Do you ever ponder the ultimate questions, such as what life is all about<\/b>? What is the worth of an individual human being? Does it all really matter? Why are we doing this<\/b>?<\/p>\n
Most of the time I don\u2019t wrestle with such humongous issues. Got enough other stuff to think about. But over the past week or so, those questions have trampled their way into my mind. And I haven\u2019t come up with any good answers.<\/p>\n
One thing that caused me to think about this is my mother. She\u2019s in her eighties now, and has entered the \u201creally old\u201d stage of life. She can\u2019t walk anymore, her memory fades in and out, one of her eyes is going, and she sleeps more than half the day. Every month or so she gets a little bit weaker, needs more help, and can no longer do something that we take for granted. You can just see her life being taken away in little pieces, bit by bit. And yet she doesn\u2019t seem ready to quit yet. She gets cranky, but she\u2019s not depressed. That in itself amazes me sometimes.<\/p>\n
Another thing that inspired such weighty thoughts in me was a recent visit I made during work hours to the Homicide Unit.<\/b> I had to talk with a chief assistant attorney about something, and since I\u2019m not a prosecutor but just a lowly administrative munchkin, I had to wait 10 minutes while the attorney in question jabbered on the phone with someone, partly talking about murder cases, partly about the furniture in her living room. I spent my waiting time just looking around the room, watching detectives and attorneys and clerks working and wandering about and drinking coffee. The Homicide Unit can be a pretty intense place, but I found it in a relatively peaceful state that afternoon, with the sun shining in through the windows. And for a moment or two I got that feeling, that sensation that you get when you\u2019re on the edge of a cliff<\/b> staring down into the chasm. What is a life? What does it mean? Why do we feel this way about it?<\/p>\n
Well, I caught my balance and the attorney finally talked to me. It wasn\u2019t too important, so I was out of there pretty quickly. She got on to the next murder file and I got on to the next monthly cost report. What is it all about? I still don\u2019t know. But it has something to do with our ability to ponder such questions and to feel dizzy when on the boundary of life and death. If you\u2019ve never thought about it, you\u2019ve never really lived. \u201cStudy death, learn to live\u201d<\/b> — I saw that line in a New York Times movie review the other day. The movie in question was \u201cThe Battle of Shaker Heights\u201d. The reviewer didn\u2019t really like the movie. Wonder how the Times would review a movie about our Homicide Unit, were someone to make such a movie?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Do you ever ponder the ultimate questions, such as what life is all about? What is the worth of an individual human being? Does it all really matter? Why are we doing this? Most of the time I don\u2019t wrestle with such humongous issues. Got enough other stuff to think about. But over the past […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}