Tag: identity
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Most people are other people
Do I really have a true self? There was a time when it seemed obvious that I, quite apart from being an individual and not a replica of my neighbour, possessed a unique identity; or at least it was something that I would eventually have, because, as the philosopher Sartre wrote, existence precedes essence; I…
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The respect that makes calamity of so long life
Now that I am old -or indeed because I am old- it sometimes strikes me that there are many important personal questions yet to be answered -even to be asked, for that matter. I suppose some might think it strange that I’ve already wasted so many years placing other lesser queries at the front of the…
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Seek not for whom the bell tolls
Do you ever put something away for safe-keeping, only to find it has changed in the interval since you last looked? Retirement can be like that: hanging a once comfortable identity in a closet somewhere, and discovering it no longer fits when you try it on for old times’ sake. Not only that, but the…
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To be, or not…
Perhaps it’s my increasingly autumnal years, but lately I’ve begun to wonder about what extinction really means. Not so much my own, you understand -although that will happen soon enough- but ours. All of us… Extinction has certainly happened before of course. I mean, the Neanderthals went extinct, the Dodos went extinct, the wooly mammoths…
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To weep is to make less the depth of grief
To say that emotions are important for us, is a rather trite observation, I suppose -they all seem to have functions although usually so seamlessly woven into the cultural Zeitgeist they defy easy inspection. Happiness seems to serve a fairly obvious purpose, if only as a contrast to its absence; pain (at least when considered…
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The I’s have it… don’t they?
Sometimes the Past is instructive; sometimes it is embarrassing. I mean, are we meant to learn from the past, or to learn when we’re actually in it, wallowing through its turbid eddies, lost in its sudden shadows? You’d think I would have figured it out by now, wandering as I am through my own autumn…
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Speak low if you speak love
When I was a naïve university student, I read that far from missing out on the thrill of the chase in youth, the elderly are usually liberated from the (presumably) hormonally mediated need for sexual gratification leaving time to evaluate other things. Since procreative duties -or possibilities- would no longer loom large in their thinking,…
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Sifting through the noise
Listening requires special skills which, like muscles, weaken with neglect; they might not always be needed in retirement. The need should be weaker there I imagined -retirement is more transactional, with each of us intent on regaling others with our own contrasts in exchange for hearing, but not necessarily listening, to those of our friends.…
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The soul walks upon all paths
I suppose I’m coming to it rather late, but I’m beginning to realize I still have a lot to learn; there are some things that I should have figured out by now, others should have been evident from the start. Identity, I think, is one of the obvious ones. After all, who we are matters…
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