Well, it’s still the dead of Winter here in the northeastern USA; in fact, we’ve just had a blizzard. Spring is about 5 weeks away. It’s hard to even think about right now. But somehow it will get here. And then things will look very different. For a few wonderful weeks, the smell of hope and possibility will be back in the air. And then, that too will pass. All Spring seasons are temporary. Physicists are quite sure that entropy is the prevailing trend in our universe, the inexorable increase in messyness and disorganization. Spring is only a spit against the wind.

But hey, I’m writing tonight from a mid-winter perspective. The good thing is that even though Spring seasons are only temporary, and cannot break the Universe’s grand slide into coldness and darkness, they somehow keep on happening. So even if things don’t seem to be going so well in your life, or in mine, and if you haven’t had a Spring season in quite a while, don’t think that it can’t happen again. But if you’re in a Spring season right now, say if you’re in love or climbing the success-ladder where you work — well, I’ve got to let you know that it ain’t gonna last. But by the same token, it probably won’t be your last season of joy either. So rock on, come what may.

TRIBALISM: I was thinking the other day during my drive to work (when I get a lot of my thinking done) that humankind’s biggest challenge right now is to change its mindset from a tribal perspective to a one-world perspective. A few weeks ago on The West Wing TV show, President Bartlett (Martin Sheen) asked the new White House speech writer why saving the life of an African citizen was not as important to him as saving an American’s. Will, the new guy, said that’s just the way it is, politics being what they are. However, there is a word for the phenomenon that Will and Jed were discussing. And that word is tribalism. In this instance, American tribalism, but tribalism nonetheless.

The human species found out only recently that we live on a globe populated by people of many different colors and languages. For most of human history, people presumed that everyone looked and acted pretty much like themselves. Only for the past 400 years or so has it been common knowledge that a whole lot of noticeable variations in the way that people look, act, speak and think crop up when you go a few thousand miles or so. And only for the past 100 years has it been common for most people to live and work and interact with different-looking and different-thinking people on a daily basis. So, it’s not all that surprising that most of us feel discomfort with this and quietly continue to seek the company of those who look and act most like us (even though our law and our science say that everyone is the same on the most fundamental levels).

Social customs and subconscious notions built up over many thousands of years do not stop on a dime. We are in a time of transition, somewhere between the tribal exclusivity that worked for us in the past and the post-nationalism that must kick-in if the planet is going to sustain 10 billion people in any sort of decent manner. Times of transition are quite uncomfortable, and I will admit to feeling some discomfort myself.

I don’t know anyone who wants to hear the Disney theme song “Small World After All” played since September 11th. But there’s no going back. As an eternal student, I will keep trying to learn more about people of all races and creeds and nationalities, and understand why we are different. Hopefully that will help me to realize what is incidental and what is fundamental. I still believe, based on what I’ve seen so far, that we are all pretty much alike on most things. Gotta keep the faith. And pass the duct tape.

WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH KIDS TODAY: Although this isn’t news to you parents out there, I recently discovered that suburban kids today don’t just go out and play anymore. They have play dates booked weeks in advance. I guess that you need a Palm Pilot to be a suburban kid these days. Back when I was a kid, we went down by the tracks or out behind the factories after school and threw rocks and bottles around, without any formal schedule. Someone would occasionally bring firecrackers, and on a really special day somebody would show up with an ash can, so we could blow something to hell. I once read an article by humorist Frank Gannon, who has to be the most underrated humor writer out there today, about the explosive escapades that he and his buddies pulled off as kids. When they blew something up, they used to call it “Rat Patrol”, after a short-lived TV show on ABC back in the late 60s. Lousy show, but cool name. I would have liked to have had some “play dates” with Gannon and his friends back when I was growing up. However, the only place I’d ever heard the words “play” and “date” together back then was on New York pop-radio station WABC, which once upon a time was THE pop-radio station (now it’s just another talk station, dominated as usual by angry conservatives; why are conservatives always so angry?). When a DJ on ABC was introducing an oldie but goodie, say from 1970, he used a recorded jingle that went: “WABC play date, ninteen seventy.” (Dan Ingrim, the afternoon man and the best DJ that WABC ever had, used to then say “ah yes, solid gold from 1917”).

That’s what a “play date” was back then. Ah, you suburban kids today, you have so much more than we had, and yet you missed out on all the good stuff.

“Knowledge is endless; life is limited. To pursue the endless with the limited is dangerous.”

          Zhuangzi

“Live dangerously.”

          Jim G.

BIRDS and POETRY: I was watching some sparrows on the porch this morning. Two of them landed on the railing and just stood there for a few minutes, basking in the low winter sunlight. Sparrows must have a busy life, especially during mid-winter. Finding food on a short, cold February day when everything is covered with snow can’t be easy. So it’s nice when a few busy birds like that take a quick break outside my humble abode.

Those sparrows brought back a childhood memory. I was about 12 or so, and I was with my father and brother in Nationals, one of those big, dumpy, low-budget general stores something like the Odd Lots and Family Dollars of today. I pretty much grew up in stores like that. We were just looking around one weekend afternoon and came across some cheap birdfeeders made of molded plastic, not terribly attractive. Each birdfeeder had a little paper card attached with a drawing of birds on it, as you might expect. But the marketing people for this cheap-o birdfeeder used a sales ploy that I’ve never seen anywhere before or since, and which almost worked on us.

On the birdfeeder card, there was a short four-line poem. I don’t remember the exact words of that poem, but the gist of it was that hungry birds appreciate a good source of food, and in return will reward you with their song every morning. After the three of us perused the poem, we just stood there. No one in my family was particularly poetic, especially not my father, an instrument technician who helped build guidance devices for NASA and military rockets. And yet, somehow we had all fallen prey to the words of some frustrated poet making a few bucks writing ad copy for some flimsy plastic household items. I could feel the emotion well up in my throat. My father asked me if I thought we should buy it. Being at the age when a boy has to prove his toughness, I said no. He asked me if I was sure, and I said yea, so we moved on.

Despite my masculine boyhood coldness, the birds in the neighborhood kept on singing every morning. So today, after I saw those sparrows, I threw some breadcrumbs out on the porch. Come to think of it, my brother has some kind of birdfeeder at his house too. Hey, better late than never.

You know, it might be a better world if advertisers used a little more poetry.

BELIEF IN GOD: I wonder how many people settle their belief or non-belief in God early in life, and how many (like me) waffle back and forth? I read a quote a few weeks ago that still bothers me a little. It was by some European firebrand from many years ago, the kind of bearded, radical guy who took Marx and socialism seriously. The fellow was expressing his disdain for the average family, who dutifully shuffled down to the village church every week to praise God despite the misery of their circumstances. The firebrand in question said that he would not join them, as he would not stoop to “licking the boots” of a cruel eschatological master; instead, he was going to devote all his attention to building a utopia in the here and now.

If you really believed that this world could be turned into a utopia, I suppose this fellow would have a point. But our world seems rather utopia-resistant. Therefore, spiritual awareness and “otherworldliness” is perhaps not such a bad idea. Nevertheless, there remains the age-old “problem of pain” to deal with. How do you cozy up to a God who put us into such a utopia-proof world? I guess that all you can do is hope that there is something better after death, that our present world is mostly a kind of training ground, some sort of big classroom where the lessons are painful because the outcomes really do matter. (Being an “eternal student”, that is an appropriate metaphysical perspective for me). Or let’s hope, anyway.

Oh, by the way, that doesn’t mean that we can just let this world go to hell. Even if it is just a classroom, we will get graded on our classroom projects. And the best class project is the one about making things better for the poor and the oppressed, and preserving the beauty of nature through environmental protection.

SCI-FI AND THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY: Despite being a “semi-techie”, I was never much of a science fiction reader. Maybe that was because most of the science fiction on TV left a bad taste in my mouth. It was generally quite negative: unstoppable aliens, nasty monsters, unexplainable horrors, death and destruction on a massive scale. The one exception was Star Trek; the Enterprise still encountered plenty of war and weirdness, but there was also a positive vision weaved into the plot. I didn’t take the original Trek too seriously back in ’65, but I later became a devoted fan of The Next Generation, mostly because of the gravitas that Patrick Stewart lent it. Stewart’s Captain Picard conveyed the sense that humanity finally stood united behind its better values and its notions of decency, and was out to spread them throughout the galaxy. (Star Wars by contrast was pretty schmaltzy, but there was still something appealing about the notion of “The Force”.)

I’ve been told that certain science fiction writings present grand visions of humankind’s future. Writers like Asimov and Bradbury sometimes envision tremendous technical accomplishments and utopian social arrangements unfolding over centuries and millenniums. That’s the beauty of science fiction: the sky’s the limit. Through science fiction, a writer can ask some of the biggest questions, such as where humankind is going and how long civilization will last.

Our present form of civilization is a rather energy-intensive proposition, burning up the earth’s resources at an alarming rate. Sometimes it looks to me as though we’re gonna lose the battle against entropy, i.e. the natural trend towards increasing disorder in the universe. It seems as though we’re headed pell-mell for a new (and maybe permanent) dark age, during which the human species will slowly fade away. However, such a dark view does not account for the progressive effects of organized intelligence. It seems to me that shared intelligence is some sort of anti-entropic force, something that might keep humankind in the game despite declining sources of easily-derived energy (e.g. petroleum).

So, the question is, will entropy win the day such that the human experiment with civilization, and possibly humankind itself, will terminate within next few millennium? Or will our advancing science and technology allow humanity a limitless future out amidst the stars? Will our species still be kicking around somewhere in the galaxy a millions years hence? Will our progeny go on to grander and grander accomplishments, such that if human intelligence still exists billions of years from now, when the universe itself has either gone cold or is heading back into a “big crunch”, we will harness the forces of nature to create a whole new universe for ourselves? In effect, will our legacy of intelligence, however it might be hosted in the impossible-to-imagine future, in itself become God? (I would have to guess that if humans survive that long, our bodies will have been modified and evolved into complex machines that wouldn’t have much resemblance to our skinny-gorilla bodies of today — maybe our consciousness won’t even be limited to any one “body”, we will all be spread across some sort of hyper-network).

Sounds great, but when I flip the coin as to humanity’s future, it lands on the edge. From what I’ve seen and know about humans, I suspect it can go either way. We are incredibly smart, as can be seen through our science and technology; and yet we’re incredibly dumb, as can be seen through our wars and self-inflicted wounds. We just keep on fighting each other and worrying too much about the short term, about our immediate comfort and entertainment. Cooperation and social progress requires that everyone trust that the next guy will also do the right thing, and right now we seem to be running on the fumes in that regard. Technology seems mostly to be speeding up our efforts at self-eradication.

I’d like to think that the cornucopia of wealth that technology provides allows people to get over their fear of resource shortage and thus encourages them to take more risks in the social cooperation arena. While that has arguably happened to some degree, at the same time it has inspired fantastic greed, manifesting itself in an incredible concentration of wealth amidst a tiny fraction of our population. Just why do families with $5 million need to become families with $50 million, a not-uncommon event during the 1990s?

Well, I’d like to stick around for the next 500 years or so to see just how this neck-and-neck horse race is going to turn out. But that just ain’t gonna happen. So, I just hope that the generations that will follow mine will keep on cheering the horse of cooperation and civil conduct, and lose their fascination with the deceptively beautiful horse of greed, conflict and personal aggrandizement.

WEB SITES AS WORKS OF ART: I’d like to think that my web site, along with this blog, is a work of art of sorts, a deeply personal statement of my being. Is there anyone else out there with a web site like that? Right now I don’t have any links, but I’m thinking of putting together a list of “life-work sites” like my own. One qualification I’m going to impose: the site doesn’t offer anything except ideas and feelings. Any significant advertising is a deal-breaker (yea, I know, I’m shilling for Blogger below in exchange for their services, it ain’t a perfect world admittedly). I’m on the lookout for sites like that, but I’m also open to any suggestions from my audience (assuming that I have an audience!).

SPACE SHUTTLE: I just read that the Space Shuttle fleet was originally supposed to fly up to 50 times a year. (In actuality, it has been limited to about 4 or 5 flights per annum.) Wow, imagine if that had happened — one would just about always be up in the sky, sometimes two. The other two would be getting prepped to go. That really would have been something. But the technology and the economics just didn’t work out. It was a lot harder than they thought to turn a firecracker into a delivery van with quarters for 7 people. Maybe the Shuttle is an idea whose time has not yet come. For now, the sad words of a James Taylor song seem most appropriate: sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.

MYERS-BRIGGS: I myself put a lot of stock in the Myers-Briggs human temperament sorting scheme (if you aren’t familiar with it, you can get a primer at www.personalitypage.com, www.keirsey.com, or punch Myers Briggs into Google for a long list of resources on the Web). Admittedly, there have been scores of different theories and ways of classifying people and their behaviors. But Myers-Briggs makes a lot of sense to me. Like any scheme, it can be used to split people apart based upon real differences, or it can help bring them together through understanding and tolerance. I’m trying to encourage the latter.

I find it interesting, though, that people’s responses to the Myers-Briggs system in itself seem quite predictable based on how they come out in the classification system. My unscientific sample of 10 or 12 people tends to indicate that type “N” intuitive people, especially the “I-N” introvert-intuitives, seem to naturally embrace Myers-Briggs. It just appeals to them right from the start. They wear their own temperament category as a badge of honor, e.g. “I am an INFP”. (Could one imagine a twist on a John F. Kennedy speech, i.e. “I am a Berliner”?). I’ve noticed that when a person volunteers their Myers-Briggs temperament, e.g. in the listings on a pen-pals site, it’s usually a type N category, not a type S.

By contrast, most of the type S “sensibles” I know seem to take Myers-Briggs very differently. A lot of them just don’t buy it. I’ve gotten looks as though I had four heads after trying to explain the system to them. Others just politely ignore you. I’ve known some S’s who become fascinated with it for a day or two, but they soon move on to the next item in the magazine. My experience with most type S’s is that they just don’t get it, whereas a lot more type N’s do (it’s not a question of stupidity; most of the S’s in my sample had graduate degrees).

I realize that people do not fall perfectly into the 16 Myers-Briggs temperament categories. I myself am a bit of a Myers-Briggs mongrel, being an INFJ with strong INTJ overtones. Research indicates that temperament has a strong genetic component, but is also influenced by the environment and thus can shift around a bit with the changes of life. Still, at bottom I find the Myers-Briggs system extremely useful in understanding people. But then again, I would, given that I am an “I-N” type.

I would like to join thousands of other bloggers right now in offering a tribute to the crew of the Columbia, and to all astronauts, and to the thousands of dedicated men and women who support our manned space exploration programs, both here, in Russia, and soon in China too. Seven more of your brave comrades have fallen, and we mourn their passing. They were true pioneers, people who risked their lives to stretch the envelope of human endeavor. They won’t be forgotten.

Let me throw out a few random thoughts about what happened, however. A few years after the Challenger explosion, I recall reading an analysis in the NY Times saying that although the O-ring problem had been fixed, the Shuttle remains an extremely complex machine working in an extremely hostile environment, and the chances are quite high that there would be other disastrous events. In that light, what happened to Columbia this morning is not all that surprising. Space shuttles are like commercial airplanes in a way; no matter how hard you try, you can’t entirely eliminate the chances of a crash. As with a 747 or 767, the most dangerous times are on takeoff (recall the Challenger) and landing (now the Columbia); that is when the machine is stressed the most. Things happen very quickly under those conditions, often too quickly for humans or even computers to react to. By contrast, problems that arise in mid-flight are generally slower, giving you time to find a solution. Apollo 13 was the prime example of that, although the crew and the ground people had to work frantically to stay ahead of the problem and bring the crew back alive. (Great movie by the way, but I think that Kevin Costner would have been a much more convincing Jim Lovell; Tom Hanks didn’t look like him at all).

NASA has had about 140 manned space missions so far, with two disasters in the air, one on the ground, and another very-near miss. The Russians have had some fatal missions too. It looks like the fatal incident rate is about 1 in 50 (for commercial flights, the rate is closer to 1 in 2,000,000). Manned spaceflight is not a walk in the park. The public really needs to think about when the risk is worth it and when it is not. I’m certainly not saying that we should ban all manned spaceflight, and I agree that the more we develop it, the safer it will become. But the Shuttle is turning into an old buggy (how many of us still ride around in a 1978 automobile? Or would want to?), but NASA just keeps patching it up instead of sinking the money into a newer and safer manned space vehicle. Why? Because developing a new space vehicle will cost BIG TAX BUCKS, and US taxpayers want tax cuts, not tax increases.

I think that the US should start limiting the use of the Shuttle, and should split the cost with Europe, Russia, China, Japan and India (all involved in space exploration) to develop a new generation of safer and more versatile manned space vehicles (for example, the Shuttle can’t go up much higher than 200 miles, whereby the most important satellites are up at around 20,000 miles). The US just can’t do it alone anymore. We need to end the “space race” and work with the world in order to develop a more reasonable and useful manned space vehicle, one that would eventually lead to commercial space travel.

One last thought: it’s ironic that both Shuttle disasters involved African-American astronauts. I don’t have the stats, but I’d have to guess that the fatality rate for black astronauts is way higher than for whites. Not that I’m saying that this is somehow a function of racism; mechanical disaster knows no color. It’s just an existential irony that even in the space program, the African-American culture is shouldering a disproportionate share of our tragedy. (Not to belittle the Jews, who have also known tragedy and were represented on the Columbia; nor the children of India; nor any culture.)

I read somewhere about a group in England that is organizing a “human shield” contingency for Iraq. These folks have organized a group of radical pacifists from the US and Europe who will spend the next few months living in the major cities of Iraq, offering themselves as potential “shame targets” for American bombs and bullets. They hope that the prospect of killing westerners, and the media coverage that it will attract, will deter President Bush from invading Iraq. One guy in his 30s said that he knows he may be killed, but he’d rather die for a cause than live to 80 in desperation about the world as it is.

Wow, that brings some flashbacks for me. Back in the early ‘70s I was about to become a candidate for induction into the US armed services, and thus for assignment to the continuing hostilities in South Vietnam. However, the draft ended just as I became eligible. Still, I had seriously considered declaring myself to be a conscientious objector to armed military service. That was quite popular back in those days, given the unpopularity of the Vietnam war. But I didn’t want to be a “selective objector”, opposed to only stupid wars like Vietnam, which most conscientious objectors probably were back then. I was toying with full objectorship (which is what the draft board required, backed up by solid proof that you seriously held such beliefs for a long time). That required an intellectual commitment to denying the use of deadly force in any and all situations.

Yes, I had some spirited debates with people, as such a radical position invites. I was asked, what would you do if someone was about to kill you without any provocation but you could kill them first. Good old justifiable self-defense. Then they put the limbo bar down a bit lower — what if someone were going to kill your innocent mother and father. Then even lower — what if someone were going to kill a city of 100,000 people, and only you could stop it (by killing the guy)? I mean, come on, couldn’t you live with your conscience if the net gain were 99,999 human lives? And then, of course, they had to bring out Hitler. (Somehow, I don’t remember Stalin coming up in those conversations, even though Stalin killed about 20 million, while Hitler had to settle for around 6 million. History does need to be taught a little better.)

The radical pacifist would respond that the picture is much bigger than one killer and his victims. The whole thing is really a cycle, a sell-out to the cheapness of life. No matter how good the intentions of a “preventative” or “justified” killing are, in reality they uphold the principle that one person can find justification to prematurely shorten the life of another. From then on, it’s a slippery slope down to a cruel and brutish world. The otherwise-virtuous policeman or soldier who gallantly kills a bad guy unintentionally inspires the child who grows to become the next bad guy. The border between good and evil is thin. The only way to stop the cycle is for the truly good people to offer themselves in sacrifice to the bad ones, such that the children of the bad may remember and imitate their goodness (given that kids always rebel against their parents).

Well. To be honest, after years of thought on the subject, I really don’t know which idea is right, or even closer to right. Can we aspire to angeldom, or is the best we can do some sort of balance of terror? I can’t say. But I can say one thing for Saddam Hussein: he does put the pacifism question into sharp focus. There’s hardly been a lower, more cold-blooded example of depravity and human cynicism since Adolph and Josef. (I never went for that bizarre anti-war delusion that the enemy isn’t so bad; even in the depths of my anti-Vietnam war cynicism, I thought that people like Jane Fonda, who cozyed up to Ho Chi Minh, were nuts.)

For now, I’m going to duck the pacifist question by saying that we should at least ask whether the upcoming invasion of Iraq will be an “intelligent” war, whether it really is in our interest or not (hard to say that any war is really “intelligent”). Going back to the 40’s, Josef Stalin did some horribly uncivilized things, even more horrible than Hitler did; and yet for him, we decided to use an alternative to war, something called “containment”. It was expensive and not completely bloodless, but after four decades, it finally worked. There may be ways to keep Saddam Hussein pinned down for a decade or so, until old age or a military coup resolves the situation. And why is North Korea, a nation that brags of its development of weapons of mass destruction in violation of international agreements, getting off so easy? Why can we live with “Dear Leader” and not Saddam? What is our plan there? (Probably something like containment).

There is a very real possibility that America will take Saddam out without too many casualties, but as we raise the stars and stripes over Bagdad, the bloodshed in Iraq will just have started. Without a master of terror keeping a lid on all the various tribes and religious factions in Iraq, the place may get nuttier than Yugoslavia after Tito. We could even see an anti-western Muslim fundamentalist regime take power as in Iran, unless we keep our troops tied up there for years. If we do stay on, our soldiers would be caught in a lot of crossfire for a long time, requiring a constant supply of body bags and maybe even the resumption of the draft. And wow, pacifism amidst the college crowd might become popular again! Maybe those guys from England won’t have died in vain.

P.S., Al Qaeda’s ultimate aim is to install fundamentalist regimes throughout the Arab world. If we shake things up in Iraq too quickly and then leave too quickly, which seems to be the American way, we may be playing right into Osama’s hand.

SUNRISE:   There was an article today on The Economist Magazine web site about the Internet as the revolution that wasn’t. Back around 1996, a lot of techno-idealists thought that the net was going to become a utopian, borderless civilization unto itself. The article cites the “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” of Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow. Mr. Barlow felt that the users of the net “inhabited a new world of creativity, equality and justice”. But as we know, along came e-commerce and pornographers and copyright lawyers and big corporations like Microsoft and AOL/Time-Warner, and so went the techno-utopians. Mr. Barlow has reportedly “lost heart” about the web, and so did I after reading the rest of the article.

But wait. Does it have to be that way? I’ve noticed that a lot of people are shelling out real money to maintain non-commercial sites just to put their ideas out there and offer the chance for public comment. I myself am doing it. There are a lot of non-profit sites with mailing lists and discussion boards, places where people are talking and interacting. The Internet can yet become a Wall of Democracy, if we teach our children well. That’s why an old fogie like me, someone who was around during the Summer of Love, someone who remembers the chants of “peace, pot, microdot”, stays interested in the net. Because it’s the last chance to get in on a real revolution before I die. The one from the 1960s stalled out pretty quickly, but this one could still happen. Sure, Napster is gone, but there’s much more to a revolution than free music. We can still fight the power on the web and find common threads of humanity, and thus help our world get past its addiction to stuff like prejudice, exploitation and war. But it’s gonna take some patience.

SUNSET:   In my January 4 blog entry, I talked about the horrors of diminishment, i.e. about what happens to you when you get old. I guess that I was reflecting a bit on my Mom’s situation. Mom is over 80 and gets noticeably weaker every few months. She’s in a wheelchair now and needs help doing just about everything. Thanks to a lot of sacrifice on my brother’s part, along with the help of some visiting caregivers, she’s still living at home. What’s wrong with her? Nothing much, other than being old and a bit overweight (which is true for about half of American adults these days).

There was a recent episode of The West Wing (on NBC) where C.J., the fictional White House Press Secretary, visited her father in Ohio, only to find his life falling apart due to Alzheimer’s. The theme was the same: the horrors of diminishment.

I’m not a senior citizen yet, although I’m now closer to retirement (or hoped-for retirement) than I am to college graduation. And even though my mind still doesn’t quite believe that I’m middle aged (I still listen to that zippy music that the young people seem to enjoy so much, e.g. the Red Hot Chillis and ИickelBack, still think that the opening to Ozzie’s “Shot In The Dark” is pure musical genius), my body is quite certain that I’m no longer 20 years old. I regret it most on Friday nights, when I get home from work and need to crash; when I was a youngin’, Friday evenings were for piling into a car with friends and driving long into the night, on a weekend road trip. Now a days, I just want to get to sleep by eleven.

Yes, getting old sounds pretty horrible, especially once you find out what it really involves. But you know what? A lot of people who are actually there, who really are old and are indeed falling apart, aren’t any more miserable than the rest of us. The worst part is when things change quite suddenly, just like the weather. Right now where I live, we’re having a cold spell; for the past few days everyone was griping about it and feeling awful, myself included. But after a while, you just get used to it and keep going. Same in the summer with the heat.

Diminishment sure isn’t fun, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy life anymore. It certainly is more of a challenge to enjoy life when you’re feeling weak or sick or tired a lot of the time; you’re certainly not going to find your kicks the same way as when you were 20 and went skiing or camping or partying all weekend. But people are amazingly adaptable creatures, and even when the air is colder and the shadows are longer (and you hair is gray or gone), people can still find ways to make life worthwhile. Believe it or not.