It’s like money.  Some people will hesitate to spend money on a new pair of shoes, whereas they will happily sink their money into a gadget they could probably live without.  Marketing is based on creating a desire and making it appear like a need.  After envisioning an enriched life with the new product, we feel loss when we go back to the real world.  That loss creates a buying urge.  That buying urge lasts momentarily, but it’s why telemarketing and infomercials do such great business.  They create motivation by promoting a reward.

I am motivated by dissatisfaction.  I may have a streat of obsessive compulsive running through me.  It’s controllable, but I can definitely feel it’s pull.  Once I am aware of something better, I am consumed by the desire to get it and implement it in my life.  This is useful and a huge burden, for I spend a great deal of time being intensely dissatisfied with the way things are.  For the things that are easily changeable, like my hairstyle or clothes, it’s a useful way to motivate that next haircut or shopping trip.  On the other hand, when it involves the superfluous, like my desktop wallpaper or defraging my computer hard disk, it just wastes time.  But when it really hurts is when I confront things which are nearly impossible to change, for that is dissatisfaction with no payoff and no viable chance of resolution.  It’s an emotion only inches from despair and feelings like these things can make life miserable.

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference.

This is the mantra for Alcoholics Anonymous and it’s wisdom can’t be overlooked.  Yet it’s the last part, the wisdom to know the difference which stumps me.  Some things are impossible and we can easily know they are impossible.  But life is filled with people who accept too many things as being impossible, when in fact they are possible.  Often, we can’t know what’s possible or impossible until we try.  Edison had 1000 failed attempts at making the light bulb, Churchill lost every election for public office until he was 62, Sigmund Freud was booed off stage when he first presented his ideas, Michael Jordan was kicked off his high school basketball team, Henry Ford went broke five times before he succeeded and history is filled with scores of other such tales.  Click here if you’d like some more examples.

Van Gogh sold only one painting during his life. And this to the sister of one of his friends for 400 francs (approximately $50). This didn't stop him from completing over 800 paintings.

I have lived by the saying:

EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE

because I would rather attempt the impossible and fail than to resign myself to accepting that some things just can’t be done.  It’s an exciting outlook and it’s the only way to achieve the impossible.

So, I feel motivated to change the things which I feel could be improved because I believe that everything is possible to change and make better.  I am motivated to do so by my strong feelings of dissatisfaction.  Seems good?

Then why am I not in the gym?  Why am I not well-versed in the Korean language?  Why don’t I keep my bike, room or shoes neatly cleaned and polished every day?  Because the dissatisfaction I use as a motivator is not motivation enough in small doses.  Eventually that dissatisfaction may grow until I force myself to really do something about it, but then I’ll only do it until the feeling subsides and stops bothering me.

If we motivate ourselves through negativity, we are creating a place for negativity in our lives.  The things which we want to get done rely upon emotions of guilt or sadness which we seek to avoid.  It goes without saying that this is a less than ideal state in which to live.

If we spend our lives backing away from negativity, we are facing the wrong direction and have no hope of finding and catching our dreams.

The solution then, is to transform those negative thoughts into a positive vision of the future.

The queue for the bus outside the Namdaemun market

I was heading home from school. I’d taken the bus at Gwanghwamun and there had been no people on it at the time, so I secured a good seat. The bus traveled past Seoul Station and Namdaemun Market before heading up the hill towards my place. At the market, the bus always fills up with old people. Namdaemun seems to be a market aimed at old people exclusively, as there is nothing there that anyone under 50 would be caught dead wearing. The curious thing is, most of the old people who board the bus there aren’t carrying anything. Perhaps it’s just a place to go to hook up with other old people. Who knows, but for the sake of the story let’s just take it that there were a good deal of old people on the bus this day.

Normally, in polite social circles, a young man should get up and let an older person sit down. This much is common knowledge. But there is a certain amount of leeway here. For age is such a relative thing. Someone may look sixty or seventy, but could actually be much younger, or a much younger person may have difficulty standing for some reason of health or circumstance. You have to make a quick decision as to their relative age and need. So here I was, enjoying my seat, but weighing up the woman who had shuffled into my vicinity, who seemed about 50, give or take a decade. I must have pondered this for a minute or so because I noticed we had already ascended the hill and were about three stops from mine.

Now here is where I feel my defect in personality shows itself. I call it a defect, maybe it’s too strong. Perhaps it’s an advantage, a knack for slicing through the bullshit. However it may seem, I’ll admit to feeling a little guilty when I caught myself thinking it. For up to this point, I had purely honorable intentions. I assumed that my desire was to help this old lady sit down and take a load off. Wasn’t that my desire?

I started to get up when another thought hit me. If I was to get up now, I would naturally move toward the door. The woman who took my place would assume that I had vacated my seat due to the fact that I was getting off. She would not notice until later, maybe never at all, that I had in fact got up early on her behalf. I would be giving up my seat and not getting any recognition for this fact.

Ok let me stop you right there. I know, I’m a monster. Giving up your seat to a person older than you is not something you should seek praise for. But think about it. When you do give it up you do it in an obvious way don’t you? A little bow, a gesture, maybe you add “please, sit down” and smile. Why did you do that? It’s not necessary. Except that it makes you look good. If you were truly selfless you would get up, pretending that you had somewhere else to be and let the seat speak for itself.

The typical everyday scene inside the 402 bus

That was my dilemma. On the one hand she was old, on the other hand not really that old. She had just got on, I was soon to get off. I’d give my seat, but would not get credit even if I did the song and dance because too much time had passed already. I was in the no-man’s land of etiquette. Life isn’t always clear cut. Sometimes you have to make a choice you’re not proud of later. In the choice between getting up with no credit and enjoying my seat, I chose the latter.

Feel free to tell me what a bad person I am. I can’t help but agree. But next time you’re giving up your seat for someone older, giving your little bow, smiling your sympathetic smile, ask yourself how much of that was really necessary and how much was just for that little rush of self-indulgent pride you got when they thanked you. Just how selfless are you really?

Nevertheless, it seems headway is being made on other fronts. I’m running fairly regularly and am feeling fitter. I have gone from almost dying running up a hill, to running 5.5km in 37 minutes, to running the same course in 25. It’s still pretty slow, but I don’t stop and walk any more and progress like that is a great feeling.

I’m also rising earlier and more consistently than I have ever done before. Of course, these are normal things that normal people in normal jobs do, but for me, having lived a life of 11am awakenings, brunch at 1-ish followed by a few hours of glorified babysitting as an English teacher, followed by a dinner at 10 and eventual sleep at 3am, it’s quite a shift. I teach and get respect, I work legally with a visa and I even spend time preparing for classes.

It’s also been a little thorn in my side that I can’t speak Korean. At first it was understandable, I knew a little, enough to get by, enough even to joke around. But now it’s no joke. Having spent a good 4 years in this country and still be unable to put a sentence together is really getting embarrassing. So, of late I have dusted off the various books I had previously bought in various fits of studiousness and cracked them open for a peek. When I find some time, I may even enroll in something.

Firstly I will state from the get-go that I am starting my own religion. I dont want you to misconstrue my newfound faith as to be in any way related to any major religion existing today. I suppose elements of all of them are true in some way, but I think they completely misconstrue the truth and build so much bullshit around it, that you cant really see it anymore. Maybe people wanted more out of their religion, more meaning out of their existence, so religions grew to fulfill this need. Maybe they lusted for more power. Either way, they have been distorted so as to make the truth impossible to see.

The honest truth is that the actions of your life dont particularly matter. From the perspective of the universal consciousness, your life matters an amount which is infinitesimally close to zero. You can be good and bad, the UC pretty much doesnt give a crap. To kill someone, for example, is against the universal plan, but matters so incredibly little as to be almost insignificant. In fact, it may even be a part of the plan. As human beings, it makes no sense to be terribly concerned with the details of the universal plan, as you have been programmed to enjoy your life and in so doing, play your role in the UP. However, being human you have a consciousness that demands to be aware of whats happening to it, so humans have longed for this spiritual meaning to life, to be aware of the plan that exists for us. We have in the past turned to religion to satisfy this need, but as these religions were so full of hogwash and illogicality they stood opposed to the truth we had learned with our own eyes. Religion, in its role of tour guide to Eternity, has failed miserably. Instead of helping us to observe our own place in the universe and of the meaning to our futile lives, they elevated their own status to be much higher than it should be, to control people to behave as they wished them to. Power made them greedy, those religions, as they longed for more and more control. Whatever truth started out in them, by the time religions had taken over peoples lives, there was little truth to be found at all. This is why I must start my own religion.

To be honest, criticizing todays religions is almost a waste of time. There is so little to believe about them that people need to study it in order to see how it might be true, go to church every week and recite prayers to enforce it. If you really need to reinforce truth, then maybe its not so true to begin with. Truth is a light which shines upon us. Yes, finding real truth requires a search, but once found it should make itself forever known, imprinted on your brain. Truths as elemental as 1+1=2 or the difference between hot and cold are, once learned, never forgotten. In the same way, the Universal Truth is something that, once learned, is not easily forgotten.

The plan is something I need to talk about. The plan is the goal that our lives contribute a part to. All of us are helping it along. I want you to imagine you are God for a moment. You look out over Creation and see all the different life-forms blossoming, burgeoning their existence into the universe. As it all grows, you feel that the winner will grow to benefit further your plan. Right now, the humans are showing promise, but will the dominant species be the virii, which eternally replicate and never destroy each other, as the humans are prone to do? You feel no special longing for either side to win, just to watch as it unfolds before you. You are happy to let the creatures develop, all along playing their Darwinian games of natural selection until they have the capacity to join the communication of the UC.

No doubt there are other civilizations out there also competing their way to universal significance. Some may just be starting out, others may be far more advanced than ours. Looked at from Gods perspective, we see them as eternally engaging in the battle of survival. There are many species which are not even nearly going to come close to winning. One of the branches of life forked out and made a bird called a dodo. That branch had hoped to be the ultimate species, fighting for domination of the planet, the solar system, the galaxy, but alas, it turned out to be a really stupid bird. As a result, its line ended. As humans, we are living out our lives and we think we are developing quite well, but this may not always be the case. Another life form may swallow us in pursuit of their own destiny and that will be our end. However, as we advance, we will be open to broader and broader forms of communication, using methods previously undreamt of. Eventually, we will discover other species. Of course, they may be a species of giant walking plants, who communicate through molecular emission and transmission. In which case, well think twice before making the movies about cross-species romance. Species are out there, its just a matter of finding them.

Imagine a caveman. He is living in a cave on the outskirts of the city. He has never ventured far out of his cave and the town locals have never risked getting close to him. The caveman is unaware of the world. There is, of course a wireless internet signal running through the air around his cave. The humans in the town send this wireless signal out. Theres also a cell phone network in the area. If the caveman had a computer or a mobile phone, hed be able to contact the humans and access all their knowledge. However until the caveman builds the computer and mobile technology, he will be unable to bridge that gap. You may ask, what about more traditional forms of communication, such as smoke signals, mirror flashes or plain old-fashioned shouting. From a universal perspective this amounts to asking, why dont the aliens send us information through more traditional means, in ways we could understand? The answer is the same for the townspeople and the caveman as it is for the aliens and us. That is, they cant communicate with us for the same reason we cant run computer networks on a system of smoke signals: the mechanism for communication is simply inadequate. What seems like an impossible task for our imaginary caveman, that task of hooking in to the wireless signal of the town, remains our very real task of finding out how to plug into the universal network of truth. Its almost an impossible feat, but its one we must never give up on. A major part of my religion is learning how to connect to truth and be open to receive it.

to be continued…

Then again, my lack of good sleep could also be due to my nightly suffocation at the hands of the supplied pillows. If my mattress is the most extreme of hard, then my pillows are the extreme of soft. My head sinks down into them like I was resting it on a pile of cotton balls, balls which fill the holes I usually like to breathe out of, oh I don’t know, every few seconds or so. I’ll wake up every few hours, feeling more tired than I did when I first lay down and wondering why my co-workers can drink more, sleep later and get up before me.

I’d throw away the pillows and rest my head on the mattress, but any sudden moves might give me brain damage. I’m not entirely sure which is worse though, suffocation or brain damage. When those are my two choices it’s no wonder I’m sitting here writing blogs into the wee hours of the morning.

Oh well, back to my slab.

The other problem is, it’s hardly even noticeable. One minute you’re playing cricket in the backyard with your friends, the next you’re stuck in a job you hate with a baby on the way. Well, maybe not that fast, but something along those lines. Things happen, and we make decisions along the way that we didn’t realize were that important, that wind up shaping our future. The words of our friends, our parents, some dude on TV, lead us astray from the dreams we had when we were young.

But all is not lost. For within us all there is still that child that we used to be, looking out with eyes of wonder at the world. It may be buried under a mountain of adult problems, but you can rest assured that if you search hard enough, you’ll find a familiar face in there. It’s never too late to discover your inner child, the child of the past who knew what they wanted out of life.

The problem with life is that people grow up. The older you get, the more you think you know and the more you think you know the more you start to believe that you’re smart. Older people categorize everything, whether they’ve seen it before or not, whether they’ve experienced it or not. They categorize and judge things based on their years of experience and think that there’s nothing new to know. It gives us confidence, but takes away our curiosity, it makes us sound smart at the cost of losing the wonder we had when we looked at the world as a mysterious place. I challenge you that most of the things you think you know, you don’t really know at all. You just think you know and you never bothered to check if you were right or not. Go on, check. I’ll wait.

No actually I won’t, because I had a more important point. If you forgo the idea that you do know everything, it may just be possible to learn something new or head your life in a different direction. Some people like to imagine that they are living their last day and wonder what they would do. I don’t suggest this, unless you plan to do a bunch of crazy things with little prospect of any future. I suggest that if you’re struggling to find perspective as the winds of influence buffer you about, do the opposite and imagine that you will live forever. Now, imagining that your body would stay young for another half a millenia or so, ask yourself, what would you do first?

If you worry that it’s too late to change what you’re doing, that there’s not enough time to do that traveling you always wanted to do or to learn how to play the guitar or to join a local club, think again. Worrying about time is a fools past time because worrying only stalls us further. By the time we realize we’re stalling, a whole bunch of time has passed, which makes you worry about it more. What we all have to realize is that life is like Wheel of Fortune (I know, profound isn’t it?). We have no idea what fortune we’ll have, but the game has a definite end and unless you spend your money in the gift shop, you may well come away with nothing. But in life, it’s not money but time that will run out at the end of the game. You can’t take any of it with you, so what good is it wasting all your time to do something that doesn’t make you happy? Are there really greater factors at work in life than people being happy living?

“I do it for my children” the struggling fathers of the world say. “I slave away at this job to send them to college so they won’t have to work as hard.” Which is an honorable thing to do. But will they be happy after all that? Or will they do the exact same thing as you and then tell me that they’re doing it for their kids.

But don’t think about it from a purely selfish perspective. It’s in the interests of humanity that you do find the thing you love. Happy people don’t start wars easily. They work harder out of sheer joy and make advances in their fields to the benefit of the rest of us. You owe it to humanity to stop putting up with that crap you call a life and start living your dreams fella! Too harsh?

Look inside. Go on. Ask your inner child what they make of your life. Find out what mattered to you then, what dreams you had when you still had the ability to dream. Picture your life stretching out into eternity and go for the first thing that takes your fancy. You may well discover a part of yourself that you had forgotten existed.

Fears abound us in modern-day society. We are no longer the commanders of our domain, like when we were hunter-gatherers. We rely on the actions of others for our material needs. We are cogs in the great machinery of society, a special skill developed to help turn the engine that drives our economies forward. We are also faced with situations completely removed from natural life. Public speaking is something the caveman never had to face, nor was intercontinental travel. But in this modern society, we overcame our resistance to other cultures and instead embraced them, shared them, all the while infusing ours into theirs. Ordinary people rose to the top ranks of large corporations through white-collar channels rather than battle and subterfuge. Men no longer hunted women in the same way as he might hunt a gazelle, but rather had to revert to conversation and dialog. He had to read a woman’s signals, then try to decypher what they mean. For the woman it is often just as strange, when men approach and speak nonsense in hope of impressing them, or entertain them all night unable to mouth the words of interest due to the social stigma of rejection. Or what of the countless number of people scared of the outdoors, of nature? Unable to fend for themselves, even in the most basic of natural scenarios, they would make their forefathers of only a few generations blush in their caskets. We no longer need to learn the skills of natural survival that were so essential just a century or two ago.

The fact is, we are incomplete people. We are only an element of an equation, entirely unbalanced in our efforts to fit in to modern society. We no longer seek to make ourselves the best in a wide range of endeavors, but rather to better one particular aspect of an endeavor in order to serve society better. As a whole, it makes for a better society, all the cogs working in harmony. But is it any wonder that the average person lacks confidence in a wide range of situations? We find ourselves living in a modern society with social rules and laws of manner and ettiquette, yet with biological programming identical to our spear weilding forefathers. We are conflicted, unbalanced and as a result, unconfident.

I don’t have a social answer to the larger problem, however I do have a solution to all those lacking confidence: act.

Confidence or rather, self-esteem is determined by your actions, not your thoughts. Those who are overly thoughtful, no doubt have heightened sensitivity to a whole range of topics, with increased knowledge and quite possibly the correct answer to many problems. But those who act, endear themselves with the confidence that the action brings forward into future situations.

In personal terms, conquering fear requires action. There aren’t any thoughts which can satisfactorily conquer it. Action with an external focus is the only way. External focus is important. Concentrate on the subject of your action, enjoy every part of the action, the process. Standing there on the verge of action, contemplating the result, be it success or failure, only serves to weaken confidence.

Constantly focus on things outside yourself. Let your emotions tell you how you feel, rather than analyze your own head. Act. Start small. Let that action lead to the next action, instilling confidence into the way you act, again and again. It will not always have the result you hope, but everything that happens will still give you the confidence you need for the next action because you did something. As soon as you act, you have more power than all the self-confidence boosting prop speeches gave you.

As for all the cog-in-the-wheel stuff, try not to let it bother you. Take up a new hobby. You’ll feel much better.

=====

An addendum. Eugenics has always been a dirty word, equated with Hitlerian aspirations of a ‘super-race’. However, while reading the Wikipedia entry for Nikola Tesla, I noticed this interesting quote:

[...] man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct [...]. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.^[ref]

I think Tesla was too optimistic of social trends. But it makes one wonder. Is the weakening of this mating instinct offset by the increased opportunities for meeting your potential mate that modern society affords? The question of who to mate with will still be programmed into us, to a degree, but how much this does or should play a role is highly debatable. As I discussed above, we have moved away from personal self-sufficiency and the pride that brings, toward a mutual interdependency and the material pride that brings. The result is a society which seeks personal happiness at any cost. When faced with one’s personal happiness over more perfect offspring, we might choose the former more readily. After all, the rule usually goes that whatever is lacking, people are more desperate to have. Poor people are thus more likely to steal and people lacking in self-worth more likely to scream “me! me! me!”.

So who would you choose? A person with a personality you like, or someone who was, eugenically speaking, a perfect match? Should that even be raised as a question?

The other side of the argument is that today’s society has moved away from the notion of physical strength. Functioning well in modern society requires superior mental ability, not pure physicality (sports men and women excepted). However is just as much a physical trait as strength, arising from superior cognitive functioning, rather than muscular.

Ethically, the whole issue is a slippery slope. While countries such as China have embarked on a program of sterilization for those with “genetic diseases of a serious nature” and even some mental health conditions. Canada had a program of eugenics which continued into the 1970s, as did other countries including my own, Australia. And surprisingly, the largest state-sponsored eugenics program behind Hitler’s was run by, you guessed it, the US of A.

Programs such as these are artificial attempts to restore the natural balance of society. Programs and policies such as Feminism, Taxation/Welfare or Economics seek to correct some failing of modern society through a set of imposed rules on it’s subjects. Yet social programs which instill their own criteria on social interaction easily circumvent human nature to suit their ends and leave society more imbalanced than ever, inevitably. I could talk about each of the above programs in detail as to why I feel they are unnatural, but I think this rant has gone on long enough.

Plus, I’m meant to be travelling, not philosophizing.

It’s not just January 17th either. It’s December 13th, 14th and 15th. The rest of December is pretty much a blur too. I remember moments where I went some place and did something, but if I had to piece it all together it would probably only account for 1-2% of my time. I don’t think I’m crazy or forgetful, it’s just that days blend into each other.

I heard that everything we do is stored in our subconscious and that we can recall it under hypnosis. But if it’s stored anyway, why don’t we just have access to it, to remember all the things we did if we choose to.

Now I can understand why people keep diaries. Writing everything down would make the past easier to recall. Once you had a few events, you’d be able to fill in the pieces. What troubles me is that people who write memoirs always appear to have such clarity about events, places and conversations. I’m sure they just make it up. After all, who else is going to remember what happened. I can’t really believe that they have always kept a diary of daily events.

The problem also with writing everything down is that it takes so much time. Writing down all the things that happened in a day would mean living the day over again, writing out the words, explaining all the things that happened. I’m sure it would take the better part of an hour. So that’s an hour out of every day which you lose just recording events, most of which are probably boring and dull.

But the bright side is, you’d be able to tell people what you were doing at any given point of history. Is that ability really worth it. I suppose at the end, when you’re almost done with life and you read back over it, you can experience your life again. I can imagine myself as a grandfather, reading an excerpt to my grandkids….

May 12th. Went to the supermarket to buy socks. Oh I remember those socks I bought. They were stripy and felt so comfortable. But they got dirty and soon I wore a hole out in the toe. Maybe I made a note of it… ah yes, June 23rd. Wore out my stripy socks today. Was very disappointed that they didn’t last longer… Timmy, Timmy, listen to your grandfather! What’s that Wendy? Well I’m sorry my life wasn’t more exciting for you. Comfort is part of a happy life and socks play a large role in that comfort. What? Fine, go and play outside.

I think it might be better to let mystery surround a life instead of laboring over stuff which wasn’t important.

What would be cool is finding some way to predict what you’ll be doing days, weeks, months or years from now. It’s possible on a small scale, but I find that it gets complicated quickly. You need constraints on your life. You may be able to predict with relative certainty that you’ll be in a certain place doing a certain activity at such and such a time. However at best this sketch will be general. At worst, it will be broken in the first minute.

The solution? Make your actions follow your predictions. In other words, plan your future.

Which makes me wonder what else I can grow under the right conditions. I saw a documentary the other day about two guys who hit stuff. By subjecting their bodies to repeated impacts, they made their bones incredibly strong. I heard of another guy who was bitten so many times by rattlesnakes that he didn’t need antivenom any more. It’s a testament to the human body that it can change and adapt to anything that humans might be stupid enough to do repeatedly.

What special skill might I be able to acquire though? I rarely jump through plate-glass windows or wrestle snakes, so the above examples aren’t really for me. I hated the cold, yes, and my body adapted, true, but I need more. Maybe the resistance from fire. You never know when your house is going to burn down. Withstanding an inferno might be a good thing. Ability to breathe underwater another. But finally, I suppose if you were going to get resistant from anything the best thing would be death.

You could start by killing yourself a little bit, then a little bit more, then a little bit more. Try a little poisoning, then a little stabbing, then a little drowning. Eventually, no-one will be able to top you off. This could be very useful for people in the shady professions. Of course, I wouldn’t try this myself. I’ll just wait for the video to appear on YouTube.

It seems that my last post was misinterpreted as the last cry of a tortured soul. So just to clear any incorrect assumptions: No, I do not want to kill myself.

What the poem was about in actual fact was the war in Iraq, but more than that, the plight of any man who leaves his family behind to put himself in the line of fire. I imagine him stepping out of his door, wondering when he will return, hoping that some stray bullet or misfortune won’t prevent this happening. I imagine all those times he just wanted to be in front of that door again, the smells of cooking and fresh linen rushing to greet him. And yet there they are on the battlefield, on a rig, sailing the seas, fate waiting at the ready to take their lives.

That people would take my poetry the wrong way, it’s comforting to know that my safety net is there. It’s also a reminder just how out of touch everyone is with me. The last thing I’d do is kill myself. I always used to ponder this subject in high school. I could never fathom why someone would take their life. It seems to me that wherever you are, there’s always something you can do before you die. For starters, go skydiving. If that doesn’t put you in touch with life, then try shaving your head and going to live in a Buddhist temple. Why not? And if you seriously must kill yourself, then why not do it creatively? Go for a swim in the ocean with slabs of bloody meat strapped to your body. A plane ticket to Africa only costs a couple of thousand dollars, any credit card will give you that. Go live with some apes like Dianne Fossey or some Grizzly Bears in Canada. What’s the worst that can happen?

No, if I’m bothered by anything it’s that we die too soon. Life seems to travel so fast, days fly by then weeks and years. In a way I’m searching for that timelessness of childhood. Back in the time when you wanted to be older so bad that days, weeks, months and years passed so slowly. Now that I’m old, just the opposite kind of time dilation is happening. Like the song, I just want this train to stop.

When you’re young you feel eternal, as though life will never stop. From this feeling comes the idea that you can be anything and everything to everyone. Then the realization comes that everyone passes and soon it will be your turn. You just have to resolve your mortality with the desire to do everything and achieve only that which is achievable in a human life. It’s that point of change which gets people down. Why do we suddenly see getting older as a bad thing? We can’t help getting older and we do it every single moment. So why not celebrate it. Can you remember the time when you were 17, a week before your 18th birthday. How you just wanted it to pass. Imagine that for your next birthday, finally being 30, 40 or 95. And why not?

So as this year ends and we all start our ritualistic grumbling of “well there’s another year”, stop yourself right there. 2007 is almost here. A new year, a new page of history, a new tableau on which to paint the colors of our lives. We’re older, wiser and living the lives we chose all those years before. We know that it’s never to late to change anything, that everything is possible. And that, concerned family and friends is my simple philosophy. E is P.