Life and Other Passions
Some advice to the young, which they don’t want, but here it is.
Develop as many skills and learn as much as you can about a lot of diverse topics, while you can.
Because no matter what you do in your life, either your job will become obsolete, or you will.
The more skills and education and experience you have in all manner of things, the greater your chances of being employed and earning money all your life.
You’ll also have more joy.
Keep yourself open to life.
One of my favourite movies is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. So I borrow this title for my post, with a minor modification, because I am not going to write about the movie, but about life.
Life is the good, the bad, the BEAUTIFUL and the ugly.
We forget the beautiful part.
We also forget that life is ALL of the above. You cannot live without experiencing all it has to offer. If you focus only on one of the the four, your life will suffer.
Life is the whole package and it does not play any favourites.
But you can get through the bad and the ugly by remembering the good, and mostly, the beautiful.
You may come to realize, surprise, surprise, that the bad and the ugly are also beautiful.
In fact, all of life is beautiful.
The bad and the ugly will teach you that.
I’ve been reading about the 46 year old man who plans to live forever.
He’s been subjecting himself to all the latest and greatest in medicines, diet and exercise, with a little voodoo in there by injecting himself with his sons blood – ewwww.
He looks great and no doubt he feels terrific. I can attest, my 40’s was by far the best decade of my life too – uh, without all the latest and greatest and millions to burn. I was fit and happy and…
Well, what can I say dear fellow.
I have some bad news for you.
You will get sick. And, you will eventually die.
So sorry. But that is how biology works.
No matter what kind of great shape you are in, entropy is gonna find you, because despite our best intentions, and sometimes because of them, our bodies and minds wear out.
It is called old age.
I did too much exercise (warning to all you extreme fitness freaks) and now I can’t do very much. I had only a few serious overuse injuries in my life but oh boy, do they come back to haunt you and severely limit you. Even without that, our bodies cannot and will not do what they could when they were young. You will find this out. I can assure you, it is a FACT!
I have discovered that there is little difference in life span between those who took care of themselves and those who were a little more lenient.
So just a heads up on this. You can overdo good intentions and shorten your life. Ah, life is a trickster! So don’t be too smug about your health. In an instant you can lose it.
Your life is never on hold. Just enjoy what you have today. Tomorrow never comes, and neither will biological immortality.
Do something that is so wonderful you leave a legacy of goodness in this world instead of concentrating so hard on your own self interests. If you have millions to spend on yourself, you’d do better to help someone who has nothing, or someone really struggling to survive. That is the best way to live forever, and the only way.
I should like to apologize to all the people I have knowingly shamed in my life, and there are many of you. I am so sorry.
I was shamed by others most of my life and you’d think I would know the horrible consequences of that enough to not inflict it on others.
But alas, I did not.
Isn’t that a sad testimony, considering how long I have lived?
All these years I have believed that everyone else was okay, and I had a lot of bad in me that was inexcusable. I caused others to feel this way too.
In the movie, The Mission, slave trader Mendoza attempts penance for his wrongdoings by dragging a big heavy bag of his metal armour and swords everywhere he goes. As if he, and he alone has done wrong in his life. He is eventually set free from this by the very people he once enslaved.
This is what shame and guilt is. That big bag.
But here is the reality of it. Everyone has done wrong. Realizing that was like that indigenous man cutting Mendoza loose from his bag of shame. That man knew the truth. No one should carry all the weight of shame. We have all done the inexcusable at some time in our lives. No one is exempt.
And I’ve learned that those who shame and guilt another the most, are often the ones who have a lot to be ashamed of themselves! The ones who subdued me the most, for what I now see as being petty crimes, were the ones with the blackest of hearts, who did much wrong in their lives.
I am definitely not saying forgive, or even forget. I don’t believe in that. You can’t forgive and forget pain. But you can see the truth about humans.
This is not an excuse. I knowingly shamed others. I am offering an apology and a way for you to be free from a burden that is not exclusively yours to carry.
Getting old is just one shock to the system after another.
I write this because I am mad about the judgement placed on seniors about their abilities.
The seniors you read about that run marathons and stuff like that, are the extreme exception to the rule. I hate that younger people think all seniors are physically and mentally capable of such feats, and are therefore lazy.
This is a huge big lie, and you need to get that out of your head. We cannot do what we once were able to. It is not a matter of not wanting to. It is a truth we are not able. And NO, seventy is not the new forty. Stop that shit.
I was athletic and healthy all my life. I ate well, took care of myself, was never way overweight. I ran 10K’s. I cycled thousands of kilometers. I danced. I went to the gym and lifted weights four or more days a week. I went canoeing, paddleboarding, hiking. I was fit. No major diseases.
And then I got old and I can do NONE of that now.
If you live long enough, you are going to start to fall apart. I don’t care who you are. It will happen to you. Usually in bits and pieces, one shock after another, but sometimes in one big shock.
And it is not just your body. Your brain is tired. You are not as quick. You cannot endure eight or more hours of brain work at a go. You need a lot of rest.
It does not matter what you do, it will happen to you.
That is why we need guaranteed income when we are old. We can no longer earn it, and we have a lot of expenses that young people don’t have. It is costly to stay alive and have a good quality of life.
We have contributed our lives and sometimes our very souls to the world of work and community during our time here, not to mention, raising you young people and providing you with shelter, food and opportunity for a good life.
Cut us some slack.
Why do rich people persecute the poor?
Why do they take away their benefits, pay them shit, work them to the bone and kick them to the dogs? They take away food, health, shelter and liberty.
Why do they treat seniors so deplorably? It is shocking how our elders are so disrespected and forgotten. They deny them health care or enough money for a decent life.
And women! We are losing all our rights! The handmaidens tale is not fiction.
All the things we fought so hard to wrench from these greedy bastards hands is being snatched back.
If they had their way, we would all be out on the streets, unable to buy a loaf of bread, with only the shirt on our backs.
And they just want more and more and more and more.
Look at what CEO’s make. Look at what their employees take home. Both values are obscene. Vile. Disgusting. Oh my. Look at what Mr. Weston got for being a good CEO to the shareholders lately for Loblaws. Since he successfully overinflates grocery prices so we can’t even afford a head of lettuce, saying companies should make a profit, he got a raise from 8 million to 11.4 million! Because he was, poor fellow, underpaid. Do you believe this crap?
What does it mean to be billionaire? It means you are above the law, above reproach, even above God. You don’t even pay taxes. I pay more taxes on my meager pension. And it means everyone is totally expendable. There are always replacements.
Yes, I am pissed.
I am pissed that we don’t fight back hard enough. We worship worthless, tone deaf, idiot billionaires and celebrities. We throw money at them for their substandard products and shows. We hang on their every opinion as if they are gods. We give them positions of power to rule over us and humiliate us.
We live in a slave economy. We all work and live to provide the rich with lavish lifestyles we will never ever experience, that they constantly shove in our faces.
They shamelessly flaunt their wealth. I am sick of seeing tours of some assholes ten million dollar homes on the beachfront. Reading about their Greek vacations, and five hundred million dollar yachts. The two dozen rare collectible cars they own. The Rembrandts hanging in their living rooms. This is not to show us what we can obtain, it is to keep us hungry, to keep us in our place, to keep us dirt poor and slaves to them.
I think one of the possibly many reasons companies don’t hire seniors is this.
They are wise.
They are wise to all the tricks and manipulations bosses try to pull to make their employees work longer and harder for less, and all manner of degrading and belittling mind games that reduce employees to begging slaves.
Senior employees are not there to climb the ladder, so they don’t play those games. They’ve been there and done that a hundred times.
I think bosses are more interested in their own power than the good of the company.
Their loss.
There was a place I could go when I was young, in a castle, by a fireplace in a rocking chair. At the Friendly Giant’s.
I was a terribly shy introverted girl living in an extroverted world. Still am in many ways. The Friendly Giant sheltered me. I was safe and understood there. A place parents and peers could not come to.
My refuge.
When I get scared, which is often, I remember this program, the infamous harp and recorder playing ‘Early One Morning’ and the Giant summoning me to “Look up. Look waaaay up.”
Bob Homme was the kindest, gentlest adult in the world. I hated when he closed up the drawbridge when we were gone.
I loved Jerome the giraffe. He was in no hurry for anything. And the Giant was taller than him!
The older I get, the more I miss my childhood, because my adulthood mostly sucked. And there was no Friendly Giant.
Recently I completed an on-line course on Environmental Law, and once again, I am blown away. I am trying to pursue subjects that I had zero or little interest in for various reasons and I highly recommend you try also.
I had no understanding of the legal process and held uninformed opinions and prejudices about laws, lawyers, etc. I thought legalese was gobbley gook that only those who could endure years of study were able to understand. That part is true, it is gobbley gook and it does take years to fully grasp it, but for a good reason. Laws have to be very precise and have universal meaning, that is, to enable identical interpretation the world over and be effective. This is what good lawyers and policy makers do, they look for weak areas, to exploit or remedy. And good institutions work hard to ensure they can enforce what they are assigned to do, in this case, to legally protect the environment. Judges ensure that all players in the game are following the rules to the letter.
But there is so much more to law than mumbo jumbo. This was a fascinating course for two reasons. First, an understanding of how laws work, the institutions developed to uphold laws, what judges really do, and how all this is applied to real world cases. And it examined some shocking environmental issues and abuses. Interesting enough. But the second, and greater value from this course was developing a new way of thinking.
When I left the administrative secretarial work force and became a medical secretary, it was as if I left earth and landed on Pluto. Everything was entirely different. They spoke a strange language. Office procedures were entirely foreign. Oh sure, you still operated a computer, typed and answered phones, but this was a whole new and much higher level of being, doing and thinking. When you first work in the medical field, your head goes tilt-tilt-tilt.
And this is what this course did for me. It took me to a whole new way of thinking. I had to not only change gears, but change vehicles.
So if you really want to expand your present awareness, to learn how to understand, analyze and interpret the world around you, take a course, read a book, sign up for an experience.
It not only adds to your knowledge, but it’ll shake up your opinions and beliefs. It’ll expand your world view. When it comes to what you think you know about life, the universe and everything, you might just find you had it all wrong.
It is a long time ago now, but I remember this photograph well.
At the time this was taken, I was an avid photographer, to say the least. I took pictures of everything, and in return, people took many pictures of me, perhaps in revenge! I made photo albums, those horrid self stick pages, good grief! And I would add captions that proved to be, sometimes, unpopular.
The above, with that caption, set me up for mockery.
At the time I was stunned by the backlash, because I was in no way trying to be pretentious, at that age, I didn’t even know what that meant. I was just simply stating a fact. Sure, I had lots of creative interests that I wanted to pursue, but I was a writer first and foremost and I didn’t doubt myself at all. I never questioned it. It was an activity I did every single day. I wrote hundreds of stories. I thought everyone else knew who they were too and should just say so.
Yep. Pretty pretentious!
That was the day I started shrinking from who I am. Over time, my real self was nearly totally eroded by the well meaning and maybe not so well meaning direction of others. As a result, I was miserable most of my adult life. I never successfully integrated into any field of endeavour, failed at every employ and relationship I had, and was LOST.
If you can remember who you are, live it. It is not that it is never too late, but why spend any of your precious time and life trying to be something you are not. My adult life was just one big embarrassment because I was a jagged square peg trying to fit into round holes.