Sleeping Out

Yesterday I decided I needed to sleep outside. I’ve had a tent set up in the woods by the pond for the last two weeks, since Cedar and I camped out one night. It’s survived a couple of wind and rain storms, and it seemed silly not to use it after it had been out through all that.

"Wake Up, Time to Die."

How will I know when I have lived enough? I have heard that some people say that they have lived enough and are ready to die. I cannot imagine ever being ready to die. Some nights before I fall asleep, I remember that it is going to happen sometime, and my body goes completely cold. Thank God for sleeping pills.

Commerce and Trade

One night in bed Bruce and I were talking about World War II and why the U. S. had entered (romantic, eh?) He said it had occurred to him that we really did it to preserve our trade routes and trading partnerships more than for any military reason. So I asked him the question that’s been on my mind so much lately – is trade and commerce all there is? Is this what life is about? It seems so in America, where everywhere you look is an advertisement. But even in Tanzania, everywhere I went, people were selling food – holding it up to the windows of buses slowed down in traffic –oranges, symmetrically peeled with knives, roasted field corn, sweets. And then there was the market where people sold baskets and dyed cloth and vegetables. There was a woodcarvers market where I bought carvings to bring back for people and I bought myself a lovely Zanzibar chest. But then I gave it away the following Christmas. Every now and then, like right now, I have a moment of mild longing for it – the beautifully carved top, the secret drawer inside – but then it is gone.

WWED (What Would Emily Do?)

Is there such a thing as enough of a life?

Growing up, it seemed that all we did was move from one place to another. First it was just my parents trying to find their place -- from Israel to various locales in the NY metro area. Then they split up and I hopped on the microbus with my father for the ride to Tennessee, Wisconsin, and back to Israel. Then my mother pulled me back on her bus, with stops in Manhattan, Scarsdale, and Spring Valley, NY. By the time I was 10, I had lived in 10 places in three states and two countries.

Some of these moves were prompted by circumstances, or messages from God, but the last few were distinctly upwardly mobile. I was more or less equally unhappy in each place, but each dwelling was bigger, with more yard and nicer things. After moving back with my mother, when I was eight, every home we lived in had a television. Always the sad sack new kid, I spent most afternoons in front of it, stuffing my face. Saturday nights I watched Love Boat and Fantasy Island, alone, imagining all the other kids at parties, movies, hanging out...

Giving It All Away

Peter Singer thinks that if you make more than enough money to satisfy your basic needs, you should give at least some portion of the rest away to keep children all over the world from starving to death or dying of preventable diseases. Preferably, he says in some of his writings, you should give everything you have above what you need to live. His argument for this claim is compelling, and if you are interested in seeing why, and making yourself squirm a bit in the process, try this exercise called "The Drowning Child". (The site this exercise is on -- philosophyexperiments.com -- has a lot of eye-opening exercises on it. I highly recommend it.)

Jobs

It drives me crazy to hear so much talk about jobs and how people need jobs. Just give us jobs. As the “Great Recession” drags on, and politicians continue to bloviate, I am completely up to my ears in bricks made up of “J”s, “O”s, “B”s, and “S”s. But what are jobs? They are opportunities, situations in which you trade your time, strength, and/or expertise for money. And what do you do with the money? You spend it, of course, so that other people, the ones who make the stuff you buy, can also have jobs. If you don’t spend, people won’t have jobs. So get a job so you can get money to spend so that other people can have jobs too. Oh, but don’t forget to put money aside for retirement because it’s your right, your entitlement, to someday not have to have a job, but you’ll still need money to spend so that other people can still have jobs even while you’re taking it easy. (And of course if they have jobs, they can continue paying your Social Security.)

Too Rich or Too Thin -- Part II

So we have established that yes, one can be too thin. The more difficult question is whether it is possible to be too rich. In the third person, the answer is clearly yes. The 99 percent, as most of us were characterized in the Occupy Wall Street protests, can easily see that those in the top 1 percent are too rich (as this video shows). Their wealth has grown; ours has shrunk, and it is easy to blame their growing wealth for our growing poverty and social problems. But when you are too thin, it does not just mean you’re an eyesore for others. It means your own health is compromised and you could die. Is there comparable danger to the person who is too rich? What are the perils of plenty?

Well, there’s the whole “money doesn’t buy happiness” theme, with Richard Cory going home and putting a bullet in his head. And there are the addictions – “sex addiction” not least among them. (Are there happy marriages among the very rich, or is the charismatic power of wealth to attract nubile young women just too much for any man to resist?)