Who's to say?

So, my day began with a phone call from my mom, saying she had to be hospitalized because of the multiple pulmonary embolisms in her lungs that had probably developed as a result of a blood clot in her calf. It seemed she was out of danger now, but it was apparently only by chance that these embolisms (which I have learned since then are blood clots that travel throughout the body) did not lodge in her heart and cause a heart attack, or become lodged in a critical area of her lungs and kill her. But because they didn't, the only treatment required is a simple administration of blood thinners, in large amounts at first via IV, and then later in pill form. Whew.

It's not a fun exercise to contemplate your parent's death, but every once in a while it seems that you aren't given a choice, which brings me to my point.

When I think about death (and I really try not to, as a rule), I tend to ask myself what would make someone content enough with their life to accept their death. Many people have said that you can't separate death from life, but the opposite appears to be true - death must be evaluated with respect to the life that preceded it. So, the big question: what makes a good/happy/successful/fulfilling life?

Money.

Make lots of money.

Just kidding. Wouldn't that be awesome though? Anyways, I definitely don't have an answer yet, only some thoughts and guesses.

Off the top of my head, I'm going to say there are two schools of thought on what makes a meaningful life: the journey people, and the destination people. The first group, as you may already have guessed, think a good life is found in the act of living, in the way a person chooses to deal with the realities of their experience. The second group choose a goal for their lives, and their satisfaction with their lives at any given moment corresponds with their success in pursuing this goal. I know I'm painting in broad strokes here, but I'm trying to distill some fundamental ideas about how people look at their lives.

Back to my mom for a second. I have to wonder what she thinks of her life at this point. Sometimes I envy the perspective she has on life, having lived a great deal more of it than I have. She's told me before that children are at a disadvantage because they often don't know the whole story of how their parents came to be the people they are today, and that sometimes it keeps the children from realizing the humanity that they share with their parents, that their parents also often flailed around for years and years until they finally fell into circumstances conducive to a more stable life. I think if I truly believed that, maybe I wouldn't worry so much about my future. But then I have to ask if she's lived the life she wanted, and if, faced with the end, she would be content. To use a tired metaphor, we stand at opposite ends of a gulf, one looking forward and the other looking back.

If I had to choose, I'd say I fall into the journey school of thought. I can't think of any great ambition for my life, or what I want to get from the world. I'm looking for a point of view from which to confront every day, but I lack the goals of the destination people that help them stay oriented on their path. I'm sure I'll go into some of this stuff in greater detail later, and I'll definitely have to flesh out this whole "meaning of life business" (could I have picked a broader first topic? Seriously.). For now I think I'll try to learn as many skills as possible, and try my hand at traveling. Perhaps with more experience, I'll find my path out there somewhere.

One final thought. The greatest virtue of the traveler is courage, and his greatest enemy is comfort, because comfort is what makes the traveler cease to be a traveler.

This'll have to do for a first effort. More later

Bryan