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LISTEN. A good weekend for me includes at least two leisurely morning dogwalks (unhurried by pressure to join the daily stress-parade on I-24) and afternoon bikerides in the neighborhood, on the Richland Greenway to Centennial Park, and in Warner Parks. Check, check, and check. Crisp cool mornings and sunny afternoons in the 60s made our walks and my rides a delight.

This weekend's highlight, though, was an internet live stream from Venice, Florida. I was here, but wife and Younger Daughter were there to honor our dear friend Patricia. She died a year ago, but the pandemic prevented a proper memorial at that time. 

We participated in a ceremony to honor her service as a Unity minister in July at Unity Village in Kansas City. 

We were honored to participate last night in her memorial commemoration at Unity Village near here, with music and poetry and a scattering of ashes amongst the flowers. Her life of service and nurture and kindness inspire like the rose, reaching for the light but keeping rooted in the soil of this earth. That example has not sailed over our human horizon, though there was talk last night of a "transition" and a departure to another realm. For myself at least, she's still right here. Her goodness blooms like the rose. --Jy 15, '21

Saturday's service was at the church she founded in Venice. Sharon's tribute to a woman of boundless energy, cheer, and love was eloquent and heartfelt, a proper goodbye to a beloved friend and humanitarian who lived a wonderful life and will always live in our hearts and minds. (Her remarks start at about 37 minutes into the service.) Woo-hoo!, as Patricia would say. And, go Chiefs! A legacy of unconditional love, devotion, and service indeed. 

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In CoPhi today we conclude Why Grow Up: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age. 

Susan Neiman's counter-reading of Shakespeare's seven stages of human life corrects the popular misconception of the Bard's message. 

He was not saying life sucks and then you die, she says, he was mocking that defeatist self-sabotaging attitude. Good, I mock it too. Many parts do suck, of course, and death--or infirmity, at least---bears down these days like a motivated  and amped-up NFL lineman. But I choose to look on the bright side, after yesterday's lovely spring sunshine and the promise of more days  like it just ahead. None of us of course, at any age, ever knows how many. So we must savor them all, if we can.

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women mere players... 

The idea that we're all just performing a script we've been handed, without license to improvise and discover in spontaneity the specific joys and meanings of our lives, is bleak. That's the bleakness I find, too, in so many of the rationalist/determinist philosophers we've encountered in our survey of the western stages of would-be enlightenment. Just follow the script? No, if you're a player you should play, and you should enjoy it.

And as for the the idea that we must undergo a debilitated second childishness, before exiting to mere oblivion? I prefer Hannah Arendt's more uplifting emphasis on the corollary: our mortality is met and matched at the other end by natality, and life goes on. If we can learn to appreciate and celebrate both ends of the play, we get a second childhood which is not a descent into dependency and loss (sans everything).

This is an important point, I think: being childlike and "forever young" (as Dylan sings it) throughout the entire pageant and especially near the end, in the sense of being forever curious and open to new experiences and discoveries, is virtuous. Being childish, incompetent, incontinent, unconfident, uncurious... That's unenlightened, it's immature, it's unworthy of freethinking independent human beings. It's undignified. It serves only the interests of those with profit to gain from selling you something you likely don't need. "Children make more compliant subjects and consumers." Are we a nation of children, in this sense? We don't have to be, if we don't buy that script.

One of my discussion prompts today asks if we know adults who never grew up, or who say they admire Peter Pan, or who are "young at heart" and "open to the world,"  or any young people who've missed out on the joys of childhood. I'll bet we all do. The good news of enlightenment is that it's never too late to rewrite the script.

"I wish I'd known enough to ask my teachers the right questions before they died," Neiman laments. My dad was my earliest teacher-by-example, as I'm sure many of us would say. I'm so glad I had the opportunity to ask him all the questions I'd long put off posing, in what we knew would be the final months of his life back in the summer of 2008. Ask your questions. Write that script.

"Most people grow happier as they grow older." The data support that, we've learned in Happiness class, even though most of us know a grumpy old person or two. The U-Bend varies, in different places. The Swiss start aging happily at 35, the Ukrainians not 'til 62. But happier days await most of us, say the stats. 

"Growing up means realizing that no time of one's life is the best one," just as each season of the year brings its own unique joys. "To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring." George Santayana, "perfection of rottenness" and all, was right about that.

Leibniz thought most people would choose on their deathbed to live their lives again only on the condition that they would be different next time. Nietzsche thought that was cheating, but Bill Murray arranged it in Groundhog Day (and won Andie McDowell's heart). I like David Hume's attitude: I might not want to repeat everything I recall of the last decade, but I'm banking on the next one being better. Give me ten more unscripted years and I'll take my chances.

The great message of enlightenment, surely, is that fear of living is self-fulfilling. Life doesn't have to suck. And while people my age may not be able entirely to avoid being "sneezy" (achy, sore, tired) they don't have to be grumpy either. The happy flip-side of the insight that no time of life is the absolute best is that no time has to be the worst. Life is good. (And bad, and ugly, and sometimes exquisite.) The mortal curtain comes down, the natal curtain rises. The play's the thing. Play on.

4.13.21