Gilgamesh and Our Motivations

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of my favorite books ever. It’s also the oldest epic tale we have, describing events that date back to about 2,500 years BCE.

Gilgamesh was tall, handsome, strong, smart, and the King of Uruk, a walled city-state in what is now Iraq. He was reported to be 2/3 divine and 1/3 human. He was also a pretty major malignant narcissist. As a consequence, he was a very bad king, who viewed the kingdom as his personal candy store. His position as a leader was all about getting everything he wanted at the expense of whomever had to pay. He exploited his position and his people for his own base enjoyments and personal enrichment. When we meet him, he’s not married, but he insists on always being the substitute groom who spends the wedding night with any young woman of his kingdom who is married, and then he moves on to the next special treat he plans to give himself. He wears out the young men of the kingdom in competitive games just so he can win, over and over, and continue to prove his immense superiority.

The people complain to the gods, “Help us with this guy! We can’t take it any more!” And the gods do something creative. They make him a counterpart, an equal to him in size and strength, and they initially put this man into the woods to live with the animals as their protector. While Gilgamesh is a man of the city, this new creature Enkidu is a child of the forest. Gilgamesh has experienced the height of sophistication in an urban setting that at its peak had up to 80,000 inhabitants. Enkidu as a nature boy has a mindset of simple innocence. Rumors of his existence, great strength, and exploits in saving the animals from hunters make their way to the city, and Gilgamesh is both intrigued and troubled. He has to meet this individual and perhaps once again prove his superiority over what is quickly becoming an urban legend and, in that sense, a threat to his own reputation as the strongest and greatest man alive.

Gilgamesh goes to the big religious temple in town and approaches the beautiful temple prostitute—which was apparently a well-known job in ancient times, serving to unite the world and the spirit in distinctive ways—and he asks her to go find this legendary man in the woods and use her special skills to lure him to town. She agrees and is successful. I'll elide over all the fascinating details.

To summarize: Enkidu arrives just as Gilgamesh is about to exercise his jus primae noctis (right of the first night) or, as it later came to be called, his droit du seigneur, and the wild hairy man of the forest intervenes to stop the king from this presumptuous deed. They fight violently and it’s basically a tie. Gilgamesh is very impressed. So is Enkidu. They instantly become best friends, and soon go off on adventures together. The prayers of the people have been answered. The king is no longer interested in exploiting them. He has bigger fish to fry with his new buddy. But the things the two big guys get involved in bring the wrath of the gods, and Enkidu has to die. Gilgamesh is stunned and falls into intense grief. He goes on a challenging and difficult quest to find the secret of avoiding death, any key to eternal life possible, having heard that there is one man far away who has this unique gift. In the midst of his daunting journey in a desperate search for immortality, he oddly comes across a wine bar in the middle of nowhere, and a wise barmaid named Siduri, who advises him to abandon this inevitably futile search and learn to be happy with what he has.

In one of the most beautiful and wise passages in all of literature, Siduri says:

“Gilgamesh, where are you going? You’ll never find the eternal life you seek. When the gods created man, they gave him death, and they kept life without it for themselves. Humans are born, live, and die. This is the order that’s decreed. But until your own end comes, enjoy your life. Live it in happiness and not despair. Relish your food and drink. Make each of your days a delight. Bathe and groom yourself well. Wear nice clothes that are sparkling and clean. Let music and dancing fill your house. Love the little child who holds your hand. And give your wife pleasure in your embrace. This is the way for a man to live.”

He’s unable to listen to this great advice, and continues on his mission until when it fails, as Siduri knew it would, and he returns to his city, chastened, and humbled, and perhaps ready to live as the wise woman had suggested.

It’s often been said that the two great forces in life are love and death, or the polarity of desire and fear. The Greek word ‘Eros’ is often used for the former, and ‘Thanatos’ for the latter. When the story begins, Gilgamesh is motivated by Eros, but in a bad and corrupted way. Then, with Enkidu’s death, his motivation changes. He’s moved by Thanatos, but also in a bad way. I believe the power of the story is that he discovers in the end how to be motivated by both in a constructive and positive way.

I won’t follow Freud in his famous uses of Eros and Thanatos, which I take to be the claim that we’re either motivated by a constructive creativity that moves toward unity and life, or a destructive aggression that delights in dissolution and death. I would rather see these two polarities in a different way.

The force of Eros is a pull toward life. The force of Thanatos is a push away from death. Or to put it more comprehensively:

The Pull of Eros is about embracing life, strength, pleasure, and growth.

The Push of Thanatos is about avoiding death, suffering, deprivation, and weakness.

The common human quest for money or power, status or fame can be driven by either of these forces. Gilgamesh experiences the full range of this, and for most of the story only in bad or unwise ways. Siduri recommends to him a life of proper Eros in a constructive mode. Before the death of his friend, the king had been living a life of Eros in an improper or destructive mode.

The proper mode of Eros is to bring good to others as well as yourself. The improper mode is to focus only on yourself.

When Enkidu dies and Gilgamesh is plunged into the shock and grief that results, his motivation changes. He is desperate to avoid death in his own life. But perhaps even before he met Enkidu, there was a negative motivation from the side of Thanatos in his life. The destructive mode of Thanatos, like destructive Eros, is also to focus only on yourself, but in this case in a willingness to sacrifice the good of others in order to avoid your own vulnerability to death, suffering, deprivation, and weakness.

By contrast, a proper and constructive mode of Thanatos motivation is to focus on helping others to avoid needless death, suffering, deprivation, and weakness.

Done right, the two motivations of Eros and Thanatos both can be manifestations of love. Done wrong, they’re the opposite.

Love: Care, Compassion, Nurture, and Delight: That’s what Siduri wanted Gilgamesh to learn to experience and give to others. And I think eventually he does. If there was hope for him, there may be hope for nearly anyone. It’s a story well worth your time.

For the best translation of the tale, scraped together from various clay tablets, click HERE.

The Lessons of Socrates and Christmas

Socrates called philosophy a preparation for death. I guess he never heard of estate planning. Philosophy in my view is a preparation for life—a full and good life. For death, it gives us very little solid guidance. For life, it offers a lot.

And yet then, perhaps the wise and good life it prescribes is in itself also the best preparation for death, or the final ending of this life. So, in a sense, the old boy was right. But then, I think I am too. And he left out the middle part, which is not to be ignored. But then again, our Christmas and Easter stories imply that even the finest intellectual guidance or theoretical preparation for life or death is never enough. Inner transformation is required of us. We come into the world like unmolded clay. We need first to be formed, and then transformed. And while that never comes from philosophy, it can be mediated through it. Perhaps that was the one more thing Socrates would have told us if he had not been required to drink the particular spiked punch that ended his time here. But don't worry about him. He was prepared.

Happy Christmas. May the joys and lessons of the season infuse the new year for you and yours.

The Courage to Be.

In 1975, my next door neighbor Paul was a very famous architect, a graduate of Harvard, the University of Berlin, and the Bauhaus. He was in his 70s and an avid skier. He was a handsome man in great shape and with a lively mind. I had seen his homes in books of modern architecture.

I would go visit him frequently. He asked to borrow my books about Wittgenstein. We loved to sit and talk philosophy and modern design. I liked to play on his tennis court. My wife and I took care of his chickens when he and his young Chinese wife traveled. They lived in an old New England farmhouse that had been added onto time after time. It was an architectural mess. He was an architectural marvel. And he was my favorite unofficial mentor.

But then we had to move out of the one bedroom "mother in law" apartment in the big house where we lived outside New Haven. The husband of the family owning the home had disappeared for a year, only to show up one day in a crazy disguise. I didn't recognize him at all, but his kids yelled out "Daddy!" Weeks later, men in dark suits and Ford LTDs arrived to take boxes of things out of his part of the home. And soon, we had to move a mile away.

I later heard that Paul had been diagnosed with cancer. I tried to figure out what to say to him before I visited. I couldn't come up with anything. I was afraid to visit without good words for him. I thought I had to have answers. I postponed seeing him. I procrastinated. I was busy. I was in graduate school at Yale. I thought of him often, and put off what I thought would be a very awkward visit to a man who had been so full of life. Then someone told me he had died. Waiting for words was one of the worst mistakes I had ever made.

Don't wait for words. Don't wait for answers. Go to people in need and just show you care, words or not. People need love more than answers. People need you.

Sorry, Paul. I was an idiot. Actually, I was a coward. But I didn't understand that at all. I do now. And I've developed a little more courage, the essential courage to just go forth and be. I don’t have to have all the answers. But I do have this one. And now, all these years later. I have the courage to admit my weakness and to say thanks for the lesson. I still love you, man. I finally realize what it takes to show that to others.

Ode to Odie

One small cat, age 5, left this world on March 14, 2018, leaving it better than he found it, and my life greatly enriched.

An Ode for Odie.

If you want to know how good a cat

he was in this world: It would be my great honor and joy

to clean his litter box twice a day in eternity, forever.

*****

He prayeth best, who loveth best/ all things both great and small: for the dear God who loveth us,/ he made and loveth all. - Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge.

The World Needs Us

I came across an obituary online this past week that gave me pause. In case you didn't see it, it's instructive to read. Here's an abbreviated version:

Jamie Zimmerman, who served as a doctor and reporter for the ABC News medical unit, drowned while on vacation in Hawaii. She was 31. Zimmerman was attempting to cross the Lumhai River on Kauai's north shore when she lost her footing and was swept out to sea. Zimmerman's mother, Jordan Zimmerman, confirmed her death with a message on Zimmerman's Facebook page:

"Those of you who knew Jamie or perhaps read some of her writings knew that she loved people above all else. It was her passion to be of service, and teaching meditation was her calling," Jordan Zimmerman wrote. "In her short 31 years Jamie traveled the globe representing America as a caring mindfulness ambassador. Her accomplishments included helping Congolese refugees in Zambia, volunteering in a cash-strapped hospital in India, building classrooms in Uganda, and working with indigenous people on the Amazon in Peru. Jamie served as a United Nations Global Health representative in Haiti and she even taught meditation at the U.S. Capitol.

"She was honored with UCLA's prestigious Charles E. Young Humanitarian Award, was a Rhodes Scholar finalist, and earned the title of Dr. Jamie at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. All this was in addition to her work with ABC News in their Medical Unit as well as The (Goldie) Hawn Foundation where she trained educators and school administrators to teach meditation to children."

This was a tragic death, as are so many in our world. And when we read of the loss at age 31 of someone who was doing so much for so many, we're reminded that the world needs those of us who are still here to step up and make up for some of the difference in the world that Jamie could have made had she stayed among us longer.

Of course, there's no such thing as replacing such a person who has been lost, either in the lives of those who knew her, or in the world more broadly. But there is a point worth pondering. This young woman did great good. And she would surely have done much more, had she lived a more normal lifespan. The world is in need of that good, still—all those years of all that service. And so the rest of us should be inspired, when we notice a need, or happen to think of a way we could help someone around us, to take action like Jamie Zimmerman presumably would.

She made herself available to others, and lavishly. We don't have to travel the globe to do that ourselves, in our own way, and in the time we have remaining. But wherever we are, and whatever we notice that could use our help, the world needs us to take action.

Preparing For the Big Next

We have no clear idea what's next. I mean, after this life. Really.

We speak of heaven, and "the next adventure" but we have for this inevitable end that each of us will meet the most extreme dearth of detail regarding any important thing imaginable. That's why life after death books sell so well, and it's why psychics and clairvoyants stay in business. 

One thing seems likely to me, having studied this for decades. It will matter then what we do now. We should treat each other in this life as well as we possibly can. For theists, it's an obligation. For atheists and agnostics, it's a bold dramatic gesture. For all, it's an exercise of radical freedom, achieved with difficulty - not to react slavishly and reciprocally to what others do to us, but to set new standards for what those others need to have done for them. Each of us is called to be a pioneer of elevating action. Each of us is called to heroic grace.

We should treat others exceedingly well, despite what they sometimes do to us, not just because of what they are created to be, but because of what we ourselves are created to be. The fact is that we deserve the effects of such actions as those we ought to perform. Many great thinkers, such as Plato and Shakespeare's Hamlet, have understood this. We all need to, as well.

The relationship between the now and the hereafter is simple. The now is limited. We know that. And it will affect whatever hereafter there is - even from an atheistic perspective, for what is now created and done will never cease to have been, forever into the future. Every act is eternal. The full story of reality is vastly and everlastingly different, depending on what we do now, day-to-day. There's always the possibility of demeaning behavior or elevating action - it's left to be our choice. What then will we do?

Hemingway, You, and Me

Life coaches now tell us to believe in ourselves, organize our lives better, and remember to breathe. Medieval life coaches would whisper in people's ears, "You're going to die. Remember your mortality." What was up with that?

I just finished reading Ernest Hemingway's famous novel, A Farewell to Arms. An American has gone to Italy in the First World War, to help the Italians fight the Austrians and Germans. This man, the narrator of the story, drives an ambulance and other vehicles near the front. He's badly injured, meets a nurse, falls in love, receives a medal for heroism, and months later returns to the front. So far, the story tracks the life of the author. Then, through a series of unexpected small situations and accidents, our narrator becomes separated from his unit, and is wrongly suspected of desertion. He escapes an imminent execution out in the countryside only by diving into a river under fire. He reunites with his love and, now on the run, they manage with great difficulty to get to safety in Switzerland, where she goes into labor with his baby. Fortunately, they're able to enter a major hospital for the delivery. The story is full of twists and turns, ups and downs for the two of them.

At that point in the narrative Hemingway goes far beyond confronting us with the crazy and sometimes scary vicissitudes of life, as seen in the adventures of the soldier and his great love, and begins to rub our noses in the fickle inescapability of death in this world. The last pages of the book are so bleak in articulating the author's deepest attitudes, the whole thing could have been called, "A Farewell to Meaning and Hope."

This wasn't, of course, the only time Papa H took on the topic of mortality. Many months ago, I quoted here from his other novel, The Sun Also Rises. Just eleven pages into it, there is this brief conversation, worth repeating, that starts with Robert Cohn, Princeton graduate and amateur boxer, speaking to his old friend Jake, the narrator of the novel, in a bar – where, it seems that, interestingly, philosophical reflection about life often takes place:

“Listen, Jake,” he leaned forward on the bar. “Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?”

 “Yes, every once in a while.”

“Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we'll be dead?”

“What the hell, Robert,” I said,  “ What the hell?”

“I'm serious.”

“It’s one thing I don’t worry about,” I said.

“You ought to.”

As we all know, but, like Jake, tend not to think about very much, the life adventure we’re on right now is a limited-time offer. This is an interesting point of reflection for all of us who are already in mid-life or - like me - beyond. But it’s an important fact for any of us, however young or old. Are we making the most of our time? Are we using our talents in the best ways, and taking advantage of the opportunities that come to us each day? Are we enjoying the adventure that we have, to the extent that we can? Or are we letting ourselves be held back by habit and worn down by our own inner reactions to things that are outside our control?

The answers to these questions often turn on another one: How well do we handle change in our lives, day to day – the little, unexpected events, and the bigger disruptions; the challenges and the opportunities? Do we resist almost all change and regret it, or are we creative artists with it?

As the bluntly philosophical Robert points out for Jake and all the rest of us, there will come a time when further change in this world is impossible for each of us – maybe thirty-five years from now; maybe longer; and maybe much sooner. We never know. So why not make the most of this incredible journey while we can? Great things are possible for us, with the right approach to work and life.

Hemingway himself may have taken a very negative attitude toward the challenges of life,  but he did pretty well for himself in his chosen profession, despite the many ups and downs he couldn't control, until he chose exactly the wrong action on the day that ended his adventure.

We shouldn't follow his negativity of attitude, or many of his choices. But we do benefit from being reminded of the churn and fragility of our situations throughout this life. We don't find ourselves in an easy world, or with endless time. We're clearly in a place of challenge. But that just means we need to develop all our strengths and the most positive attitudes we can in order to flourish and prevail, within the parameters given us. Ultimately, that can provide us with a Farewell to Anxiety, and a Farewell to Fear.

Last Words

I've been reading a novel this week whose main character is fascinated with the last words of great people in history. As a southern boy myself, I've always loved the mythical last words of the legendary southern redneck: "Hey! Watch this!"

Or: "Look where I am! No, up here!"

Or: "It ain't dangerous at all."

Or: "Yeah, you can eat it. Watch me."

Or: "No. It's not loaded. I promise."

Or: "You just gotta hold it right. And, it's not that poisonous."

But most of those statements, I think, are normally followed by a profanity of some sort.

And they wonder why the southern redneck is a dying breed.

Last words can be instructive. One enlightenment philosopher, eating far too much at dinner, was told by his wife that he should not take another bite. Picking up an apricot and waving it in her face, he said, "What harm could this possibly do?" Then he popped it into his mouth, ate it, and dropped dead at the table.

My grandfather's last words were, "It's beautiful."

Thomas Edison was hardly more specific: "It's beautiful over there."

Steve Jobs' last words, reported by his sister, were "Wow," repeated several times.

But maybe my favorite last words were those of a famous nineteenth century American minister, Henry Ward Beecher, who said, simply, "Now comes the mystery."

Indeed.

The Fault In Our Stars

In the New York Times the other day, I read about a famous Young Adult book editor at Dutton who gives her authors 20 pages of harsh critique on their manuscripts, and they cry, and then revise, and get bestselling results. She has more bestsellers, apparently, than anyone else. John Green, author of the mega hit book The Fault in Our Stars, now a major motion picture, as they say, is one of her authors. And so when I saw his popular book on a used book table in an airport bookstore this week, I bought it to find out how mega bestselling books are written - something a philosopher would not know. I promise you that. And I read it on the airplanes of the week.

The book is good. I recommend it. It's a story about two teenagers in Indiana who have cancer and fall in love. The girl, Hazel, who is 16, loves a book once written by a reclusive novelist who now lives in Amsterdam. She's read it over and over. She meets a boy, Augustus Waters, when he visits her support group for cancer kids. He's hot, so they talk, and he decides to read the book she loves so much. And then, Spoiler Alert, he uses his "Wish" (for very sick kids to have special experiences) to taker her to meet her hero, the author of her favorite book, in Amsterdam. They find that the man is quite different from what they expect. But despite their disappointment in that main facet of the trip, love blossoms. Then: Someone dies. And the nature of our universe is prodded and pondered.

It's a surprisingly philosophical novel. And, again, I liked it. But do you remember how the characters in the hit tv show Dawson's Creek used to talk like graduate students, instead of the high schoolers they were supposed to be? Ok maybe you didn't watch. Well. These characters, the girl 16, and the boy 17, talk and think more like exaggerated versions of Ivy League professors.

Hazel, the girl, speaks with words like: veritably, decrepit, horrifically, toroidal, disheartening, dysmorphia, incessantly, feign, taut, catastrophic, hamartia (the ancient Greek word for sin), gutted, ludicrous, flummoxed, gratuitous, luminous, and indefatigable, as well as in phrases like “waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles.”

She thinks, and narrates to us, with words like rapture, sedentary, ferocity, tenuous,  misnomered, elicit, coterie, irreconcilably, succulently, malevolent, encroached, transfigured, commiserate, cloyingly, prematorium, eponymous, irrevocably, rotundity, labyrinthine, and lumen, and also in phrases like “the tears not like tears so much as a quiet metronome,” and “existentialist experiment,” and “a bodily sovereignty,” and again, “existential curiosity,” and “a quantum entanglement,” and “the sound of a parent’s annihilated voice,” and “depraved meaninglessness,” as well as, finally, “the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering.” Do sixteen-year-olds ever actually go around talking and thinking like this, anywhere other than the Indiana of the book?

Augustus, the 17 year old boy, and former high school basketball player, speaks with words like sacrality, trope, perseverant, eviscerated, and self-aggrandizing, and with phrases like “The day of existentially fraught free throws,” “the men and women who wait like Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot,” and “awash in the nobility of sacrifice,” and again, “awash in the metaphorical resonance,” or “the Whitmanesque revelation,” and “the terrible ferocity,” and “the incessant mechanized haranguing.”

But they also curse in really normal curse words, and Hazel often agrees with Augustus in the new faddish phrase, "I know, right?" And she eventually describes her formerly admired novelist as "the world's douchiest douche." (184) So there is quite a dynamic spectrum of language represented in the book.

Hazel's really popular fashionista high school friend, Kaitlin, uses phrases like "preemptive dumping,” and “lascivious details,” and speaks of “unconscionable” luck. And then she buys lots of cute shoes.

Parents occasionally speak professorially, but not nearly as well as the kids. A nurse gives an abstract of the news that sounds like something Jon Stewart might do after getting his own PhD in pop culture.

The prose of the book is sometimes really really aggressively MFA (Master of Fine Arts degree). And some of the ideas are, as well. But it's all very clever, despite striking me as incredibly unrealistic. Of course, maybe that's just me. I've never been around kids who ate dictionaries for breakfast and alphabet soup for lunch.

But I think the author does a good job of bringing up some big issues about life, death, disease, afterlife, consciousness, fairness, fate, and honesty that we all need to contemplate. I think I will contemplate them with you some tomorrow, or the next day. If you've read The Fault in Our Stars, let me know what you think.

So maybe I know now, indisputably, irrevocably, and inerrantly, if not sublimely, what it takes to write a Number One New York Times bestseller. I've got to practice my prolixity, at least enough for the inexorable to occur.

Good Grief, Charlie Brown.

Recently, I asked readers for some topics they'd like to see me blog on. I got lots of suggestions. I've written on two of them already. Today, I'll tackle a tough one, and briefly: Grief.

Grief is an experience and expression of great value lost. We can grieve the passing of a family member, a friend, a pet, or our youth. We can grieve the loss of a job, or a marriage, or the demise of a great business. 

Grief, like most emotions, can be rational or irrational. It would make no sense to grieve the loss of a potato chip. And there are probably philosophical conditions for sensible grief. It makes sense for me to grieve the loss of people and animals I've known, in a way that it might not, regarding people and animals whose passing I rationally know must be happening around the world, but with whom I've never had contact. In one of his early movies, Woody Allen's character says something like, "If one guy is starving somewhere in the world, it puts a crimp in my day." And I get that. I feel a keen regret about the suffering and loss around the world that happens every day - at least, when I have the time to think about it. But my experience of that is not quite the same thing as grief.

Grief is personal. And it can be good. If a person or relationship or endeavor or hope has indeed been of great value, and of great value to you, it would make no sense to experience its loss without such an emotional recognition of its value. The stoic philosophers wanted to avoid any disturbing emotion, but, as I've pointed out in my book The Stoic Art of Living, in a discussion of Epictetus, they went too far. Epictetus even went so far as to think that on hearing of the death of your son or spouse, you should react exactly as you would if you had heard instead that someone else's son or spouse had died. And that makes no sense at all. It would signal a pathology, or emotional void that isn't properly human.

But what Aristotle said about anger is also appropriate concerning grief. In order to evaluate its experience in our lives, he urged us to ask questions like: For whom? On account of what? How intense? And for how long? As a philosopher I believe that things and people can have objective value. And I think they can also have subjective value, which constitutes the manner and degree with which we place value on them. Part of rational living is to acknowledge anything that has objective value with a subjective response proportionate to it. Of course, we can value personal possessions, or a tree in the backyard, with our own special subjectivity, tracking the history we have with such things, and our subjective response can in such cases go far beyond any question of objective value, but when there is high objective value, or an appropriately elevated subjective value, grief is an altogether appropriate response to loss.

But grief must have limits, in order to be good - limits of both intensity and duration. In order to honor the high value of something or someone who has been lost, we don't have to inflict on ourselves the other great losses that would result from being totally overwhelmed and shut down for a long period of time by overly intense or prolonged grief. We have a responsibility to ourselves and those who remain around us to be as strong as we can, and make efforts to stay on the path that life has provided us, remembering that, despite any loss, there are many gains and even joys that can await us, and be brought to others by us, if we can regain our equilibrium.

No one promised us that life would be easy and without loss. In fact, as great philosophers have understood, we need difficulty and loss to refine us and goad us to grow into the full maturity that life can afford us.

To know good grief is to know a part of that growth.

Who Will Cry When You're Gone?

Who will cry when they first learn you're gone?

Ok, I don't want to be the philosophical version of Debbie Downer here, but we need a second day on the topic of death, I think, but only obliquely, and as the source of a question. Yesterday, I mentioned an announcement in church of a great man's impending departure. Immediately, tissues and hankies were visible all over the sanctuary, as people dabbed their eyes. And that caused me to reflect on a very sad fact. There are top leaders in the world of business who seemed to have nothing more than an acquaintance relationship to their own family members. Their time is always spent elsewhere, and their energy. And at work, they're all business. They don't go around touching the hearts of others.

The people who will cry when they first learn that you're gone will be the people whose hearts you've touched with kindness and love, with affection and concern, with support and encouragement. How many are there? That, to me, is a measure of a life well lived. And we don't all measure up as we would like. But as long as we're still here, we can do something about it.

I think it's interesting to use what I like to call "The Inner Circle Principle." Your life can be imagined as contained within concentric circles. Family and best friends are the closest, innermost circle. Then, there are increasingly remote orbs of friends, co workers, neighbors and other acquaintances who also surround you. Ideally, you should be touching people's hearts in every contact you have. They deserve that. And so do you. But as a practical matter, it can help to concentrate first on the inner circle of people in your life - family and close friends. Are you acting toward them with kindness and love, affection and concern, support and encouragement? Are you paying attention, and doing the little things that will help them and touch their hearts? Or are you always in a hurry, distracted, and needed elsewhere for "important things"? These are the important things.

Give people what they most deeply need while you're here, and you'll make them wish you would stay on and on. And then, when they do learn that you've left for a distant shore, some tissues and hankies will likely appear to signal the good memories that you've left in their hearts.

Burn Bright While You're Here

In our informal Methodist church at the beach yesterday, the head minister told us at the start of the service that the oldest member of our ministerial staff had just suffered a major stroke and was now with hospice for what would most likely be his final hours. This man, The Reverend P. D. Midget, though in his nineties, had always seemed to have a timeless youth and vigor about him. Today, I realized that I had always assumed he'd be with us for a lot longer, despite his advanced age. He was a great harmonica player, and could do a fine job as well on the mandolin or banjo. He had recently had a smaller stroke, and in rehab had written and performed an upbeat song about it all that amazed everyone at the hospital. A graduate of Duke Divinity School, long ago, he was a keen reader and thinker, and could reenact episodes from the lives of historical figures in a dramatic way that was unexpectedly moving. He was an unusually kind and loving man, and always had a quick smile and a word of encouragement for anyone who crossed his path. I really enjoyed every conversation I had ever had with him, and now wish there had been a lot more of them.

In giving the announcement concerning this unexpected turn of events, our minister mentioned that he had already overseen the funerals of eight people in the past eleven days. And for a church of our size, that's pretty unusual. This two facts together were a powerful reminder of the fleeting nature of our time in this world, which is something that we usually keep out of mind. But it can be greatly useful to remember. As Woody Allen's character, in one of his movies long ago, said to a friend: "Don't you realize what a thread we're all hanging by?"

Consider an interesting passage from Ernest Hemingway's book, The Sun Also Rises. 

Just eleven pages into it, you'll come across this brief conversation that starts with Robert Cohn, Princeton graduate and amateur boxer, speaking to his old friend Jake, the narrator, in a bar - where it seems, interestingly, that philosophizing about life often takes place:

"Listen, Jake," he leaned forward on the bar.  "Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it?  Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?"

"Yes, every once in a while."

"Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we'll be dead?"

"What the hell, Robert,' I said, "What the hell?"

"I'm serious."

"It's one thing I don't worry about," I said.

"You ought to."

As we all know, but mostly, like Jake, tend not to think about very much, life is a limited-time offer. This is an interesting point of reflection for all of us who are already in mid-life or beyond. But it's an important fact for any of us, however young or old. Are we making the most of our time on earth? Are we using our talents in the best ways, and taking advantage of the opportunities that come to us each day? Are we enjoying the adventure? Are we touching the lives of others in positive ways? Or are we letting ourselves be held back and worn down by our own inner reactions to things that are sometimes outside our control?

There's a lesson we can glean from Woody Allen, and Hemingway's characters, and my old friend. Burn bright while you're here. It won't be forever. Remember this, and make your best difference while you can.