LIFE

How often do you think about LIFE?  Just that.  LIFE.  If you're like I am, not very often.  I am here now after 316 of these articles and I am just now getting around to mentioning this subject.  It's because we think a lot about the details of life, but rarely about the reality of life itself.  We think about vegetable life, animal life, earthly life, social life, life style, sex life, city life, pro-life, after life and more, but I've run out of lives to enumerate.  When I was in school, grammar school, that is, life was rather simple.  There was human life and there was chicken life.  We raised chickens.  Chicken life was not very long and generally came to an end on the chopping block, followed by the plucking, gutting, cooking and eating.  Human life was that activity which had the strength and the freedom to use other forms of life for its benefit.  Along the way, being raised in a deeply spiritual and religious family, the other dimension of life for humans was the relationship with God and His world of Saints and Angels.  See, I started by saying that when I was younger, life was simple.  Ha!  Just a few sentences into the narration, it got complicated, didn't it?  Of course it did.  I haven't even mentioned the fact that in my mother tongue there were two ways of talking to people.  There was the polite way which required different grammatical forms, and the familiar way which didn't require special forms, but was nevertheless different.  That's a wrinkle that English speaking children don't have to contend with.  Then, of course, things really got a little more complex when I found out that to get by in this country, knowing English was a must.  Jeepers, creepers, was this thing ever going to get easier?  Not really.  Not for the first born boy.  There was house cleaning, diaper changing, chicken feeding, plucking and cleaning, grass mowing, victory garden work, school work, fishing, baseball and mumbly peg.

Now life is really getting difficult to organize.  But, somehow I got through it.  We all do.
One of the interesting aspects of life as I see it is the nearly constant effort that we make to define it in ever simpler terms.  We have Robert Frost and his famous poem, "The Road Less Taken."  Easy choice.  One of two things.  Now we all know that this is certainly far from the reality that we all know.  Instead, we find ourselves bombarded with lists of "simple rules" to follow that guarantee a happy life.  It used to be that these lists appeared in books that were too expensive to buy, so the contents didn't interfere with the course that we were carving out for ourselves anyway.  Now, of course, hardly a day goes by that we are confronted with PowerPoint Shows with beautiful pictures of stunning flowers, sweet music and a list of life rules that are assuredly the source of happiness in life.  Oh, that it were that simple!  
Some 50 years ago, I happened to be a college - level student in philosophy.  One of the topics that we had to confront was, "What is life?" Ha!  At 23 who cares?  Since I was there for a reason, I decided that it might be fun to hear the answer.  I'll tell you the way it was told us, and then I'll translate it.  <Vita, sui motus est.>  "Life is self motion."  The topic got quite a few hours of treatment, but it didn't contribute to making life any simpler.  We did learn that the motion of water boiling is not indicative of life and that oxidation of iron is also not a sign of life.  Whoopee!  Doesn't that make you happy?  Come on admit it, it does, doesn't it?
I am not going to get too deep with this thought because I feel that it is better to leave you to your own devices in this area.  The only thing I'll say before leaving you is that however life is defined, it strikes me as something about which we should be happy.  Just put yourself in touch with the joy you feel in the morning after having been "dead" for a few hours.  Feels good, right?  Enjoy it.  No matter how complicated it gets, it's a gift that we look forward to every day.
Finally,  remember what I told you, No crying is allowed at my funeral.