Category: Personal Reflections and Diary

IMPORTANT LIFE LESSON : RENEWAL VS RESURRECTION

My grandmother buried her first husband after a long life together, met another man in her sixties, and had an entirely, new, ‘second’ life. She lived two entire lifetimes by the time she was 96. Maybe three if you count her fairly interesting life prior to her first marriage.

We are not ‘old’ at 40 any longer. We’re just matured. You can have a completely new life to live, about every twenty years. And from what I’ve learned from the data, you might need to, for both your own health, happiness, and well being.

If you keep weight off by avoiding ‘white foods’ and prepared foods. If you just walk enthusiastically a bit. And you try to always learn something new. You can be marketable for most of your life. I mean, if you’re a man in your 70’s or 80’s and you’re even vaguely interesting, you would not believe how much ‘action’ is to be had among the previously-considered-elderly.

I disagree that you can’t find new meaningful friends after 40. I have. Making new and meaningful friends is actually easy if you want to make them. You just choose to love them. And the truth is that we are better at picking our friends as we age. And the way to love people is to PRACTICE IT. Just like anything else.

My uncle formed my behavior dramatically one summer day by telling me you never want to be in your 40’s and say “I wish I had.” But that’s interesting in itself, because it says our commitments and choices are fixed, and that we cannot restart, restructure and renew our lives, as often as we choose to. It’s the accumulation of all our trappings and signals that imprisons us.

I think our monogamous lifestyle during our agrarian ages really created the metaphysical assumption that we have one life to live. We don’t. I tend to think of my ‘lives’ by the women I have been in long term relationships with. And I think that is probably the better way to view life in an age where relationships seem to last less than ten years, and require twenty to have a decent chance of permanency. If we are ‘marketable and desirable’ for longer periods, perhaps even late in life, if we take care of ourselves, then we do in fact, get chances as multiple lives.

I’ve been trying to understand what happens when marriage is rare, and a temporary pooling of economic resources in the upper classes, rather than a universal and necessary lifetime insurance policy. And where we are instead, insured by a hegemonic and arguably oppressive state. And I think that we will see ‘serial’ lives. in fact, the only thing preventing that life today, is the overuse of sugars, msg’s and bad foods, rather than meat, fat, and fresh fruits and vegetables, and our absolute failure to walk around the world we live in so that we can stay insulated from the diversity of each other. And I think that describes the future moral code pretty accurately. It certainly does in the lower classes today.

But that aside, the point is, that you don’t need to die and hope for an afterlife. You don’t need to ‘own a home and die there’. If you want a new life, just sell or walk away from material things and start over if you don’t like your life.

I made that choice. I’m on my third or fourth ‘life’ now. And with each ‘life’ I am better at, and happier with life than the last one.

But it’s your life, your many lives now, and those many lives are your choice. Not nature’s. Not fate’s. Yours.