Rules for Old Age

A perfect footnote for the previous entry - from teenagers to the aged, a 90 year old Rabbi talks of the benefits of aging in the New York Times today

He distills 6 benefits:

1. Increased Tranquility. “You have achieved in old age what you have wanted to, if you are fortunate,” he said. The important battles have been waged, the decisions made. “You no longer have to do the pushing, the striving, the struggle.”

2. A kind of zen caring. "You don’t rush to quick action,” Rabbi Haberman explained. “You’re more likely to stop and think.” These days he’s hardly indifferent to the world’s problems, he added, but he’s less inclined to think he can solve them, or that they’re soluble at all.

3.“The art of submission.” Americans are activists by nature, but “more happens to us than we cause to happen,” he has found. “You have to accept the unalterable.”

4. Able to consider the possibility he’s wrong. He labeled “liberation from the compulsion to set everyone else straight.” He has loosened up since his more dogmatic youth.

5. Gratitude - “I’m more conscious of the little favors people do — the driver who stops and lets me cross the street, the newspaper man who brings my paper directly to the door,” Rabbi Haberman said. He feels more aware of humanity’s interconnectedness. “I am a zero by myself.”

6. Connectedness to Family and Community.

You can find the full version of his sermon here

Now if only we could figure all that out when we were teenagers, what extraordinary adults we might become!


undated picture of the Rabbi

Rules for High School Graduates

The Internet is so funny, everyone acknowledges that Bill Gates did not in fact, make up these rules, but they are listed on google sites as 'Bill Gates Rules' as we have apparently all agreed to call them that. Having just argued with DS about manners and not had an open and accepting response, these rules resonated with me:

RULE 1 - Life is not fair, get used to it. (hence this great photo of a seagull snatching the dolphin's fish away. Those sneaky seagulls are everywhere!)

RULE 2 - The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.

RULE 3 - You will NOT make $40,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car phone until you earn both.

RULE 4 - If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.

RULE 5 - Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger-flipping; they called it opportunity.

RULE 6 - If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

RULE 7 - Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents' generation, try "delousing" the closet in your own room.

RULE 8 - Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades; they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.

RULE 9 - Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

RULE 10 - Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

RULE 11 - Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

Okay, some are a little harsh, and in the work place there are plenty of divas and coasters, just like in High School, but the idea of doing something hard for the intrinsic reward of a feeling of accomplishment, that is something I want to inculcate. And if we are creating rules, I would add - be polite, it costs nothing and leaves a lasting (good) impression.

beautiful images!

I can't capture any of them, so you're going to have to go directly to Zena Holloway's site, but she has so many dreamy, beautiful images. She specializes in underwater photography and there are just so many perfect images to chose from, but the one of the baby with his head above the water but swimming like a small elephant... just gorgeous!

A perfect poem

for expressing how I feel -

Walking Away, by C Day Lewis

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

This poem first appeared in the collection The Gate and Other Poems, published in 1962. It is dedicated to Day-Lewis’s first son, Sean, and recalls a day when he was watching Sean go in to school. It has become one of his most enduring works and in 2001 was chosen by readers of the Radio Times as one of their top ten poems of childhood.

A fellow parent sent it to our class and I just loved it. Gifts through email... (and now via a blog... )

Letting things go

I haven't written for the past two days because I've been searching for the perfect image but I've stopped letting the perfect get in the way of the good, and am writing anyways...



I've been going through my closets which are now as neat as they will ever be, throwing things out. (the above image is clearly fantasy.) I have obeyed my three year rule - I have to wear something once every 3 years, or it can't live in my cupboard anymore, and am so grateful that Housingworks opened a shop around the corner so I can go and give my good enough clothes a new home.

It's funny, how I like throwing things out, it makes me feel lighter and less cluttered in my soul somehow, to have my space leaner and cleaner. Though I don't feel like that about my writing at all, have to keep every scrap there, and don't feel like that about people either. I hate it when people leave.

We are all leaving in my world right now. I've been so affiliated with DS's school, and as he leaves elementary school and moves on to middle school, I can see lots of change and flux.

I realize I'm not a 21st century gal after all. I don't relish change and I don't multi-task well. I like depth and stability. But I also appreciate life cycles and I can see one taking place now, and as change comes, as space forms, new things can grow... So I'm simultaneously trying to let go and hold on... no wonder I can't find the closet picture that portrays that!