While standing by a river,
the Master said,
“What passes away is, perhaps, like this.
Day and night it never lets up.”
—Analects of Confucius - Book 9, Chapter 17
“Hello!” a voice rang out from nowhere.
“Hellooo!” it yelled again as two grannies sought to find where it came from.
“Hi, yeah, up here,” a middle-aged woman called down toward their wheelchairs.
As the elderly women craned their necks to see who was screeching from above, the woman leaned over her balcony and said, “I know you mean well, but feeding bread to those birds leads to wing deformities!”
Why, if I had my bow, I woulda slung an arrow in her general direction, harassing people who have one foot in the grave like that.
“You listen to me, lady!” I wanted to yell. “If those old-timers wanna toss the remaining scraps of their social security at ducks, then you leave ’em alone!”
I didn’t have to, though, as those sweet geriatrics ignored the wench and went on feeding. (That, or they were too deaf to understand what she was saying.)
By some cosmic intervention, this waterside scene occurred as I was reading the quote above, serving as a reminder that old age will eventually catch up with all of us.
Fortunately, I read Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life when I was young and always kept in mind the essence of his work: “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing.”
His wisdom made me realize how the existence we often take for granted is in short supply. We have, what, eighty years if we’re lucky? And there’s a chunk on the front end, which is barely remembered, and a chunk on the back end, which is, well, probably barely remembered. So, from the moment I read that book, I vowed to live my lively years by asking, “What’s the most efficient use of my time right now?”
And if that means feeding wildlife when I’m half-dead, then you let me be.