March 8, 1958
IF YOU could live your life over would you do it?
My car-pool companion, an oldster like me but a perpetual optimist--unlike me--posed the question the other day as we drove to work.
It was a rather personal query, I said. If my answer was negative he might assume that my home life was unhappy, that I was a social outcast, that I was burdened by insoluble problems and perhaps dogged by ill health, none of which was true.
"Answer the question," he demanded.
Did he mean the same me, I parried, the same personality, childhood, the same setting as to time and circumstance, occupation, triumph and misfortune?
"I mean the same stinking you and the same identical life. How about it?"
"I'm not sure," I said after a pause. "Would you?"
He said, promptly and without reservation, that he would. He'd love it. His statement was completely honest. He is a fellow who accents the positive and is torn by no regrets.
WOULD THAT I were of like attitude. I am torn by regret half the time, given to second guesses and what-might-have-beens and what-I-should-have-dones.
The smartest thing I ever did was to get a woman who could tolerate my introvertish doubts and Monday morning quarterbacking and convert me, often for as long as a week, into a person of gay abandon and high spirit.
IF YOU could live your life over would you do it?
My car-pool companion, an oldster like me but a perpetual optimist--unlike me--posed the question the other day as we drove to work.
It was a rather personal query, I said. If my answer was negative he might assume that my home life was unhappy, that I was a social outcast, that I was burdened by insoluble problems and perhaps dogged by ill health, none of which was true.
"Answer the question," he demanded.
Did he mean the same me, I parried, the same personality, childhood, the same setting as to time and circumstance, occupation, triumph and misfortune?
"I mean the same stinking you and the same identical life. How about it?"
"I'm not sure," I said after a pause. "Would you?"
He said, promptly and without reservation, that he would. He'd love it. His statement was completely honest. He is a fellow who accents the positive and is torn by no regrets.
WOULD THAT I were of like attitude. I am torn by regret half the time, given to second guesses and what-might-have-beens and what-I-should-have-dones.
The smartest thing I ever did was to get a woman who could tolerate my introvertish doubts and Monday morning quarterbacking and convert me, often for as long as a week, into a person of gay abandon and high spirit.
Any reluctance I would have to starting from scratch again is not born of the fact that life has been bad. It has been very good. Tragedies have been few and blessings many. Hesitance springs from the realization that too many days have been spent worrying about too many misfortunes that never happened. I am plagued by a foreboding psyche.
BUT IF forced to choose between starting life again at the time I did and starting anew now I would take the old route. A look at what appears to be ahead gives me the shakes.
An infant today equipped with an understanding of future possibilities and portents would be a nervous wreck before he could toddle if he had my emotional wirings.
He could see himself blown into infinity by an H-bomb or his bones turned to jelly by a diet overly rich in fallout. He might imagine himself, 15 to 20 years hence, starving to death in a traffic jam, being a reluctant inhabitant of a space station or being dragooned into a trip to the moon.
The playgrounds and trees enjoyed by those who had gone before he might find displaced by super-highways and parking ramps and otherwise sacrificed to the gods of progress. He would see nature in retreat before population growth and man's lust for efficiency, movement and expansion.
MY CAR-POOL pal, however, declared that after he had lived out this life he would just as soon take a whirl at another one cast in the future, despite all the risks and uncertainties. In the next 100 years, he declared, a lot of interesting things would happen. Space would be conquered and the parking problem might be licked. One had to face life, he lectured, not be afraid of it. The cold war, the economic, technological and scientific complexities, the civic and educational problems and the traffic snarls posed challenges and exacted a sense of responsibility.
In many respects, he continued, life might grow infinitely better. With automation on the march, man will have to work less and less. He will have time for more culture and more time to think of something better to eat than hamburgers, hot dogs and pizza. Home movies will get better certainly, since they can't get worse, most shopping will be done via vending machine save in the real estate and durable goods fields, and we might even get off the do-it-yourself kick.
I LIKED that part about working less but was unimpressed by his over-all picture. I am not a whit interested personally in the conquest of space. Things are tough enough on earth without seeking trouble upstairs.
As for problems on the welfare and scientific fronts, I could make no contributions whatever and would only be in the way.
So at the end of my mortal stint, while having no complaints, I'll be willing to say "enough."
Copyright 2020 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.
Copyright 2020 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.
