Being in the moment means your attention is on what’s actually happening now, rather than replaying the past or rehearsing the future. You notice the conversation you’re in, the food you’re eating or the road ahead, instead of half-living it while your mind is somewhere else. It doesn’t mean having no thoughts. It means noticing when your mind has wandered off and bringing it back. Writing is my best tool for staying in the moment…
Piety is devotion and reverence, most often toward God or religious practice, shown through worship, prayer, and faithful observance. The word comes from the Latin pietas. For the Romans it meant more than religion: it was dutiful loyalty to the gods, to one’s family (especially parents), and to one’s country. Virgil’s “pious Aeneas” is the classic example. That older sense survives in phrases like “filial piety,” meaning devotion to one’s parents. The word can also…
I’m back on my hilltop and am momentarily alone here on this quiet sunny Saturday morning in late September. Kim is up caring for Sharon, her older sister and will return later today after having lunch with an old pal in Santa Barbara. Buddy is finishing up a few days stint with his doggy pals at Doggy Day/Night care and is unaware that I will be picking him up in a bit and bringing him…
The older I get and the more into retirement I delve, the more I find myself wondering about the value of memories. We are generally raised to believe that keeping memories is a good thing. It’s a pretty deep cultural assumption. Photos, journals, archives, “never forget,” nostalgia as a positive emotion. The whole apparatus of human development treats memory as inherently valuable, and forgetting as loss or failure (dementia, “senior moments,” a fading photograph). But…
“Kidding a kidder” (or “you can’t kid a kidder”) means you can’t fool someone who is themselves skilled at deception or joking. A trickster sees through another trickster’s tricks. “Kid” as a verb meaning “to tease or deceive playfully” and it emerged in English slang in the mid-1800s, likely from the noun “kid” (young goat), by analogy, with the idea of playfully “kidding around” the way a young goat frisks about, or possibly from the…
I’m not entirely sure why the world works this way for us, but we seem to have a front half and a back half of the year. They are broken up by the month of July, which is our month with out family out here on the hilltop. The front half tends to be about planning some distant trip. The last few years have been, starting in 2023, Egypt/Jordan, Southeast Asia, Patagonia, and this year,…
I’ve not always been complimentary about the medical profession. The advent of AI in our daily lives has added to that tendency. For some reason, the Google phenom with the likes of WebMD never captured my attention and certainly not my medical confidence. But that’s all changed now thanks to Claude. Claude is now my trusted advisor on all sorts of things, including medical needs. Claude sent me to the ER for stroke/TIA screening a…
I keep finding reasons to think about our friend Bill (of Dulcinea and Bill). He is gradually becoming one of my heroes and it has nothing to do with the fact that he seems to like reading my blog stories. What has caused me to think and write about him again this morning is the fact that I am taking Kim off for a routine colonoscopy this morning and we have been living with the…
I am sitting here at almost 11pm on a Tuesday night at the age of 72 wondering who I am supposed to talk to about the fact that I’ve put in five unexpected hours of expert witness work tonight rather than writing a cute story for you all to read tomorrow morning. I got a surprise email yesterday from my Australian client asking for a Zoom call tomorrow night to review my in-process report. That…
I just spent a day doing something I don’t do much with people I haven’t seen often enough, and therefore learning and experiencing a lot of new things. The world is separated into people who love boats and boating and those of us landlubbers who never really caught that bug. In my youth in Wisconsin, the land of 15,000 lakes (even though neighbor Minnesota brags about having 10,000 lakes), I did my share of boating.…