50 years

“Here I am because I came, because I came here I am, and if I hadn’t come I wouldn’t be where I am”

So much happens in half a century, it’s staggering, it’s impossible to remember it all

Experiencing the beauty of watching your daughter be born. Looking death in the face and sticking your tongue out at it, scared shitless, mind you. Watching the old ones go, and feeling rage at the loss of the youngest. Loving, losing love and finding it again. Loving again, without fear and without expecting anything, and getting infinite affection back.

“Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun. "

I was thirty-nine when I started writing this blog. At thirty-nine my old man was gone. I think about the immense opportunity I have had and I give thanks every day by making the most of it, “carpe diem!”.

Although the age at which you go matters less than the mark you leave. It’s hard to outdo my father on that count, but we are in this world to fulfill our own destiny, not our parents’ wishes, and not to compete with their memory.

I love my children, but as the poet said, I can give them my love but not my thoughts.

“For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”

When you turn fifty there is neither time nor room to recall all the experiences you have piled up, but you can reflect a little on what we have learned, because it seems that’s what we come into this world for.

Over the last year I went back to being a college student, and studying has revitalized me. I found out how lazy I was when I was young, and the clarity experience gives you. It’s unfair to young people that they get graded; let them roll on and come back to take the exams when they feel ready.

Actually, on second thought, grades don’t matter. What counts is love for your profession. The best grade is the recognition of your clients and your peers.

“Love, and do what you will!”, said Augustine of Hippo, but he also said: “poor is not the one who has less, but the one who needs infinitely much to be happy”.

You cannot be happy. Wanting to be happy is a stupid illusion that leads to suffering. If you think of life as a process, what they call happiness is nothing more than one of the possible states you can pass through.

You can feel happy, for a moment, but you cannot be happy all the time. Don’t chase the impossible; maximize the number of times you pass through that state.

The First Law of Mentat, as Paul Atreides quotes it to the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, says:

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”

Live the process, don’t strain to understand it statically.

There are two kinds of people: those who see the world as it is and those who see it as it should be. The first are called positive, the second normative. Be positive; you get more satisfaction and spare yourself anger and frustration. But never stop loving those who want the world to get better.

Adaptation is the key to evolution. There is no progress in evolution. That idea that evolving means moving on to a better stage is not what Darwin said. The most evolved species on the planet is not the human being, it’s bacteria; think about that. The crocodile has been the same for sixty million years, it has no need to change. That is evolution too.

Don’t hate human beings, don’t be a misanthrope. We are the ones wrecking the world, true, but we can make it better. Hatred never achieves anything. There are normative types who say, “when we have power we will bring about the changes that will make this world better”. They ignore that power corrupts everything. Nothing is ever built from power alone. Remember what master Suzuki said:

Love is affirmation, a creative affirmation; it is never destructive or annihilating, for, unlike power, it embraces everything and forgives everything. Love enters into its object and becomes one with it, while power, being characteristically dualistic and discriminating, crushes any object that stands against it, or else conquers it and enslaves it under its yoke.
Love and creativity are two aspects of one reality, but creativity is frequently separated from love. When this illegitimate separation takes place, creativity comes to be associated with power. Power really belongs to a lower order than love and creativity, but when it takes possession of the latter, it becomes an extremely dangerous agent of all kinds of evil. This notion of power inevitably arises from a dualistic interpretation of reality. When dualism refuses to recognize the presence of an underlying integrating principle, its immediate tendency toward destruction shows itself in brutal and arbitrary form.

So that is the best gift you can give anyone: love. It is the greatest building force in the universe.

I wish that you feel as loved as I do when you reach my age.

This is my gift to you this year, a song by Robert Palmer, Every Kind of People: