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Thomas Jefferson said, “I can’t live in a world without books.” Pursuing the life of the mind is what brought him happiness. According to the historian, David McCullough, Jefferson “… read seven languages. He was a lawyer, surveyor, ardent meteorologist, botanist, agronomist, archaeologist, paleontologist, Indian ethnologist, classicist, brilliant architect. Music, he said, was the passion of his soul, mathematics, the passion of his mind.” He was all of this in a time when education was a luxury and a privilege. As Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, including the words, “the pursuit of happiness,” Jefferson had in mind these intellectual pursuits as well as the pursuit of virtue free from government influences. Jefferson had in mind citizens of moral character who would use liberty responsibly with concern for the common good. Jefferson chose the word “pursuit” to emphasize a journey, not a destination. For me, I have never been very successful in pursuing wealth, status or fame. But I know that happiness always finds me when I am deep in the pages of a book, or actively engaged in discussion and debate, or busy helping my neighbors. Happiness finds me in the thinking, the learning, the doing, and the connecting, not in the getting. Our forefathers were willing to sacrifice their honor and their lives for the vision Jefferson described in the Declaration of Independence. And they had faith in a future they imagined but could not see. They had faith in us! Let’s keep a good thing going. May happiness find you today as we celebrate and recommit to that great vision. Happy Birthday, America!
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The problem with modern living is that it is…well, it is just so…relentless. Brush my teeth? Didn’t I do that yesterday? Twice? I feel like a preschooler who just can’t believe I am being asked to do it again when there are so many more interesting things to do. Preschoolers still believe there is more magic to life than the daily routines. I am an adult now. I know better. When it comes to the repetitive tasks of adult life, my experience may be more like Sisyphus, the Greek prince who angered Zeus and was given the punishment of forever pushing a giant boulder up a mountain only to get it near the top and have it roll back down. Sisyphus was condemned to spend eternity in the underworld perpetually starting over. Apparently, the ancient Greeks who inspired modern mathematics, medicine and democracy also pioneered our contemporary version of hell where gravity is the devil. Sisyphus’s story is more complicated than mine, and I’m no prince, but I can’t help thinking of him as I wash a mountain of dishes left over from a gathering the night before. By the time I finish the load, it is time for breakfast, so I eat, and wash up more dishes. Then I go to the refrigerator to fix a cold drink, and, of course, the ice I remove from the tray is the last of it. I have to rinse the ice cube tray and refill it. Next, I reach for the pitcher in the refrigerator. You guessed it! I fill my glass by emptying the pitcher which then needs to be washed up…and so it goes. Followed by laundry… It appears that somewhere along the way I may have angered the gods, and from watching the news, this could be the underworld. Maybe the gods are ensuring that someone like me never leaves home. This leads me to consider that cave people didn’t have it so bad—naked meant no laundry, and eating on the run meant no dishes. Perhaps they were the more evolved ones and the lesson from Sisyphus is that daily life has been downhill ever since. As adventurers race to settle outer space, I have to wonder: what cosmic Sisyphean tasks await us there in a future of zero gravity? Will weightlessness be the new devil as I try to keep all of my balls in the air ceaselessly wondering: which way is up? I saw my young dentist on Tuesday. He was sporting a big, red bump and a long vertical scar on his forehead. He earned his injuries in a cycling accident. “I’m just glad I didn’t damage my teeth. I see a lot of that in here,” he said. Short-term ribbing aside, my dentist will carry on and the cycling accident will be forgotten. There is so much more to him than a rare fall from a bike. If he turns up in a doctor’s office for another reason, no one will ask him: “Any falls recently?” If I walked into a provider’s office with a lump like that on my forehead, I wouldn’t be worried about my teeth; I would be worried about my freedom. Adult Protective Services would be called. I would be one stitch away from the nursing home. My argument that suffering a fall while switching clothes from the washer to the dryer was a mere cycling accident would not save me. And that fall would haunt me at every future encounter with a medical professional. For my young dentist, his fall is seen as an aberration, for me and my peers it is seen as state’s evidence that we are incompetent and becomes a stain on our permanent record cards. Growing older is like driving around with the car’s check engine light illuminated. What now? Medical appointments are the new second career. And health care professionals don’t really see older folks. Now that the number of procedures performed has toppled patient well-being as a performance indicator for doctors, they look at us and see dollar signs. And don’t get me started on the pharmaceutical companies. I was in high school when the War on Drugs began. It went about as well as the Vietnam War. I admit it; my aging body appears to be in shambles. I don’t really want to look at it any more than my doctor does, and I am equally good at avoiding doing so. No matter how many miles I walk or how many leg lifts I do, time and genetics continue to conspire against me. Even if I get to Fort Knox before Donald Trump, I don’t think there are enough gold bars in there to cover all of the procedures I would need to lift every part of me that has fallen. Even my eyelids are sagging. There isn’t a stylist out there who could put together a flattering outfit for these proportions. My best look might be a body bag. But it’s what’s inside that counts right? I’d like to say that my good heart and clear conscience make up for the raggedy exterior, but that’s not the what’s inside I’m talking about here. No siree. You should see my labs! Popeye said, “I yam what I yam.” Well, so yam I. I should know; I’ve eaten enough of them. When Euell Gibbons asked, “Ever eat a pinecone?” I didn’t laugh, I took notes. Chipping teeth aside, I do think Grape Nuts are effective. I am constantly studying the literature on healthy aging and trading notes with friends. The homework never ends. I can list ten ways to lower cholesterol faster than I can shout out the Ten Commandments. I anticipate my lab results like the impending birth of a child. When any of my lab test results come back within the normal range, I want to send out announcements or put up a yard sign: An honor roll student lives here. And if I make it out of a doctor’s appointment without a prescription or a referral, I rush straight to the nearest convenience store to buy a lottery ticket. I try to imagine a new kind of beauty pageant for seniors, one in which it’s what’s inside that counts. Instead of the MC reading the contestants’ heights, weights, and body measurements, they read our best lab results out loud and everyone cheers as we walk the runway in comfortable shoes and sweatpants. Instead of a Miss Congeniality Award, there would be a special honor for the lowest A1c. Even better for seniors, this is a pageant that could take place remotely. Just email your numbers. No risk of falling on the runway. Have you ever wondered who invented pockets? Sure, I do have too much time on my hands, and nowhere to put them because I am in my pajamas and shock! They don’t have pockets. I try to imagine getting by in a world without pockets. All I can think of is Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. No pockets necessary or possible. Maybe pockets came with the fall from grace. God knew mankind would be spending a lot of time on the run and might need a place to carry a few nuts and berries. Sitting at my desk waiting for a storm to pass and feeling disappointed that the inventor of the pocket is not better known and celebrated by history, I decide to fill the time by doing a little research on pockets thinking that I might make up for this slight. I search the internet for the history of pockets and find that the invention of the pocket was not the Eureka moment I had hoped it would be. In my mind I pictured it like the discovery of fire or penicillin. In actual fact, it was a practical development that probably occurred to a lot of people at the same time maybe as much as 5,000 years ago. Seems pockets started out as external, wearable pouches, belt bags or tie-on bags for carrying small tools. (And I thought the fanny pack was a clever update!) It wasn’t until much later that the pockets became a sewn-in feature of clothing and a place to carry the pocket watch for the man who literally had time on his hands. (Sewn-in pockets came much later to women’s wear and became a symbol of emancipation.) As always, there are downsides to the story. About 1450 the word pocket entered the English language and gave a name to a growing criminal element, the pickpocket. Pickpocketing was much easier before picking pockets became an inside job, while it was still a slash and grab event. And, as mankind is want to do, the inner aspiring capitalist took a good idea and stretched it too far turning the simple pocket into wallets, knapsacks, backpacks, fanny packs, brief cases, suitcases, and trunks, and burdening women with purses and designer brands. But maybe I am onto something with my capitalist musings…The more I think about the history of pockets, was Henry Ford really trying to help us get from place to place? Or was he just upping the pocket game with the automobile? Aren’t most cars just giant pockets on wheels? I know I keep a lot of small stuff in my car: loose change, a pen, a few clean masks, some plastic utensils, paper napkins, handwritten instructions to friends’ homes, a worn out old map of the city, a compass, a small plastic bowl with a lid in case of motion sickness, sunglasses, caps for my tire stems…I know some people who keep their cars so stocked up that there is only enough room for the driver. Maybe Henry Ford was really a man who always dreamed of living inside of a pocket. Or making a fortune pocketing people. Well, this is taking up too much of my day. I am heading out for a walk to clear the pocket of nonsense that is my mind. I have other pockets: one for my phone, another for my keys, and one for some tissues and some chewing gum. Yes, I am an emancipated woman. I have pockets. And I know how to use them. Somehow, for reasons only the mysterious algorithms know, several YouTube podcasts popped up on my TV screen with YouTube stars eager to talk to me about manifesting. I always thought that manifesto sounded like a pasta dish and that manifesting was the verb for eating said pasta, but no. Manifesting means: establishing, demonstrating, displaying, revealing, showing, exhibiting, expressing, making plain. And a manifesto is a platform, policy, strategy, philosophy, declaration, statement, program, proposal, plan, beliefs, or guidelines. Mm-hmm. According to the aforementioned podcasts that included the usual man-on-the-street-on-a-phone types as well as respected neurosurgeons, if I think of something good that I want, and I write it down, and I repeat it to myself over and over, what I have been contemplating will show itself in my actual factual life. My mother used to call that wishful thinking, and followed with the warning: “don’t wish your life away.” But it appears that when a neurosurgeon gets into wishful thinking, it is called manifesting, and it becomes science. Perhaps a neurosurgeon’s extraordinary salary and connections help with the manifesting part, but I can’t say for sure. I’ve never moved with that crowd. While surfing these manifesting manifestos, I learned that the opposite of manifesting is hiding. Now that was a revelation worthy of my time: I didn’t wish my life away, I was just well hidden! In the next podcast fed to me by the algorithm, l learned there is something called “the dip.” Everything dips. Each of us has to decide if we will quit at that point or go on. If we choose to go on and weather the dip, we have to figure out “where to put the tired” until we rise from the dip. I don’t know about you, but I usually keep the dip in the refrigerator next to the leftover manifesto which is what I consume when I am tired. Usually with chips. And maybe some ice cream. All of which I eat while watching YouTube videos the latest of which pointed out to me that we need more zest, which, again, I keep in the refrigerator next to the dip and the leftover manifesto. I learned some important lessons from all of this podcast watching. First, my smart aleck devices are spying on me and the contents of my refrigerator. Second, I am either a hider or a quitter. And third, there is a lot of money to be made on YouTube if you can come out of hiding, lose the tired, and survive the dip. Right now I am sorting through my refrigerator for inspiration, something worthy of manifestation. I feel on the verge of something big…it has something to do with yogurt and tofu. But wait! Is that manifestation or fermentation? I don’t know. There must be a podcast for that. In any case, something is brewing. Look for me soon on YouTube… if I survive the dip. I didn’t get it back then, that time so long ago when my father said, “I miss thunderstorms.” In the later years of his life, my father moved from Western Pennsylvania to Southern California, a place of good memories, a place he had loved during the prime of his life. After his move, the one thing Dad missed enough to mention was thunderstorms. When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and deeply, painfully reflective, I sent him an audio cassette tape of a booming, drenching thunderstorm. When I sent the tape, I thought it was just a weather event that my father had been missing during his years in endless sunshine, but as I sit at my desk today, in the later years of my life, listening as the rain pounds down just outside my own window, I understand that his longing was for something more than rain. All around me I feel the growing stillness. Thunder is rolling in the distance. It is ten o’clock in the morning but dark as late evening. The tree outside my window begins to bend and sway in the wind. The leaves on the tree shimmy from the force of sudden, large, pelting raindrops. Traffic and outdoor activity cease. The birds that had been singing earlier are nowhere to be seen or heard. While the typical outdoor sounds are absent save for the thunder and the rain, the sounds inside my apartment are amplified: the ticking of the clock, the hum of the refrigerator, the quiet whir of the ceiling fan, the beating of my heart. Somehow, I am more alive and alert in the stillness. My busy mind is stilled too. I am aware of nothing but the sensory experience around me, the life force within me. A bolt of lightning makes me blink. It is followed by a crash of thunder that makes me jump. It is not a feeling of fear or helplessness, but one of a greater wisdom: it is wise to stop, to attend. The thunderstorm carries me away. I am here but not here. I am living inside a snow globe where it is the world beyond the glass that is being shaken. Time stops. I am given a free pass to do nothing but listen. Somehow the weather settles in me and on me. I am cloaked in humidity and sound. The thunder reverberates in my ears, and like an electric shock, stimulates my heart that moves in synch. I am in the rain but not in the rain. My body becomes a sympathetic barometer of the weather outside. I think back to my mother shouting, “Get away from the window,” as she chased me and my siblings off the couch where we had settled on our knees to watch the storm outside. She pulled the drapes. Mom never explained the science, but we grasped her fear that lightning could strike us through the glass if it chose to take such aim. But I am a grown up now, a taller version of that former curious, perhaps incalcitrant, child I sit in front of the window, drapes opened wide, and I watch: the eerie stillness as the storm whips up a fever, the thrashing, and then the return to stillness, the dark clouds hovering, taking a pause, re-committing to another downpour. I wonder: why am I not afraid of something so ominous? I take in the lesson from nature--facing the things so much bigger than us, so much out of our control, things that will pass. I am calm, a calmness that is something more than acceptance of the storm or its eventual passing. Somehow, I am joined with nature in the divine plan that all the things are one, the things that say: STOP. LISTEN. BE. There is nothing else but this. The storm calms. The leaves and the branches are still. They shake off the rain drops in the last breath of wind. They bounce back to full attention, listening for the sun’s commands. I hear the revving of a car engine. Someone making a break for it…whatever “it” is. A faint light appears in the sky through clouds that are now white and light enough to see the blue behind them. Do the clouds lift? Or do we? Cleansed by the pause, from the moments when we turn ourselves over to the forces of nature? For a brief time we are stilled, more aware of our authentic Garden-of-Eden selves, more aware than daily life allows us to be. We are quiet, outwardly attentive, inwardly connected to the electricity that powers all of nature. Life itself is a passing storm. We are given moments when nature brings man’s plans to a halt, moments to rest and reflect. Moments when darkness gives way to light. So much of what demands our attention is inconsequential--oil changes and laundry. The emerging light in the sky says, “Safe. At ease. As you were.” And so we pick up with chores of the day. But can we really be “as you were?” This life doesn’t really belong to us. It is a passing storm. There is peace and sunshine on the other side. I will see you there one day, Dad. We’ve been goosed! By our polite Canadian neighbors. I don’t know why it took me so long to catch on. While news outlets have provided non-stop coverage of the United States putting the squeeze on Iran, no one seems to have followed the story of how our Canadian neighbors have been goosing the United States for years. I realized this quite by accident. I was driving down the five-lane highway toward my home when I saw the traffic ahead of me slow to a stop. As I approached the line-up, I could see two adult Canadian geese high-stepping across all five lanes of the busy highway. In front of the adult geese were four goslings, little yellow and grey powder puffs on tiny webbed feet. In their determined, goosey, take-your-time way, the avian family made its way into the parking lot of the International Union of Operating Engineers. The geese walked up the driveway as though they knew exactly where they were going. I wondered: could they be members of this international union? The people who build our roads, bridges, and buildings? The people who do the heavy lifting, so to speak? It seemed quite possible. I thought about what a strong and vocal union the local geese had become. They hold up heavy traffic at their will. They bend the arc of pedestrian and bicycle traffic with their droppings. When they take a stance, they mean it. They will shout and squabble all day long defending their positions. They are not timid in swooping down on busy roads and tall bridges, and they don’t show a smidgeon of fear of the few local bald eagles that nest along the river that they share. The bald eagles are way outnumbered. These engineering geese have been busy working and reproducing while the American bald eagle’s idea of being busy is looking majestic, nesting and having its photo taken by enraptured passersby. As I see it, Canada has been quietly and slowly taking over the United States one goose at a time. If my town is any reflection, this is a serious invasion. And the geese regularly shut down my busy local thoroughfare, the Strait of Vamoose, the route into and out of downtown. While the geese generously supply us with fertilizer, they do impede the flow of traffic into and out of the gas stations along the Strait. More importantly, these frequent closings of the Strait of Vamoose do impede the flow of morning coffee at the ports of Tim Hortons, Starbucks and Sheetz, and that right there could start an all-out war. By teasing us with repeated tie-ups and shutdowns, the geese have learned that they own the straightaway. As of now, the traffic has been cautious in stopping and waiting while the geese cross the Strait, but I don’t know how long it will be before there is open retaliation. We are all living on borrowed time waiting for the Strait to open once and for all. No one has tried to round up these illegal avian immigrants. As a matter of fact, citizens are strictly forbidden from causing injury to these invaders. (I am guessing they are all here on Einstein visas being members of the International Union of Operating Engineers and all, and many are claiming birthright citizenship.) In any event, what’s clear to me now is that Canada gave us the bird a long time ago and no one in the administration has yet to cry fowl! |
AuthorLilli-ann Buffin Archives
June 2026
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