Keeping My Mind Open So I Don't Miss Anything
As age wraps its bony fingers around us, it gets harder for our bodies to do the things our minds say we can do. Mountain biking, hiking up a steep trail, running, or just going to the gym and trying to bench the weight you had when you were in your early thirties. It’s just harder and, frankly, disappointing.
About fifteen years ago, in a former life, I worked with Josephine and Josephine had a plan. She was driven by a single goal which was to work as hard as she could, climb the corporate ladder and make enough money so she and her husband could retire at forty-five and live the rest of their days in relaxed splendor. Jasmine planned to begin working part time about two years ago. In her mid forties, she felt it time to spend more time with the kids who had, up to this point, been brought up by nannies. She was considering going freelance and starting her own consulting business. Her time would become her own and she’d made enough money that she and her family were pretty well off. Hunter has worked extremely hard for the last several years trying to grow his company and build a solid nest egg. He…
I didn’t know him at all, but from what I have heard, life for Joseph John Janson was not all that kind to him. Before he was married. Before he had two sons. Before he tragically slipped and fell in a bathtub, drowning at the age of 57, and before life had thrown its curve balls, he was just a young man of 22 years, living his life when he took to the open road. I grew up in an old Victorian house on the Main Line of Eastern Pennsylvania. It was the “wrong side of the tracks” but it was still a nice big house with lots of cool places to hide. A few years ago, I was rummaging around in the third floor storage room and I happened upon three old black journals. They were the kind that were flimsy and bound with thin, black leather. About the…
Jerry Seinfeld has a bit about what happens to the missing socks in the laundry. They had to go somewhere right? That’s the law of conservation of matter and energy. But for some reason, they disappear. Never to be seen again. We have a bundle of socks tied together in our laundry basket. It rides along every time the laundry is done and never does anything but sit there. The intention is to, at some point in the future, match them up with their mates once they come home to roost, but that hope is never realized. So what is there for this lonely bundle of singles to do? No matches to any of the socks exist. But there are close to 10 of them in there that have accumulated over the last few years. My question is, why do we keep ’em? Shouldn’t there be, maybe, someplace where they…