Tag: retirement
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The art of our necessities is strange
Do you ever miss things you thought you never would? Or details so obvious that when they are pointed out suddenly surface like children playing hide-and-seek? A bus that just left the corner where you usually catch it; the snack you often grab from the fridge when you’re feeling a little peckish but didn’t buy…
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Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
I was married once; it was okay; I might even describe it as fulfilling at times -although mostly the filling full of rooms, and often with furniture. Or rugs. Or appliances. Or, well, gadgets: time-savers. But now that I’m retired, Time is only a nuisance -something I am destined to have instead of money; something…
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The temple in which we live
I realize I’ve been obsessing about this for quite a while now, but my progress has been slow, and the chances of resolution seem to recede further and further each time I make the attempt. It’s easier, of course, to analyze it, measure it, and categorize it in someone else, but for this… for this,…
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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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Why is Wonder?
Sometimes I am accosted by the strangest questions; they remind me of the unanswerable ‘why’ questions that so often bubble out of 3 year olds -the only difference, I suppose, is that I would no longer be satisfied with the unadorned ‘just because’ answers I’m sure I used to get from my frustrated parents. But…
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Is Seeing Believing?
Isn’t it interesting that some of us can look at a forest and miss the wind riffling through the leaves, while others see the moon as a ‘ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas’? What determines what we see? Does it have to relate to something we’ve seen before -patterns that we recognize? Is our apprehension…
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Cycling in a Dish
Where do they get this stuff? Menses in a dish –or, to be more academically abstruse, ‘A microfluidic culture model of the human reproductive tract and 28-day menstrual cycle’? It has a pedantic ring to it, even though it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but I have to ask a simple, quasi-lay interrogative: why?…
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Unregarded Age in Corners Thrown
I worry too much; I didn’t used to, but it kind of crept up on me along with my aches and pains over the years. Age is something that has always been fraught with tensions as we stumble through the calendar first wanting more, then less and then, I suppose, trying to forget about it…