Just remember, once you're over the hill you begin to pick up speed.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Hello Margie
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What's the difference between real time and obligatory time? If you are invited to a party by a friend and you go delighted to be there, to meet their friends and share some stories, laughs and good companionship, that's real time. If you go to meet someone you think will be there just to do make a contact and maybe do some business, even that is real time. If you go to put in an appearance just to make sure that you don't lose an acquaintance or insult the host, that's obligatory time.
If you take your kids to the playground and enjoy seeing them play and maybe pushing them on a swing or catching them as they come down the slide, laughing with them and listening to their chatter, that's real time. If you take them to the park just to sit and talk with another parent or do nothing but keep an eye on them while they do whatever they can find to do on their own, that's obligatory time and the average child knows the difference.
Now answer this, what is the difference between a real life and an obligatory life?
One of the advantages of growing older, going "over the hill," as Schopenhauer and others put it, is the realization of how much obligatory time one has logged on one's time sheet and how sparse the real time measurements are. Those vacations at the beach which were meant to be relaxing times were actually obligatory escapes from a difficult or time consuming job. Getting with the guys for horseshoes or the girls for your bridge club may seem to have been real time but as you look back it seems more like a waste of time, an obligatory waste of time. Time you could have spent doing what? Something real?
Some of those of us who are masquerading as senior citizens (for want of a better term) take on projects. We learn a foreign language as I am trying to do. We join a book club to read and discuss some of the world's great, or not so great, literature. We go on cruises to see what the Earth looks like in the Caribbean, or Mediterranean or in the Fjords of Norway or Alaska. We volunteer our services in hospitals, day care centers or other institutions where some senior wisdom will be useful. We take up painting or writing and produce works that will beautify and enhance other lives. We take up a new enterprise or a new business and go back to work. And why do we do it?
We do not do it because life is short and we had better do something with the little time we have left while we're waiting to die. No. We do it because we are alive and wish to live real lives and not obligatory ones any more. Let the magazines and the TV talk show hosts admire her for teaching a college course at the age of 80. She's not thinking about being 80. She's thinking about teaching.
Old fogies pick up speed because they no longer waste time on obligatory lives. Let pretence, guile, artificiality and acting-their-age go out with the trash along with the false eyelashes. They're out for the real stuff.
Dana Bate - The Vagabond
Never Give Up
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Showing posts with label Arthur Schopenhauer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arthur Schopenhauer. Show all posts
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Are You Who You Are?
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Hello Durres, Albania. Have a joyful day.
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It's one thing for an actor to assume a character and convincingly behave as that character for two hours or so. But it's another thing entirely for a person to assume a personality and character of someone they think they are or want to be.
It's fine to try to emulate people, particularly those who have been an inspiration to us, but we can't achieve the level of grace and knowledge expressed by someone else through imitating them. You can't grab a hold of the wagon in the same place someone else has a hold of it. Sooner or later, and too bad if it's later, the mask has to come off and you have to start understanding who you are begin to live that way.
There is another form of false individuality and that's type casting. It may not be a certain individual that you want to copy but a type of person you wish you were. You want to be a tough guy so people won't bother you, so you swagger and talk rough. I once worked with a woman director who was bossy, unpleasant and put up a grand stand about being important. She wasn't really that way. She just thought she should be, to prove herself in a man's world, or something. Amazing pretensions can accompany someone who is trying to be a type of person they aren't.
The most insidious role playing that can happen is when one has a vision of himself which isn't true and tries to fulfill that vision. I once knew a man who tried to convince himself and others that he was a cultured and intellectual gentleman, who read all the world's great literature. The fact was he wasn't, which became obvious if one tried to discuss ideas with him. He was a perfectly fine fellow just as he was. He didn't need the pretension. He didn't need to hide himself from himself. But he had developed a false individuality that he liked and, by golly, he was going to stick to it.
To really understand oneself is a formidable and somewhat impossible task. It doesn't happen over night, but through days of darkness into occasional sun shine. And just as infrequently but just as assuredly the masquerade drips slowly off of us and the real individual emerges. Then we realize to our shock how many years we wasted trying to be someone else.
DB - The Vagabond
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No fooling around, here is this week's puzzle.
These are all legitimate movie titles in translation.
Your task, if you wish to survive, is to translate them back into their original titles by the end of the week.
Several Saints
Uprising Over The Thanksgiving Dinner
How One Murders An Imitator
Swept Away In A Breeze
The Lion Is Burning It's Feet
What The Flute Makes
The Insects' Messiah
She Married The Monster
Mr. Summerfall Winterspring
The Chimpanzees Live There
Confessing When Drenched
He Paid Very Close Attention, Unfortunately
Boiling When It's Dark
Misplaced Religious Artifact Stolen
Trees Around The Little House
Leo's Secret Message
Ultimate Spanish Dance in France
Country In A Maternity Ward
Instructions In Stone
Creepy Creatures Aloft
The Bitch Is Domesticated
3 entries so far.
Good luck
dbdacoba@aol.com
DB
*********************
SPRING QUESTION
(This is not a contest)
NASA has planned to send a two man mission on an 18 month trip to the planet Mars. It would take 6 months for the astronauts to get there and after 6 months of exploration another 6 months to return.
Should they do it and why, and if not, why not?
dbdacoba@aol.com
4 answers so far
I eagerly await your answer.
DB
******************
Arthur Schopenhauer
************************
Hello Durres, Albania. Have a joyful day.
**************************
It's one thing for an actor to assume a character and convincingly behave as that character for two hours or so. But it's another thing entirely for a person to assume a personality and character of someone they think they are or want to be.
It's fine to try to emulate people, particularly those who have been an inspiration to us, but we can't achieve the level of grace and knowledge expressed by someone else through imitating them. You can't grab a hold of the wagon in the same place someone else has a hold of it. Sooner or later, and too bad if it's later, the mask has to come off and you have to start understanding who you are begin to live that way.
There is another form of false individuality and that's type casting. It may not be a certain individual that you want to copy but a type of person you wish you were. You want to be a tough guy so people won't bother you, so you swagger and talk rough. I once worked with a woman director who was bossy, unpleasant and put up a grand stand about being important. She wasn't really that way. She just thought she should be, to prove herself in a man's world, or something. Amazing pretensions can accompany someone who is trying to be a type of person they aren't.
The most insidious role playing that can happen is when one has a vision of himself which isn't true and tries to fulfill that vision. I once knew a man who tried to convince himself and others that he was a cultured and intellectual gentleman, who read all the world's great literature. The fact was he wasn't, which became obvious if one tried to discuss ideas with him. He was a perfectly fine fellow just as he was. He didn't need the pretension. He didn't need to hide himself from himself. But he had developed a false individuality that he liked and, by golly, he was going to stick to it.
To really understand oneself is a formidable and somewhat impossible task. It doesn't happen over night, but through days of darkness into occasional sun shine. And just as infrequently but just as assuredly the masquerade drips slowly off of us and the real individual emerges. Then we realize to our shock how many years we wasted trying to be someone else.
DB - The Vagabond
********************
No fooling around, here is this week's puzzle.
These are all legitimate movie titles in translation.
Your task, if you wish to survive, is to translate them back into their original titles by the end of the week.
Several Saints
Uprising Over The Thanksgiving Dinner
How One Murders An Imitator
Swept Away In A Breeze
The Lion Is Burning It's Feet
What The Flute Makes
The Insects' Messiah
She Married The Monster
Mr. Summerfall Winterspring
The Chimpanzees Live There
Confessing When Drenched
He Paid Very Close Attention, Unfortunately
Boiling When It's Dark
Misplaced Religious Artifact Stolen
Trees Around The Little House
Leo's Secret Message
Ultimate Spanish Dance in France
Country In A Maternity Ward
Instructions In Stone
Creepy Creatures Aloft
The Bitch Is Domesticated
3 entries so far.
Good luck
dbdacoba@aol.com
DB
*********************
SPRING QUESTION
(This is not a contest)
NASA has planned to send a two man mission on an 18 month trip to the planet Mars. It would take 6 months for the astronauts to get there and after 6 months of exploration another 6 months to return.
Should they do it and why, and if not, why not?
dbdacoba@aol.com
4 answers so far
I eagerly await your answer.
DB
******************
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