Category: Scriptures

When I was a teenager going to  Christian Youth Fellowship, there was this girl who was both very pious and very 60s era liberal. Liberal Christians seem like a weird idea now in this era of conservative Christians but “Jesus as the ultimate hippie” had a lot of appeal to the Boomer parents who were part of my Methodist church.

Anyway, there was this one time where, I don’t know how it came up, but the youth pastor (or maybe one of the pious girlls, not like quite sure) said something that has really stuck with me ” this as if you were going to live forever but die tomorrow..” I have since come to understand that it’s a misquote of something misattributed to Ghandi that actually comes from a Renaissance Humanist (I think, not important).

It sticks with me because of a Kevin Nealon joke on SNL’s “Weekend Update”  about this sentiment:

And then much later on in my life, I would think about how the Doctor mixed the last night of River Song’s life be 24 years long. Or an even earlier joke that I heard on “LA Law” but I have said many times in my career which is, ” If I only had a year to live, I would want to do this job because everyday can seem like a thousand years”

I think about how at this point I blog maybe once every couple of months but if we go back to the very beginning, I’ve been formally blogging since 2009, and I’ve been doing stuff like having my .plan file (it’s a Unix thing ) be blog-like since the early ’90s.  The entire time I’ve used about my death as if it were just around the corner. And it hasn’t been. And it won’t be. Until it is.

The most profound insight on this actually came for my daughter, who mourned the impending death of her cat for the entire time she was in college. But she graduated college and her cat was very old but still alive. She said that at some point she stopped being afraid of when her cat would die, and just be thankful for the time that she had with her cat.

To a certain extent being afraid of death is really about being afraid of life. But that is to too simplistic.

For you see, I do often prepare for the end knowing that the end is not coming but hypothetically considering what can it do to make the moment worth it. It’s just that, what makes the moment worth it can often be incredibly commonplace. Sarah Silverman does a stand-up special about how her stepmother and father died within 9 days of each other. In his last days, amongst the things that Sarah Silverman’s dad did was binge watch all the episodes of the Ali Wong series “Beef.” I have a close friend whose dad a terrible stroke that left him very disabled, and he spent the last days of his life watching “The NFL today”

This is what they mean when they say ” stop and smell the roses” or ” Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans”

A life worth living can absolutely be filled with ordinary moments. You’re not ” killing time” you are just living gently.

Which brings me to the point: for people my age, advice on how to live your life like ” live as if if you have been invited to a sushi buffet. Love as if you are a character from the Amelia bedelia books. Saying as if you’re a contestant on a reality game, show in a foreign country and everything you’re saying has been overdubbed into the native language.” What I hear, and perhaps it’s a Gen X thing is as if

“as if” is Alicia silverstone’s hilarious retort lots and lots of absurd platitudes being presented to her in Amy Heckerlings adaptation of “Emma.”

Moreover, for me, it tells me that although people strive to find the metaphors which give insight and clarity into the substance behind the symbolism in their life… Most of the time they don’t find metaphor they find simile

As if it were possible to find ontological truth…

S’yeah right… And maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt! Party on, Wayne. Party on Garth