in the future and never enjoy the minutes which are happening one at a time. We become so consumed with our purpose or goals that we ignore the flowers and birds that surround us. We forget to smell the roses. The famous atheist and socialist Emma Goldman said “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.” We take ourselves and our lives too serious. How often have you known someone who upon experiencing their first heart attack and surviving it suddenly decided to reprioritize what was important in their life? This wakeup call for mortality helped them to realize that they were missing out on what life is meant to be. Why take a trip if you cannot enjoy the journey?

Every so often when I was growing up, my father would take us on a trip. It was usually to visit my grandparents in Alabama. I hated those trips. My father would drive like a maniac, watching the clock every minute to see how he could cut minutes or seconds off the trip. He was obsessed with how fast he could get there. Sometimes we would sleep in the car through the night. We would often pass restrooms because he would not waste time stopping. When he finally got around to it, we would pee at the side of the road. There was no stopping for road side rests. No stopping for any sights or marvels that the world might put up for display. My father’s sole and unremitting quest was to see how fast he could get us from NY to Alabama.

These trips were hated by me, my mother and my siblings. They were never fun nor do I remember one minute of pleasure on any of these trips. It was not until I was 13 that I had a good trip down south. My mother decided to take a train with my two sisters and leave early and my father and I were going to go with my Uncle Paul and his father (Pop Hofer). My uncle was not going to let my father spoil a perfectly good trip by ignoring the sites along the way. For the first time in any of these trips, we stopped. We stopped in Washington D.C. to see the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. We stopped at Luray Caverns and visited the underground caves. We stopped at Ruby Falls to see the underground waterfall. We stopped at Lookout Mountain and rode the train up and down. We stopped to eat along the way. We stopped at a motel and stayed the night. I will never forget this trip or my uncle for helping me to find a life along the way. I learned then that the journey can be as important as the destination.

What if you get there and you hate it? What if you have not learned to enjoy life along the way? What if you never get there? What about the people who had a first heat attack and it was their last? Do you stop to smell the roses? Do you stop to pick raspberries? Is your life so busy that you don’t enjoy the journey? Do you have to have a “heart attack” to teach you to enjoy the journey?

Every now and then:

“Every now and then I get a little bit tired of listening to the sound
of my tears,
Turn around,
Every now and then I get a little bit nervous that the best of all the
years have gone by.” (Total Eclipse of the Heart, Bonnie Tyler)

I love the words in this song. They help me to reflect on those things in my life which seem to happen “every now and then.” I have decided to make a list of my most important ones. My list is as follows:

• Every now and then, I get wistful, thinking of the people I once loved.
• Every now and then, I think of the friends and relatives long gone.
• Every now and then, I feel sad about the things I cannot undo.
• Every now and then, I go back to memories and places I will never see again.
• Every now and then, every now and then, every now and then, I just get
stuck.

We all have our every “now and then.” There is a certain melancholy to my list. Perhaps your list would be more joyful or fun. What are the things that pop up for you “every now and then?” Can you make a list? Why do you think these things keep popping up? Do they represent regrets or unfinished business? Do you think they would come up less often if you could somehow put them to rest? What stops you?

What would Aristotle, Plato and Socrates say about time to Confucius and Lao Tzu? What if the greatest philosophers of the Western world met the greatest philosophers of the Eastern world? What would they say to each other about time? Confucius emphasized doing the proper thing at the proper time. Lao Tzu believed that time was created in our minds and to say “I don’t have time” was to really say “I don’t want to.” Socrates would have asked “why do you think time is in your minds? Could time not be in our hearts?” Aristotle would have pointed out that the planets, stars, and earth all do their own thing independent of what humans believe or want. Aristotle defined time as a kind of ‘number of change’ with respect to the before and after (Ursula Coope, “Time for Aristotle,” 2005, Oxford online Monographs). By this time, Plato, totally exasperated would note that “no human thing is of serious importance.” “Thus, why waste time quibbling here over what time is or is not, let us go find a tavern and have a drink together.” And so the philosophers all went off in search of a tavern. Legend has it they spent the rest of the day drinking and making fools of themselves with the young women in the bar who could not understand what they were talking about. Well, such is the folly of most men when their minds meet their basic instincts and needs.

My question for you and all philosophers is: “does time rule your life or does instinct and nature rule your life?” Do you live according to the clock and logic or do you live according to your feelings and instincts? What most guides your choice of activities and times? Are you a thinking person or a feeling person? What if you could switch? How would your life be different?

Is God time? God is perfection. God is omnipotent. God is omniscient. God could build the universe in seven days. Did God create time or is God Time? What if God was like a giant pacemaker. All the beatings of each heart, all the changes of nature, all the changes in humanity governed by a God with infinite pacemaker capabilities. Everything that is going to happen is already known. Each act in the universe already scripted in God’s timepiece. All events are pre-determined. Some people would call this determinism and say it has no place in the freewill that God gave humans. Other philosophers would disagree and say that determinism and free-will can coexist. (See Bea Best: “A Case for Freewill and Determinism,” http://www.benbest.com/philo/freewill.html)

If God was time, it would explain many things that we never seem to understand. Accidents and random events that do not make sense in the short term might make more sense when understood on a cosmic level. Perhaps we could understand why justice seems to occur very slowly but nevertheless inevitably. God does not forget, there is just a time and place for everything. If we could look at God’s schedule we would be able to foretell all that is to come and perhaps comprehend why things unfold as they do. If God was time, we would not have to worry about the lateness or earliness of anything, nor would we worry that the world was going in the wrong direction or the wrong political parties were in control. According to God, things would happen for the best in the long-term.

We puny humans cannot understand time on a cosmic infinite scale. We are constantly left wondering as to the complexity and strangeness of the universe. Even our own lives and actions constantly surprise and befuddle us. Why do we act like we do, why do others act like they do? Most of the universe is like a giant jigsaw puzzle that we just can not figure out. All of our theories and hypotheses and scientific findings cannot account for this infinite puzzle that seems to strangely unfold before our eyes. It is like a play with most of the action happening unseen off stage. We never know what will happen next or why it will happen. We are just content to say “its time to go.” Do you think God is time? Can you understand what you are about or why you were put on this earth? Do you think you serve a larger cause or are you just a random event?

What is time? Do we even know what time is? Is it the passing of the seasons, the snow falling, our bodies aging or the leaves turning? Is it the sun rising and the moon going through phases? Is it the lines that grow in my face as the days, weeks and months pass into years? Is it my cell phone, my digital PDA or my analog wristwatch becoming obsolete? Is it my alarm clock, the radio, the TV or the five o’clock news telling me the time of day? Is time something you feel or sense? Do you even believe in something called time? Can you feel it or touch it or is it just in your mind? How do you know what time really is or do you need to care? Do you want to know what time it is when you are on vacation or during the weekends? Do you wear a watch for style or function? Do you take life one day at a time or do you plan your life months in advance?

What if time stopped? What if the word time did not exist and you had never heard of the idea of time? What would a life without time and all the ways we measure it be like? What if we had no schedules and no rules for “being on time?” What if there were no birthdays, anniversaries, holidays or special days to remember time? What if we had no place to go where we had to be on time? What if there were no planes, ships or buses that left “on time?”

Can you conceive of a world without time? What if our clocks all stopped for just one day? What time would you get up today if there was “no time?” How would you live today if there was no place to be on time? Would your life be different if you could forget the concept of time or if time did not exist? What if you could just do things over and over again until you got them right? Does the concept of time help you to live a better life?

Are my blogs on time timeless? As I have worked on the reflections and ideas in these blogs, I have wondered about how timeless or not timeless they will be. Will they speak to other cultures if translated into their language? Will they be readable 25 or 250 years from now? Will the ideas, questions, comments and theories still be interesting and thought provoking long after I am dead? Or will this just be another collection of faddish ideas and my blogs soon relegated to the bottom of the “used blog” pile?

How long will my blogs be readable and how many people will really find value in my blogs? Will future generations coming upon these blogs, still think they are worth reading and reflecting on? From my current perspective, the readings in these blogs should still be useful whether you read them today, tomorrow or a hundred years from now. But of course, we all have blinders on and how can I know the future or what needs, wants, desires and problems people will be dealing with 100 or 200 years from now? Today, these issues and ideas seem meaningful and important. Tomorrow, they may just be another set of antique and quaint thoughts. Someone in the year 2200 coming upon this blog may wonder about how simple and naïve people were in the 21st century.

A second question I have pondered while writing these blogs deals with how many times you could read my reflections and still get any value out of them? Or how many times, you will need to read them before you get any value out of them? I have often read something several times before the light bulbs went on and I understood what the author was getting at. There are many questions in my blogs for you to answer.

Have you really been taking the time to answer these questions or do you just read the reflections and skip the answers? What if you did answer all of the questions? Do you think you would get more out of these blogs? Is it too late now or could you go back and start over if you have been skipping the questions? Would these blogs be more valuable to you if you did answer all of the questions? Have you found any value in answering the questions? Do you think you will ever read this blog again? Why or why not? Send me your opinions; I would love to hear from you. I notice my counter stands at 135, not exactly reaching the entire human race, but someone is out there and I hope to hear from you.

Being time versus doing time, do you know the difference? Doing time is busy time. It is time spent accomplishing things, getting things done and making things for the external world. Doing time is goal oriented and linear. It moves in a straight line and is never still. Being time is time spent with and on oneself. It is quiet time. It is time spent oblivious of attainment and goals. Being time does not recognize space and movement, it simply exists. During Being time, the world stands still and nothing happens. According to Robert Wolfe who wrote “Being Time”:

“Being time means being your whole self, the whole person whom you have always been and will always be. This person stretches from the moment of your conception to the moment of your death in one unbroken self that moves and acts in the present but exists in the past and future as well.” (http://www.kofersite.com/time.htm)

I once attended a Lifesprings Seminar which lasted for three days. The subject of the seminar was learning to be as well as do. One of the leaders made the statement that in contemporary society we think that by doing, doing, doing we will then be. She said that this was backwards. We must first be before we can do. Otherwise whatever we do will be twisted and warped. If we are not first a being of integrity and honesty, then how can anything we do not be warped? Many of us are on this false treadmill. We think that by doing and accomplishing great things, we can then just “be.” We don’t realize that unless we can first be that none of these accomplishments will help us to feel fulfilled. Accomplishments will all just pass away. They will be magnificent for the moment, but in a short time we will be back to living with our unfulfilled and unsatisfied self. Nothing can get you out of this trap. No amount of physical goods, designer clothes, expensive homes, cars, celebrity friends, degrees or money can overcome the doing trap. There is only one way to live and love yourself and that is by learning the secret of Being.

The famous existential philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote a book called: “Being and Time.” (1927). It is an exploration of the meaning of being as defined by temporal time, and is an analysis of time as a horizon for the understanding of being. If you have a bent for philosophy, this book can be very interesting. I have learned a great deal about Being time from many of the excellent books dealing with Zen Buddhism. The heart of Zen lies in understanding Being time. According to Dogen, a Zen Master (1200-1253):

“To be fully present in the immediate presencing here and now of being-time is to realize the presence-time of all life. As self and other are both times, practice and realization are times; entering the mud, entering the water, is equally time.” (Dogen, Being Time, 1240)

In Western society, we sometimes say, “there is no time like the present.” Well, there is really no time but the present. We exist moment to moment and yet our minds worry about the past and the future. If we can exist in the moment, if we can learn to just be rather than do, we can quiet all fears and anxieties about what we will be, about the world and about life and death. Learning to just” be” is perhaps the most difficult task for any of us to achieve. I cannot honestly say that I have accomplished this or that I often find myself just being.

Nevertheless, I see it as a very worthwhile effort and while some would say it is an oxymoron to make it a goal, I try to reflect at least once a week on it. My weekly reflection is as: “Help me to BE as well as DO and to trust in the future by living today the best I can.” When I can accomplish this once a week and at least keep the value present in my life, I can feel a great difference in how I perceive the world and what is most important. The world and all the things I do are not nearly as important as I often think they are. Being a good person is at least as important as doing good things. From Being good will come Doing good.

Do you spend all of your time doing or can you just be? Do you appreciate the need for Being time? Do you have enough Being time in your life? Why not? What would it take to have more Being time in your life?

“I could not sleep at all last night, you were on my mind.” Have you ever had one of those nights where you just could not get to sleep because you were stuck on a thought? Perhaps it was a problem with a loved one or a problem at work. But you tossed and turned all night and finally threw in the towel and got up. Maybe you decided to read, or watch TV or just go out for an early breakfast. My, how time passes when we are stuck on a thought or how it does not pass! The night just seems to drag on and on. You want to go back to sleep but you can’t turn your brain off and laying in bed musing over the problem does not solve it. Your mind goes round and round in circles promoting one unsatisfactory theory after another. What if I had done this, or what if this had happened or what if I could do this? You are stuck on a Ferris wheel of thinking and as your mind turns the minutes seem to tick by. One minute for every idea or “what could have been” or what you should have done. Sleep is a time for the mind to rest, but sometimes when we are stuck on a thought the mind will not allow us to go to sleep and the clock will not cooperate either. No matter how tired we are or how badly we want to go to sleep, we cannot seem to turn our thoughts off.

Are there solutions for this problem? Sometimes I count sheep and this actually works sometimes. But for the most part, if I am really stuck on a thought, the only thing that seems to provide a remedy is to get up and do something. To admit that the night is over and I need to be in motion and not in bed. I may go for an early run, do homework, dishes, write, or catch up on emails, anything that will get my mind working somewhere else. Surprisingly, once I start some other activity, I no longer feel tired and I begin to feel energized. Lying in bed mulling over my problem is never very satisfactory and the time just seems to creep by. It is not time well spent until I finally decide to spend it differently. Sleep is a time for reenergizing unless we are stuck on a thought.

When was the last time you were stuck on a thought? What did you do about it? What helps you the most when you just can’t get to sleep and the thoughts keep rolling around in your head?