Longevity challenges – self and climate

I’ve been spending some time on Mastodon lately – mostly reading, occasionally boosting, rarely posting. As I said in the initial post on this blog, I stepped away from the more mainstream social media sites (think facebook, twitter, and instagram) both because of their algorithmic approach to these things and their capturing of my data. I’m still struggling to find my place in any sort of online environment (witness the infrequency of posts here), but I find Mastodon to be much more informative and engaging than other platforms, primarily (I think) because I get to choose whose posts and boosts I see. Moreover, the posts and boosts that I choose to see lead me to other Mastodon posters that I can choose to see. So finding my place on Mastodon is much like finding my place when I move to a new city – initially I explore things in my immediate neighborhood and/or areas of interest I’ve already identified, and what I find there gradually leads me further afield.

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Writing (or not) without a deadline

I’ve passed the middle of the month without posting to the blog. Despite my best (or at least very strong) intentions, ’Thinking out loud’ is running the risk of being yet another still-born project. But surely I’ll have at least one entry in the month of May!

One of the collections of Hannah Arendt’s essays is called Thinking without a banister. AS I think about my rather hopeful labeling of this blog as “Thinking out loud,” I’d say that the challenge I face here is that of thinking without a deadline. I found a recent NYTimes essay by Adam Gopnik to be rather helpful here. Gopnik draws a contrast between achievement and accomplishment: “Achievement is the completion of the task imposed from outside — the reward often being a path to the next achievement. Accomplishment is the end point of an engulfing activity we’ve chosen, whose reward is the sudden rush of fulfillment, the sense of happiness that rises uniquely from absorption in a thing outside ourselves.” Of course I knew already that I’ve lived a life driven by achievement, completing “tasks that lead only to other tasks, into something resembling not so much a rat race as a rat Mace….” I had more freedom than many have in my life’s work as an academic, but I still spent each day driven by expectations that I complete a particular task – prepping for a class, grading a set of papers, preparing to lead a workshop – by a certain externally imposed deadline. Retirement promised freedom from most of those deadlines, and while that promise has been redeemed, I find that lacking deadlines leaves me without the sense of a feeling of achievement. And I’m such a perfectionist that I’m unable (or perhaps unwilling) to define what I would accept as a sense of accomplishment as well.

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The price of books

George Orwell:

In any discussion of the price of books one must take two propositions as axiomatic. One is that the more the public reads – provided that it is not reading sheer trash – the better. The other is that it is undesirable that writers should starve to death. And it is important to realise that they would starve, or at least would have to find other means of support, if cheap books were the rule instead of the exception.

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Revisiting the pasts in the present

This weekend I’m gathering with about a dozen friends with whom I attended high school more than 50 years ago. I use the term “friends” somewhat loosely here, though (I think) not as loosely as it’s commonly used in these Facebook days. We attended a relatively small school, so we all knew each other, but I was much closer to some of those coming together than I was to others. And some of them have stayed in pretty close touch with each other over the last 50 or so years, while I’ve had relatively little contact with any of them. (And, in fact, I would say that they were very kind and generous to invite me to join them this weekend. I’m grateful.)

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Genes: fate and choice

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Genes must carry out programmed responses to environments – otherwise, there would be no conserved form. But they must also leave exactly enough room for the vagaries of chance to stick. We call this intersection ‘fate.’ We call our responses to it ‘choice.’ An upright organism with opposable thumbs is thus built from a script, but built to go off script. We call one such unique variant of one such organism a “self.”

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Cycling: Inside or outside?

I’ve spent many hours and miles on bicycles over the course of my life. I commuted to work by bicycle for most of my career, in all sorts of circumstances – some more risky than others. I continued cycling to work most days even after we moved to Boston and even during the winter. (I’ll admit here that the rather extreme snowfall in February 2015 – over 100 inches of snow in a month in which the temperature didn’t get above freezing – had me driving to work for months.) But even when I cycled to work here in Boston, I logged many “miles” each week on a trainer in our basement. I shifted those inside miles to a gym after we downsized to a condo in the city, and post-retirement winters here in Boston eventually found me riding almost exclusively in the gym.

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So many words, so little time

I’ve long been frustrated by the fact that I’m not able (or willing?) to read all of the books and essays that I think I want to read. I’m further frustrated by the fact that it’s not at all unusual for me to begin reading a book and then abandon it half-way through. Sometimes the abandonment is intentional – that is, sometimes I make a clear decision that it’s not worth my time to finish a book. But more often it’s that I become distracted by something else and simply don’t return to a book that I intend(ed) to finish reading. I’ve just dedicated a couple of shelves by my desk to the books that I’m (still hoping to be) reading now. It’s a little embarrassing to see how many of the books with bookmarks indicating my progress are books that I’ve not picked up for weeks.

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The value of civilization

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr:

… the chief worth of civilization is just that it makes the means of living more complex; that it calls for great and combined intellectual efforts, instead of simple, uncoordinated ones, in order that the crowd may be fed and clothed and housed and moved from place to place. Because more complex and intense intellectual efforts mean a fuller and richer life. They mean more life. Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of it.

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Living an entirely private life is a deprivation

Hannah Arendt:

To live an entirely private life means above all to be deprived of things essential to a truly human life: to be deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an ‘objective’ relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things, to be deprived of the possibility of achieving something more permanent than life itself.

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Of a certain age …

Ian McEwan:

In your mid-thirties you could begin to ask what kind of person you were. The first long run of turbulent young adulthood was over. So too was excusing yourself by reference to your background. Insufficient parents? A lack of love? Too much of it? Enough, no more excuses. You had friends of a dozen years or more. You could see your reflection in their eyes. You could or should have been in and out of love. You would have spent useful time alone. You had a measure of public life and your relation to it. Your responsibilities would be pressing in, helping to define you. Parenthood must cast some light.

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