I'm currently reading Mitch Albom's book, "Tuesdays with Morrie", and like millions of other readers in the last twenty years, it's forcing me to look at some aspects of my life (and life in general) that are difficult to face.

Morrie Schwartz is a very brave man; facing his terminal illness with hope, and laughter and purpose.  I seriously don't believe I could ever even approach his level of serenity if faced with something like that.  I'm fairly certain my first impulse would just be to start running, or walking, or driving somewhere, anywhere, far, far away and just keep going till I couldn't go any further.

One of the greatest fears of my life has always been that "can't win" situation.  In the 1982 Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, they called it the Kobayashi Maru, the unbeatable situation.  I cannot imagine what I would do, faced with the inevitable and unchangeable fact of my own death.  To this day, it frightens me to my core. Like most of us, I know I'm going to die in the abstract but inside I know I haven't really accepted it as a fact.  It's always going to be "someday" and someday is never going to come.  Except it is.

The book has really drove home to me the imperative of living with a purpose, of living each day as if it were your last (as cliche as that is by now).  Because it definitely could be.  Most of the deaths in my life were not out of the blue type deaths.  My mother and my brother suffered illnesses of varying lengths and severity, but they had both been undeniably sick for many years.  My father's death was a bit more jarring, having had a stroke in March then passing just a month later.  But Dad had been on hypertension medication for about 13 years, he had smoked for probably 40 years before quitting, and he'd had other health issues, too.  Nobody died in a car wreck or was murdered.

This is not to say that this diminished the impact of their deaths at all.  Far from it. But I just use these examples to show that I don't have much experience with the "your day is here" type of passing.  But I know it happens.  Young people die in car accidents, in war, of diseases.  A co-worker of the relatively young age of 55 find out she had colon cancer in July and was dead in November.  A young man who was related through friendship links developed a terminal brain tumor and died at 22.

I get it.  It's coming for us all.  And Morrie, while certainly not welcoming it, acknowledged its part in the life cycle and was not broken by it philosophically or spiritually.  Sometimes I feel I would be.  I worry that if I got that type of diagnosis I'd just start shaking uncontrollably and crying and never, ever stop.  Or at some point I'd stop and just get white hot mad and stay that way.  I worry that the grace and peace with which Morrie and those like him faced the end would NEVER be something I'd experience, because I'm too unsettled with my life to reconcile myself to death.

I haven't done what I have wanted to with my life, in  many ways.  I have wasted a great deal of it on frivolous things, like many people.  I haven't done harm, in the main, but I have pursued and concentrated on escapism and navel gazing to the extent that I've buried a lot of opportunity to do good, to fulfill myself and build up my community like Morrie says.

And no, I'm not holding up Morrie as some sort of oracle, dispensing unblemished truth from on high.  I aspire to some of the goals he talks about because I KNOW them to be worthwhile and honorable ones, even before I read his book.  I just was very good at burying those impulses under mounds of self-justification and excuses, if not outright laziness.  Morrie's word strike chords that were already within me; it's just wonderful to hear them echoed so eloquently and passionately.  And the man is speaking from the hardest and truest experience possible; he's dying and he knows it.

I'm in my 50's now.  I never, never, never thought I would say those words.  And while part of me is amazed that I've made it this far, and yes, a bit proud, there's another part that understands I'm still afraid of all the things that Morrie talks about.  Societal expectations, failure, rejection, loneliness.  Those are powerful motivators, or more accurately, de-motivators.  And really, if you had a much longer lifetime, say a millenia, maybe we could all get away with frittering away so many years on silly and unimportant things.  But less than 80 years, give or take, goes so very fast.  Morrie, at age 78, did not think of death often, I imagine, before he was given the news.

The book tasks its readers to really dig deep and consider how they want to leave this world and what they want to leave behind.  Money, power, position, fame, material goods?  Or love, friendship, good works, and fulfillment?  And of course, nobody leaves either the first or the second group entirely. We're all a mix, more or less.  But I think it's a question of what we focus on.  And even more than that, it's about keeping in mind the limitations of our  time here and how that has to inform our actions.  We really can't afford to spend years on internet message boards arguing politics or movies or whatever because that's time that we won't likely look back on with pride and satisfaction.

If I think of the things and times in my life where I truly felt happy, there were never times I was being self-indulgent and escaping.  Or if I was, it was with other people that I love.  Washing dishes with my mom, while she sang some old 1940's tune, or we talked about the day.  Sitting in the McDonald's parking lot eating lunch with Mom, talking about our lives, the people we knew, the things we thought.  Watching TV with Mom, again sharing ideas about what we were seeing.  Helping my dad coach Little League, one of the few times we were able to work together fairly tension free, doing something we both liked.  Playing games with them both, laughing in that kitchen, long ago and far away.  All of this was important and fulfilling in ways that no selfish activity can ever be.  While it's impossible to be totally in the moment, totally fulfilled each second of your life, it's great to be reminded that we should always keep that as a goal, as a way of life. Time wasting can become a habit that snowballs into an addiction.

I don't know what I'm going to do differently after reading this book.  But like Morrie, and his voice, and the voice of my lost loved ones, it's going to stay with me.  I won't be equal to Morrie's challenges all the time, but his memory and the memory of his message aren't going anywhere.  Their importance and clarity are born of a true experience and forged in situation that is all too real.  Morrie is one of those people (I won't call him a "character", though that's an apt description, too, I suppose) who really humbles you, and makes you consider the choices you have made (and continue to make).
His gentle aphorisms ring so true because of the sincerity and experience of the messenger, and the inarguable evidence that our society provides each day that it is ill and getting worse. He's given us a wonderful blueprint of how to die and more importantly, how to live, keeping in mind that we all WILL die.  He was a brave, groundbreaking soul and I'm happy that he chose to share his love and wisdom with us. 

I only hope that my death is as serene, and as meaningful, as his.

(insert sound file of ancient, rusty hinged door slowly, painfully, creaking open, the noise growing in intensity as the seconds pass until it's almost unbearable to hear...at least it stops)

*coughing* is heard, then slow, uncertain footsteps

Well, it's been a while, hasn't it?  While I am almost certain not a single soul is going to read this, I'll write as if someone here actually remembers when this blog was kinda, sorta updated on a semi-regular basis, years ago (eleven now, to be exact).

I miss it.  I miss writing and doing something that used to come naturally to me.  All of the standard and insufficient excuses/explanations can be trotted out, but the truth is I just lost touch with myself, or at least this part of myself.  I've explored other parts to good effect, but as I grow older I begin to realize that this is the thing that I can do in life, perhaps better than other things.  This is the thing that, while painful and yes, occasionally boring, can make me sit back afterwards and really feel as if I've accomplished something, that makes me feel as if I've communicated just a bit of "me" to the world and maybe reached out to it and created an echo somewhere.  I don't know for sure; but I hope so.

The world has changed a lot since I last did this.  Now Facebook and Twitter are functioning as kind of "minute blogs" where everyone is able to share photos, stories, thoughts, jokes, etc. about themselves and their daily lives.  The vast majority of it isn't very interesting or original or deep, but then again, that's not what those venues are there for.  They are there to promote clicking and advertising, not to promote deep and reasoned discussion or provide complicated insight into someone's character.

I won't presume that I will (or ever have) do that here, either.  But I hope to; I will try to.  I honestly am not and never have been interested in just doing a daily diary or sharing recipes or love advice.  I have always hoped that my writing could really connect with an audience and make them feel that someone else in the world had felt or thought the way they did, that someone else's experiences somehow were mirrored in their own, and that they would feel less alone and more empowered as a result.

I have a lot of time on my hands right now, and it's terrible to admit that whenever I have less time I seem to automatically abandon something I just said made me feel good and that I was good at.  That's me; I'm often just not a very motivated person.  But I'm always hopeful that one of these times when I start doing this again it will become a habit that I do just as automatically as brushing my teeth or taking my daily medicine.  It's not as simple as that, of course; you don't have to do any creative thinking to brush your teeth, and you don't worry that you aren't taking your medicine in an original way.  But the basic idea is there; do it, just as if you were breathing and at some point (hopefully!) it gets easier and easier and pretty soon you are doing it without even thinking about it or giving yourself time to put it off once again.

So, let's get on with it, shall we?  I don't know how creaky my writing skills are, though I would suspect they are on par with the door I used in my opening metaphor.  I write freelance for an area paper now, and have done so for eight and a half years.  It's basic reporting; city council and school board meetings, the opening of a new shop, maybe covering a visiting politician or summer festival of some kind. It's marginally fun but there's not much imagination required, that's for sure.  I hunger for that kind of wonderful inspiration I used to have as a boy when I watched science fiction television and read fantasy/sci fi books and dreamed of worlds beyond my own.  Truth to tell, like most young authors, I used a lot of elements of those stories but at least they provided me with some kind of groundwork for my flights of fantasy.  Tropes, archetypes and ideas are not infinite but they can and are expressed in infinite ways; there are only so many colors on a palette, but they can create myriad combinations of light, dark and all the spectrums in between.

Wish me luck, Internet.  I sure hope I'm up to this challenge.  I've got a wonderful lady friend now who encourages my creativity and knows there is more to me than meets the eye (and more than I allow the world to see).  She's my rudder in rough seas and has kept me from crashing on the rocks more than once.   But in the end, it's up to me to "be" me and do the things I need to do to feel fulfilled and useful and whole.

And here goes another attempt to do so.