Every day I think about certain things. And not just passing thoughts either. Certain categories have lodged themselves in my default programming, you might say. It’s now gotten so bad that I can’t really do much of anything on a given day without devoting time to mediate on these things. And more and more they become kind of working environment or operating system, like Windows, inside of which everything else I do operates. You get the picture.

One thing I think about every day is death, in general, and MY DEATH in particular. I dwell on it a bit. I mean, I’m there. I evaluate how well I die, observe how afraid I am (or not), how my death affects others (or not!), etc., and then ask myself what my being here meant to the world. I’m starting to think at this point in my life (I turn 50 next month) what I want to teach my kids is not so much how to live well (I might have said all I can on that subject!), but how to grow old, retire, and then die well (i.e., gracefully, beautifully and without fear).

There’s a funny but sobering scene in the film “What about Bob?” (1991) staring Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss. Dreyfuss plays Dr. Leo Marvin, a psychiatrist treating Bob Wiley (Murray) who suffers from multiple phobias. Bob shows up unexpectedly at Dr. Marvin’s vacation home and weasels his way into staying for dinner and spending the night. He has to sleep in Dr. Leo’s son’s (Sigmund, 12 years old) room. As they bed down for the night little Sigmund asks Bob, “Do you ever think of death?” and then goes on to say exactly what we all know but try to avoid figuring into how we live in any meaningful way, “There’s nothing you can do about it. You’re going to die. One day, it’s going to happen.” I’m like, “Exactly!”

Another thing I think about every day is BEAUTY—in life and relations, in music, literature, art, all of it. What is ‘beauty’ really? Why do we perceive it? Why does it drive and motivate us so? It’s so mysterious—but even its mystery is beautiful. It’s a non-threatening, beautiful mystery, unlike the mystery of the problem of why there’s evil in the world. I’ve pretty much just decided at this point in my life that “beauty is the logic beneath all things.” Here’s a bit from a chapter of a little book I wrote for my kids and gave them this past Christmas. This is from the chapter on Jessica:

“As her artistic talents matured, her horizons widened. Her gift-giving and beauty-making evidenced themselves in a sweet intolerance for broken or tense relations. She was (as we affectionately called her) ‘our little reconciler’. She hated to see the other kids disciplined and would often place herself between parent and child and just stand there. The world was one big canvas upon which to make something beautiful, or to fix whatever wasn’t beautiful. Don’t take my word for it. Just ask any of her friends. They can be found on several continents, speak several languages, come from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, embrace various faiths, and would all offer the same explanation for their attraction to Jessica—the inspiring sense of adventure they absorb from her love for the beauty of living. Her gift is to reduce events to the most fundamental purpose of a thing—what it contributes to the creation and enjoyment of beauty. In this she naturally excels as a theologian beyond me. I had to learn this. She knew it instinctively.”

It’s not that there’s a beauty to logic or math (as Einstein and Heisenberg, and other mathematicians have told us). It's the other way around—there’s a logic and coherence to beauty. Beauty—the perceiving and experiencing of it—is more fundamental, more ‘real’, than logic, or math, or matter/energy, or the space-time continuum. These latter realities are the modes and manners OF beauty. Call me weird. But at the core of the core, the center of the center of existence itself—there’s beauty. We know it and perceive it, undeniably. But we can’t even say what it is.

That’s pretty much how I see and perceive and evaluate everything. Is it beautiful? Does it promote a beautiful existence? Reminds me of Charles Hartshorne’s main argument against determinism—“It’s ugly,” he said.

One last thing I now think about every day is something I never thought about and didn’t like to think about because I thought it was stupid, and that’s TRADITION. Each new generation challenges prevailing traditions—traditional ways of thinking, dressing, living, etc. My parents’ chucked much of their parents’ traditions, as did I those of my parents’, and as are my kids with my traditions, though I admit that my generation had far less in the way of ‘traditions’ to pass on. I once thought this was a good thing. Give your kids a blank slate. Don’t prejudice them in any way. No traditions.

I now think this is a big mistake. What is ‘tradition’ anyhow? It’s just a certain ‘momentum’ to life, a ‘direction’ in which we live and what we aim our lives at. I mean, when you boil it down, that’s what traditions are. They’re a kind of momentum that carries us.

I don’t think anybody actually manages to live without any traditions. Even people who reject all their parents’ traditions end up establishing traditions of their own. There are even traditional ways of challenging established traditions! There is no “traditionless existence.” Life IS movement. Life IS directionality. We ARE connected to all other generations. Life IS tradition (tradition-receiving, tradition-evaluating, tradition-making, etc.). There’s no choosing THAT. There is only choosing what one aims at, what one hopes to achieve, what one leaves behind for others. And what we call tradition is just the shared momentum of life’s hopes and dreams. We all have them. We might challenge some established traditions and replace them with our own. But we don’t abandon tradition per se. So I’m kinda liking ‘tradition’ as I approach my fiftieth year.

So my life kind of boils down these days to these three things and so living each day purposefully, in the shadow of my own finiteness and death, to pass on to my own family and those I love, as far as I’m able, a vision and way of life that’s overwhelmingly beautiful. My only regret is that I didn’t “get it” earlier. So many wasted opportunities.

Post Edited (Tom) : 1/20/2010 2:03:32 PM (GMT-6)