Aging Capriciously

Famous eulogies! Some eulogies are so memorable that they are forever etched into our minds and into history. Others will quickly be forgotten. Yes, we did talk about eulogies before. In fact, I asked you to write your own eulogy. Have you done it yet? Will your eulogy become famous? Go to Google and type in “eulogy” and you will find dozens of sites with links to famous eulogies.

Perhaps the most famous “funeral” oration of all time was not given at a funeral. Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream Speech” was about what Dr. King wanted said at his funeral. He had a premonition of his own death and drafted this speech as a sort of pre-eulogy that he delivered himself. It is surely one of the most moving and memorable speeches of all time. Another famous eulogy, perhaps never given but immortalized by Shakespeare was the speech by Marc Antony after the murder of Julius Caesar. I can still hear ringing in my ears the words: “I come not to praise Caesar but to bury him.” Of course, this was a very ironic eulogy since Antony did not mean what he said and he turned the oration into a propaganda forum to inspire a revolt against Caesar’s murderers.

Most of us have probably never thought about our eulogies becoming famous, but who knows what can happen after we die. The point of creating your eulogy is not about becoming famous, it is about reflecting on the life you want to live. Someone said that dreams become goals when you put a date on them. Well, hopes and wishes can become real to but only when you put them out as intentions and desires. If you want to be the person in your dreams you will have to form the intention to be that person. When someone else is giving your eulogy it will be too late.

If you still have not written your eulogy or even if you have written it, go back and look it over again. Think about these questions again: What do I really want said about me when I die? What do I want people to remember me for? What would I say about myself if I gave my own eulogy speech today? What is memorable about my life that I would like history to remember me for? Now make a schedule to write your eulogy. When you have written it, the question to ask is “Can I live up to this?” If not, how do you need to change your life and when will you start with these changes?

There is no time that is better than fun time. Most children would not have a problem with this statement. When we are young most of our time is fun time. The older we get, the less fun time we have. Fun time is spontaneous, unstructured and not goal driven. I get a laugh out of the corporate saying: “We work hard, but we play hard.” That is an oxymoron. Play and fun are not about hard or accomplishing anything. Hard is a macho concept that denotes a phallic reference that often seems to take ascendancy over the feminine in society. Thus, working hard and playing hard are more to be valued than playing soft or working soft. When did you ever hear anyone extol the virtues of playing soft?

Well, if you want to work hard, that’s good, but don’t play hard. Playing hard destroys the essence of play. Play is about freedom and spontaneity. It is going where you want to go, doing what you want to do and not having to answer for the results. Retirement is the oasis of play that many people dream of. People wait years for retirement so they can do what they want to do. Retirement is play time for adults. Once we retire, we can become as little children again. Can you imagine wanting to have a “hard” retirement. I would much prefer my retirement to be soft and leisurely. I want to take long walks in the woods, smell more flowers, kick more cans, take more long naps and get in as much fun time as I can get in. We all need to have more fun time. We live in a work-alcoholic world driven by time clocks and computers. Perhaps, there would be less stress and less crime in our society if we all had more time for fun. I know there would be less road rage.

How much time do you have set aside for fun today? Do you take time each day just for fun? What do you have to do to have more fun time in your life? What would your life be like if you could play more and work less? Why wait for retirement?

“Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it” – G. Santayana. I first came across this quote on a tablet engraved at Dachau, a German concentration camp during WW II. The camp is now a war memorial for the millions of Jewish people and others murdered by the Nazis. Today, more than 50 years later and we still are fighting over the truth of the Holocaust. There are still those who say the Holocaust never happened. Worse, there are those who sport Nazi arm bands and wear Hitler tattoos. Many of us have no wish to forget the past but we want to remember it accurately. It is not heritage when there is hate involved. It should not be remembered with nostalgia by the perpetrators when others suffered, died and were ignominiously buried. Imagine if someone suddenly said that crucifixions were an important part of their heritage and they did not want to forget them! Christians venerate the resurrection not the crucifixion of Jesus.

What a desecration to the past efforts of millions of Americans and others who gave their lives to wipe this disease of fascism and hate off of the face of the earth! To parade around in jack boots and Heil Hitler salutes is an insult to humanity. How in heaven’s name has it blossomed again and why? Are we so ignorant of the past that we do not think it can happen again? Do we not read the paper and notice the increased violence against minorities and immigrants. Why is this true? Why are we forgetting the past and allowing this rotten blight to spread? Are we willing to trade our freedom for security? What about the past do you need to remember? What have you chosen to forget it?

Are you confusing heritage with hate? Do you romanticize the past and forget the evil that was often done to others? The good old days were not often so good to others as they might have been to some.

Well, Karen and I moved from WBL to Frederic, Wisconsin. Seems like lots has changed besides the place we lived for over 40 years. Karen retired, downsized our home, and threw or gave away about 1/2 of what we had collected these 40 years. Had to figure out where to put things in a house that is much smaller than we had. What else to throw, my computer crashed, hard drive burnt and power supply failed. Went from Cable 25 mps to DSL 10 mps and am still finding sites where my old email address is wrong. Somehow in getting my computer up again, I lost all of my old addresses on Outlook. I hope I will be able to reconnect with many of you.

Also, I have not had time to do a blog since the move. Well, I am getting back to having things put together. So today, I have the following blog for you.

“Summertime, when the living is easy.” This line from the musical “Porgy and Bess” by G. Gershwin seems to resonate in my mind when the warm breezes start blowing the cold weather away in Minnesota. We all love summer. For many of us, it is a time of vacations and connotations of freedom from school and work. However, why does the song say the living is easy? I think it is because summer seems to bring that association to mind despite the fact that it is not now nor probably ever was easy. Nevertheless, we think of the lushness of fresh fruit, vegetables, the farmers market and long days and nights. It does not matter that we may work all summer, the dream is still there of “easy living.”

As we get older, most of us will think back to our childhoods with fond summer memories of doing nothing but kicking rocks, jumping rope, fishing, swimming off of the old bridge, camping with our friends or weekends at the cabin with our family. Perhaps these are more traditional Minnesota memories but no doubt you will have your own memories associated with summer time. All over the world, people are in vacation mode during the summertime. Perhaps you will spend your summer traveling to exotic destinations or simply taking a short trip to visit relatives. Summer brings a longing for what we want life to have in store for us as we age. Summer is a time of psychological retirement years before any of us will ever retire.

What are your best summer memories? What did you once do each summer that is now simply a memory? What summer traditions do you still celebrate? What do you hope your future summers will have in store for you?

Where do I find time? Karen asks me to tell her when I find the answer. I guess many of you are also have the same question. We can look under rocks, in old storage chests, in our savings box, under our beds, in closets and I will bet we will not find time there. Like a little child playing a game, time is playing hide and seek and you are trying to find her. However, no matter how hard you look you cannot find time. Is time hiding, or have we just not saved enough to find? Time is a very elusive creature. We may find her when we don’t want her only to lose her when we really need her.

Harvest Time – By Kimberly Strothman

Orange, red, yellow, green. The colors gently falling,
billowing in the wind. The smell of dry leaves, barbeques, musty air
finding that time in our hearts for quiet contemplation
Harvest time is here.

What if the most important time to find is not outside but inside? Perhaps you may never find the time out there. The truth is that time out there is not ours to control. You can’t stop the world or even your clock. Time inside is a different story. Time inside is yours to control. Time for reflection, time for love, time for caring, time for compassion, time for thinking, all of these times lie inside us. Yet we spend most of our time looking outside. Who has ever found patience or compassion looking outside? We have limited time outside but unlimited time inside.

We spend so much time looking for time outside that we ignore the time we have inside. We have unlimited time in our hearts to care for ourselves and our loved ones. I think of the line that says “iron bars and stone walls do not a prison make.” What bars and stone walls do we construct around time? We fool ourselves into thinking that we live in a prison of time. If we realize that we can control how we look at time, we can find all the time in the world for what really matters. I may have to work from 9 to 5 to make a living but my mind and my feelings are not captured by the time clocks of the world. We create our own prisons for time.

What inside time, can you find today? Where can your mind go today to look for time that it has never gone before? What thoughts and feelings have you ignored? What if you let yourself think the unthinkable or feel the unfeelable? What could you do today that would be so worthwhile that at the end of the day, you would say “this is one of the best days of my life?”

This won’t take long! How often has someone said that to you or you have said that to someone else? A few years ago, I bought my first gas grill. I had never owned one and Karen and I decided it was time. To save a few bucks, I ordered it through the Internet. When it came, it was in one huge box which I had a hard time moving into the garage by myself. I vaguely remember something about it only taking fifteen minutes to put together. Well, it took me 30 minutes just to lay all of the parts out. Three hours and forty five minutes later, I had finished putting my grill together. Except for putting the batteries in backwards, I was able to fire the thing right up and do my first outside grilling at the age of 60. I was thrilled except when I thought how long it took me to put it together. I was even angrier the next day when after going to Home Depot, I found the same grill. I could have purchased it there pre-assembled; with delivery, it would only have cost me 25 dollars more. Thus, my savings did not even come close to paying for my time, not to mention my aggravation.

We often underestimate the length of time it will take to do things. Sometimes we are misled by advertisements but often by our own misconceptions. The thought “this won’t take long” should be a red flag for most of us. On reflection, the phrase is seldom true. They say anything worthwhile takes time. We can do the worthless fast, but those things that are really meaningful and valuable will take more time.

What things and events do you most often underestimate? What jobs or tasks do you rush through? What work do you have to do today that you should allow more time for? What areas in your life should you spend more time on? It is a lot easier to be less frustrated and to do a better job when you can allow the right amount of time needed for the job and not worry about it “taking too long.”

Just one minute! One minute please! Right! We all know that when someone says “just one minute,” it will be more than one minute. Have you ever thought about a simple minute? What is one minute? Of course it is just sixty seconds. Not too much too ask of anyone it seems. But how many minutes do each of us have in our lives? If we live to an average age of say eighty, then we will each have 42,048,000 minutes in our lives. You could say that in respect to time, we all start out as millionaires and end up as paupers. For no one leaves this earth with even one minute left of time to spend.

I think we all spend our time perhaps more wastefully than we do our money. Imagine the moment when you will have only 60 minutes left to spend. How precious each of those minutes will be! We go through our days spending minutes like the proverbially drunken sailor. We yak on our cell phones, we create mindless diversions so the time will pass more quickly and we hardly ever really think of whether we are doing the important things in our lives or just wasting our minutes. We act like young children who think they will live forever. It never occurs to us that someday our bank of minutes will be near depletion and we will rue those minutes we simply threw away.

An old saying is that if you watch the pennies the dollars will take care of themselves. Well, if you watch the minutes, perhaps the hours and days will take care of themselves. How well do you respect your minutes? During each day, do you just hope the clock will move faster so you can do something else or do you cherish each moment? What is one way you can treasure your minutes more today? Can you spend just one minute today thinking about your joys and happiness and what it means to be alive? Can you reflect on how precious the last minute of your life will be or the last minute of a loved ones time with you?

I lost track of the time. Where did the time go? How often have you heard someone make this comment? Generally, it means we were so engrossed with what we were doing that we forgot we had another appointment or schedule. When we lose track of time, time no longer seems to exist. It is not moving fast or slow, it just does not seem to matter to us. I heard someone say recently that they did not wake up and say “gee, I have to go to work today.” Instead, they woke up and said “Wow, I get to go to work again today.” Can you imagine the difference between time for the first case and the second? Time in the first case is drudgery and time in the second is a joy.

When you do not enjoy what you are doing. Time matters the most to you. You check the clock. You wonder when the time will go by. You find ways to “break” up your time. The more “breaks” the better. When we enjoy or even love what we are doing, we forget the clock. We don’t worry about breaks or when will it be time to go home. Sean John’s says “life without passion is unforgiveable.” He lives this in his daily life. His message is important for all of us. How many of us find lives that are full of passion? Why not? Is such a life beyond our reaches or do we just fail to make the choice?

The more our world is dominated by time, by pressures to do things faster, to multi-task, or to live in the fast lane the less happy and more stressed we will be. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, if time did not matter anymore and we could lose track of time on a permanent basis? What if our lives were so filled with passion that every second was one we could live with for eternity? What if passion replaced time in our lives? When was the last time you lost track of time? Can you hardly wait to go to work or do you count each workday between Sunday and Friday? Is your life filled with passion or wondering when the minute hand will move forward?

“Your time is running out” says the villain to the hero. How often have you heard this phase in the movies? Of course, we know that this is a lie. The villain’s declaration is just a cue for our heroine to spring into action. She will then surprise us with some type of unexpected near miraculous escape. Perhaps, she will fool the villain into talking long enough so she can manage her escape. This comment on time may be the most common phrase or at least one of the most common in all of theater. It is so melodramatic that authors can not refuse to use it.

However, what do you think you would do if your doctor said this to you? Perhaps at your next physical, you doctor tells you that “your time is running out.” Would you simply think of the metaphor of an hourglass with the sands of time running through it or would it strike a more essential chord of your being. I am going to guess the latter. You would want to know how much time you had left. You would want to know how you could escape this trap. If there were no way out, eventually you would start wondering how you should spend the rest of your remaining days. Suddenly time and its effective use would become the most important priority in your life. Many of us would drop the nonessentials and focus on only the truly important things in our lives.

Ironically, whether your doctor or a villain says it to you, it is a hundred percent true fact that time is running out for you each day. Do you know anyone who ever said “my time is running in?” Do you know anyone who knows the hour of their death? Maybe, you should think more about your real priorities each day before it is too late, before someone else tells you that your time is running out. Perhaps, you should be asking yourself today “What really does matter to me?”

Do you spend more time doing what matters or do you spend more time on the nonessentials? What would you change in your life if you were suddenly confronted with the fact that “Your time is running out?”