The book I'm reading makes it clear to me that many lives are defined by what happens to people. Franklin Roosevelt was defined by polio and a World War. Doesn't get much more dramatic than that. The everyday genetic and environmental things are bumped along and brought out by circumstance. I talked to my friend today whose father hit the D-Day beaches as a nineteen-year-old Texas farm boy. It's safe to say those veterans were defined by those experiences.

Today FFP left for the gym in his car and I followed not many minutes later. [Ed. note: Consider the gas savings if you could just agree on the coming and going to the gym.] But...when I got there he wasn't there. "Oh," I thought, "he just went to the bank or something." Still. I got my phone out of the car and took it inside. I started on my biking to nowhere and then I suddenly realized he still wasn't there and I'd been biking five minutes. I decided to check my phone and got off the bike to go over to where it was sitting on the counter. He walked in. He'd actually been to the building to put up some flyers. [Ed. note: They have a contract on the building but they aren't holding their breath for it to close.] Of course, I'd expected a simple explanation and not an accident or disappearance. I am like most people who bump through this life...the big shocking things happen to someone else and thanks to the powers for that.

Most of us, I think, go through our lives propelled by minor ups and downs. Some people have something that propels and consumes a big part of their lives. An accident or illness of their own or a loved one felled by something. Or they find themselves in the midst of a conflagaration or a tornado or a war or a horrible crime or world events. I have some friends who had a house fire years ago. I remember a conversation with them in which they sort of marked the time before the fire and the time after. They said they had trouble remembering whether they still owned stuff or lost it in the fire. I think it's safe to say that people displaced by war, sent to war, sent to camps orsent suddenly from a safe home by fire or disaster have lives forever colored by those experiences.

I realized a few years ago that FFP and I had four older parents (the youngest had just turned 80) and that, one way or the other, we would be propelled into changes with them in the next ten or fifteen or twenty years. Maybe dramatic and wrenching. Maybe just time-consuming. It's a locked guarantee almost that you will get sick, disabled or die between 80-100. My mother's illness and death didn't surprise me when it came. It didn't consume me as much as I thought it would, however. I don't think it defined me. I'm not sure if this was because, at the end of the day, she suffered a long time for her but a bearable time for us. Or if we put up defenses and things don't really affect us that much. Certainly a lot of it had to do with an innate acceptance of the loss of our parents when they are old. We heard about an acquaintance's death from cancer yesterday. Her children are not that old since she was a mere fifty-one. The loss of their mother, her long struggle, will probably help define them. Or wil it?

Without a cataclysm, I have had to find and define myself incremently. A slowly improving body during retirement, small mistakes repeated until you learn to not make them, bad career choices somehow rectified, good ones somehow repeated. I stumbled with relationships with no big consequences until settling comfortably with FFP. Some challenges never met because they were never presented. A teflon slide through life. Lucky, I'd say.

Indeed, I have also not been driven to accomplish one overriding thing. I'm interested in a lot of things, I flit from one to the other. So I haven't been able to define myself by a passion for a particular thing either.

And where does that leave me? It leaves me, at 55. still looking for what is essentially me. Fortunate for me, I suppose. Isn't it? Do I think that, by noting this fortune, I tempt the gods that be to reign down pain and misfortune, illness and political upheaval? Not really. I believe in chance. I think humans should take control of their destiny as far as they can reasonably do but I think running from the lightning strike is a foolish thing to do. Acknowledging that pain has more or less missed you won't change anything.

 

 

 

 

 

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104/65 74

Physically felt fine although probably a little sluggish from eating too much yesterday. Mood not quite as good as yesterday.