Is That All There Is?

 

Peggy Lee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWnODd2oVv0&list=RDPWnODd2oVv0&start_radio=1

My Mother loved this song. It expressed her take on so much, including the marriage to my Dad. Given the state of the world today, it is, I think, a good response to modern life. 

It is a tempting philosophy for myself, given the death of Darryl and my life as an old man. When I look back, or think about my life and loves, I can't come to the same conclusion. My life has been nothing short of a plenitude. Even this blog, which goes back no further than 2005, is evidence of the richness, the wonders, the epiphanies I have experienced. Thousands of pages of journals trace both the joys and the hardships I have had. 

When I was tripping on LSD in 1969 in the little apartment in Savannah on Habersham Street that I shared at times with Buz and several others, I realized that the room I was in could be seen as lovely and comfortable, or hideous, dirty, squalid.  How I looked at things, interpreted life, determined the quality. That being recognized, I insist that the overall evidence, especially the cultivation of my mind and knowledge, reveal how fortunate I have been. Yes, that view is somewhat subjective: I still stare in wonder at the appearance of Venus and Jupiter in the Western sky, seemingly close together as every other person I pass ignores the vision. I have watched those two planets appear together over the Champs Elysees on my first trip to Paris. 

Whether a life is wonderful or whether one sings Peggy Lee's song depends not only on the circumstances of travel, education, lovers, opportunities of working and home, but also on attitude. It requires too that one be active; going places, seizing the day. 

Philosophy and self-help aside, my life has had thrills no one can deny: visiting Delphi twice, Buddhist and Shinto shrines in Japan, boating close to the vast Moreno Glacier in Patagonia, walking into the Pantheon in Rome, or Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Feeding wild kangaroos on a beach in New South Wales, living with three girls from Brooklyn in Copenhagen, then returning decades later with Darryl there to stay with friend and fellow philosopher Katrina. That's just a feather of the travel. My 13 loves including the Love of my Life, my husband, Darryl for 35 years of being like one, our thoughts, feelings and experiences so merged...Teaching philosophy and art history for over half my life in colleges and now, BFA...And on and on in a kaleidoscope or a complex collage of living fully. 

So, not "Is that all there is" for me. but rather, "How can there be so much in one lifetime?" In a utopia, everyone would have a life as rich as mine, knowledge as rewarding and astonishing as mine, loves as fulfilling as mine, satisfaction as complete as mine has been. It is the could have been vs the how it is for the majority of humans, for the multitude of animals and plants, for the entire planet that turns the world we live in into the tragedy that we see before us. 

Cheers,

Jack