“The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing. ”

-Ernest Hemingway –

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My mantra in life is

Think For Yourself, Question Everything, Never Stop Learning

I don’t know when I adopted those above words of life, but it was a long time ago. In this regard, I follow Socrates in the belief that the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. There will NEVER be a time in my life where I think I have learned enough. One of the depressing things about living in a retirement community (RetCom) is that there are so many people here who just seem to exist day to day. They have no desire to learn, they only want to be entertained. That is one of the brutal things I quickly discovered by living here.

Finally getting to the point of this post, I seem to have never lost the quest to question things. My father, who was a single parent, certainly got tired of my questions. He often said, “That’s just the way it is”. That was never enough for me.

To this day, I still wonder what I will do when I grow up. One of the secrets to aging gracefully is to never grow up. That is a hard lesson to learn, but it might just be the most valuable one to learn in your later years.

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I have changed my sleep pattern once again. I now go to bed at 9pm and wake up at 5am. Being that we just passed the shortest daylight time of the year, it means that I must wait 3 hours for the sun to come up. But it adds another 30 minutes to my most creative time of the day. I like that very much. But, I think I am going to stop here. Getting up before 5am just seems kinda crazy even to me. 🙃