seventy one

So I just had my 71st birthday this week. Wow and I’m feeling it. I thought I was bullet proof. I would live to be 120. Not. When I was a young whippersnapper I thought I would live forever. Why not? Just cause everybody else died didn’t mean I would. Actually it was a rejoinder to my religious friends who wanted to make sure I was going to heaven. It doesn’t apply if you never die, right? That was ridiculous, of course, but so was the idea of going to heaven, like some kind of a Grand Hyatt resort hotel with a 36 hole golf course and a 24 hour buffet, perfect weather and no one gets mad. What would you do for all eternity anyways after you’d played the course about a million times? Sit in the bar and watch reruns of old TV shows from life on earth, drama and comedy from back when things mattered? I mean think about it, if you live forever and everything is perfect then nothing matters. There are no consequences. Anyways, I dropped my target down from eternity to 120 and that has been considerably lowered lately. Not that I don’t have aspirations of living a long healthy life with lots of rohn reports but it’s not going to be easy. And herein lies the point of my tirade. Each day is made up of 24 hours and every hour is made up of 60 minutes. Right? And every minute is made up of 60 seconds. They go by pretty quickly. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three . . . there go 3 seconds. And our life is made up of a collection of these days into weeks and months and years. The years of which, of course, we have only a hand full of. Let me rephrase that: life goes by just like the seconds and minutes of our days. It’s just a matter of perspective. We can see the seconds and minutes, we don’t really see the years. Until you get to be 71 and stuff starts happening or stuff starts not happening that’s supposed to happen. I won’t go into details but basically everything we take for granted begins to be called into question. A lifetime - from birth to death - is a gift of the creator. I mean obviously we didn’t create ourselves or the world we live in or the universe it’s riding in. It’s a divine gift, if there is any meaning to that word, because it allows us to conceive of something called ‘divine’. The universe is not beautiful, it just is, but we see beauty in it, magnificence. What? Wow! A tree spreads its branches into the sky, spreads its roots under the earth, connects both with a tower of wood. It’s collecting sunlight from the sky and nutrients from the soil so it can survive and make seeds. We see something beautiful, grand, majestic - just as the squirrels see acorns in the branches and transit points above the ground. I can see the tree. It’s beautiful. The tree of life. What else can you do with your own mortality? I think the older you get the more you see it. The more beautiful it is. Created by nobody and nothing we know, it just is. How wonderful. Maybe I’m just a little seed that falls off and goes back into the ground. Or maybe I get eaten by a squirrel haha. Digested and metabolized. Giving life to new life. The fact that no one knows what happens at the end of life makes it extremely mysterious. Anything could happen. Can you prove me wrong? But the fact that life does have an end makes being alive extremely compelling. A favorite poem from a favorite book poem picture. two great lights in the lower sky last night venus maybe and her lover across the way in the city of starsorion watched from his castlethe pleiades chatted drowsily andromeda of course chained to her rock waited and waited for someone to show up with a key but those are not my stories someone else saw the starry mask anddescribed it that way all i saw were two wanderers walkingwhere there was no path and there were no stars music from Cafe de Anatolia 40:52 sign up for this newsletter leave a comment share with a friend visit the archive for more stories This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rohn.substack.com/subscribe