The Best Time of Day
I reckon everyone has a best time of day. Probably not at whatever hour you get an over the top, over lengthy, musing from me.
I almost always look forward to the post midnight hours. The day is over, these days minus any drama, my mind wanders down memory lane, or ponders some topic of interest to me about life, and everything is still and quiet as far as I can see from my 11th floor living room. An occasional car may wend it’s way down a distant highway, or a plane do the same in the sky to some distant city. Scientific studies have shown that awe tends to bring contentment, a mellowness to our mental state. My life experiences can verify that my wandering in nature, or just viewing my little world from on high, does just that. Alone in the quietude of post midnight hours makes me feel the most connected to the essence of the evolutionary process. While we cannot understand the process entirely, we can feel connected to it in certain circumstances, just like we can feel best connected to someone we love or admire or enjoy in certain situations. Marriages would always last if those certain situations could be maintained till death. The inevitableness of change to everything in our lives can make particular/peculiar mental connections difficult to sustain. What or who we believe, admire, or love faces inevitable changes over time. These changes enhance, detract, or leave the same what we admire, believe, or love over time. So little is stable. We just deal with it as we cannot stop the changes.
For most people I think change is more exciting than annoying when young. But as age creeps up it takes more for us to get to the same excitement highs, and we begin to appreciate the peace and quiet of less exciting endeavors. Been there, done that, leaves us with less and less new—more and more old. For me, all the three phases of life (formative, productive, terminational) have been enjoyable but in distinctly different ways. Would I want to start all over again if I could push a button and do so? I think not if I still had clear memory of my past life. The newness of it all would be lost, and we all have learned long ago how intense life can be in various ways. We do not, according to scientific studies, have inexhaustible energy stores. We do not have inexhaustible will power. We do not have inexhaustible self focus. Even Terrell Owens has limitations in these inherited mental talents. And even here, when extreme will power and self focus rule an aspect of one’s life, other aspects of that life will suffer. Sometimes too much of a good thing has consequences. One thing for certain about the elderly—there is always a certain degree of past vitality missing. We really do often die a death of a thousand cuts. That transition from the productive years to the terminational years--while, granting the terminational years can, in these times, be healthy ones for decades, this transition requires—for most people—an acceptance that they are less and less important or relevant to those in their productive years. It is difficult to figure why any one, done with the ‘rat race’, would try so hard to remain a part of it. Commotion, pointless stress, competition, power, social gad flying, manipulative behaviors, etc. are not things which bring contentment in the terminational years. For me, the notion of any of the foregoing, as part of my daily life now, is foreign to me. Don’t miss any of that stuff at all. It was great and necessary at the time, but enough is enough. If we can’t adapt and change, we suffer consequences.
After midnight, when the stillness permeates everything, and we have only uninterrupted thoughts to let play through our minds, we can end up with the purest of emotions and notions about so many aspects of life. If we have any axes to grind, they seem to be absent past midnight. We tend to generate more kindness, forgiveness, greater comprehension and better insights when there is nothing present but the quietude of nature gearing up for yet another day. There will be sadness too, knowing that nothing but Time is permanent, albeit not for us. But it is a mellow sadness, not the kind of sadness which makes one weepy or angry. Actually, it is amazing so many of us have survived so long. My own personality too often put me on the edge of cliffs, or almost over the top of a wall too high from which to fall and survive. In the day time, others can seem too much up in our face—at post midnight hours their existence seems more curious than annoying, their diversity more intriguing than a target of our critical appraisal. Live and let live seems to dominate. In the quietude of the post midnight hours one can come close to feeling evolution is proceeding smoothly, according to the laws of nature. This hardly means our own lives are predetermined. The laws of chance led to a particular sperm matching up with a particular egg. Nothing predetermined by that. Our genetic makeup and the environment into which we are born and live are nothing we earned, nor were assigned by anyone, not even God. However, we do control how we play the hand dealt us. This, plus the fact that others can, and often do, help us play our hand, make the playing field more level, and give us encouragement/opportunities. That’s the Golden Rule. Yes, we can achieve varied degrees of contentment in our lives, not by praying to God to intercede on our behalf, but by how many people in any society are guided by the Golden Rule. When the Golden Rule is the basis for ethics in a society, then that society will have the greatest number of people achieving some level of contentment with their lives.
For me, the quietude of the post midnight hours coupled with solitary inner searching, life becomes more comprehensible and certainly more awesome to the extent I mellow out and end up with renewed strength to meet the upcoming next day. Fair enough
One huge impediment to contentment is the ultimate uncertainties in life, which even the brightest of us will never be able to totally accept. It is well and good that we can, as I do, define God based on wherever there is a gift there must be a gift giver. Thus God becomes the force, or whatever, which created the laws which govern this evolutionary process, a process which has existed a tad more than our lifetime, in fact millions of years. Still, where did God come from? This implies something came from nothing, and here our intellectual abilities are useless to us. Obviously something can’t come from nothing. But it did. Do the laws that govern the evolutionary process ever get suspended by God so he can protect particular individuals from their otherwise fate? There is no evidence for this whatsoever. Bad things can happen to the best of us, and good things to the worst of us. God is not micromanaging his own created process. The person who invented the poker game and rules, has no control over who wins or loses at his game. If God was intervening to protect the best of us, Abraham Lincoln would never have been assassinated, a ten year old girl would never be raped and brutally murdered, hapless refugees would never be allowed to starve to death, our most loyal pets allowed to die, etc.
If God doesn’t interfere to alter the rules which govern evolution, can we then predict the future based on these governing laws? Not really. All we know is that survival goes to those species which are best able to adapt to the ever changing environment. But this is a principle, not a prediction. The human species has really changed the ball game. Our lives are clearly not predestined. Which egg combines with which sperm is not predetermined. Chance plays a huge roll in the evolutionary process. We are free to play the cards dealt to us by genetics and our environment as we see fit. But we also often get help from others, in terms of advice, financial assistance, opportunities, etc. How many humans in any society achieve a decent level of contentment with their lives is dependent on how prevalent the Golden Rule is in that society. This is always worth repeating and I just did.
When someone states their successes in life were “achieved the old fashioned way, I earned them”, it makes me cringe. Chances are they have simply ignored all the genetic, environmental, and personal help from others which made their successes possible. People who feel and talk that way tend to have little empathy with the less fortunate. Often, instead of being the most contented souls around, they relentlessly complain about these dregs of society who absorb too much government aid and have no redeeming values at all. Most who are successful are also welfare queens, whose help came from sources outside the government. In varying degrees we are all welfare queens, only the source of the welfare differs.
Frankly, there was nothing about me individually, when young, which indicated that I was destined to achieve anything in life. I was a small, sickly, shy, withdrawn, plain looking totally unimpressive quirky kid whose best friends were his pets. In school, nothing really stood out that was noteworthy at all. If I ever impressed anyone back then about anything of my existence it escapes me entirely. There are no monumental successes for me to brag about after 75 years, but enough modest successes in life were achieved. So, by what means? Much of the real me was inherited, so unearned right from the start. My formative environment was not earned either. But I had good parents, went to good schools, had a good neighborhood, had the best neighborhood friends imaginable, and the best pets a young boy could have—cats, a dog, a horse, a pigeon, a rabbit, a goat, fish, and so on. Maybe pets are the best means to developed empathy.
Interestingly, at least for me, the post midnight hours have played a huge role in my development as a person from my early productive years on to this day. Two of my boyhood friends were a source of endless conversations about most anything. In one case these conversations would take place after midnight until practically dawn. These two friends, independently, would always seem to ask the right questions for me to ponder, long past the time such questions were raised. Even after I lived a thousand miles away, when we did get together it would always involve a post midnight marathon talk session.
While I have stated this before, it bears mentioning again here. I cannot think of a single incident where I personally ‘earned’ my way to any position of power or authority. Someone always plucked me from the back of the line and put me at the front. If I was heading down in a free fall, others always caught me and restored me to safety. So while I have had some successes, what have I really to personally brag about? Not very much. Love was no exception. No one ever viewed me as any lover-boy, any dashing Casanova in appearance or behavior. While my presence was always felt, it was hardly ever in any social situation of any official sort. Even as a kid, when company came, I went out my bedroom widow and retreated to my neighbor’s house. A prefect brat—heading nowhere, heading off into the hills with his dog to escape to a simpler world.
I only fell in love once, a most stressful endeavor, and an endeavor whose essence blossomed in the post midnight hours. Since I arranged never to have classes before noon, this romance was most intense post midnight, not because the sex never ceased, but because our conversations never did. The content of these conversations would fill up a lengthy book, so won’t even attempt such a thing here. If anyone thinks my musings are long, those post midnight conversations were never ending. But again, it was in the quietude of the post midnight hours that my sense of values and priorities evolved, stolen as they were, from someone else. That ‘perfect mate’ was lost via my own weakness in a most difficult situation, and like so many other people, things happen in life that we haven’t the power/wisdom to overcome. I suspect most people have events in their past which they regret the rest of their lives. With little choice, we deal with it, and move on or give up and languish in frustration.
This ‘love’ may have been lost but I never lost the specialness of the post midnight hours, or the insights I gained about human nature, and especially the empathy for the less fortunate in life, those who never get the kind of genetics, environment, and help from others that I myself got time after time. Whether it is an animal or a person who is getting gang tackled by people who should really know better, it stimulates me to get involved on behalf of the person/animal being attacked. It is not the genuinely ‘bad’ people who unsettle me, but the many ‘good’ people who can treat the less fortunate with such disdain. Ignorance and isolation from these unfortunate people is behind good people behaving poorly towards the unfortunate. It seems to always go back to the falsehood of “I achieved my success the old fashioned way, I earned it.” That, to me, is the most overrated and self serving ego saturated claim around.
The downside of getting too consumed by the post midnight emotions is that we stay up too late and pay for it the next day for the lack of sleep. But in retirement that’s ok, we can always take a nap. Life at this time of my life, is what happens between naps. For me, a lot of my most meaningful thoughts come after midnight. Take away my long walks in nature and the post midnight hours— and my disposition would change from upbeat and pleasant to whinny and grouchy, cocooned in depression. Every day I pretty much do what I want, when I want, for as long as I want with little demand on others to amuse me. Everybody wins. I am not an aging nuisance to others, and I get to fill up my days with experiences and matters of interest to me. I have not forgotten the less fortunate, but these days deal with them through my FANAFI Fund. We can, however, never escape a need for some good luck and pleasant enough interactions with other people. Health means a great deal in old age, and most younger people are quite pleasant if we are not a burden or trying to insert ourselves into being a major player in their lives. It has been said that if we live long enough we become twice a child. For me, I depend on the post midnight hours to help me sense when life for me becomes ‘enough is enough’. My helium tank serves as my old age pacifier, the ultimate relief from potential senseless vegetating like a potted plant. There really is such a thing as a time to say goodbye before you lose the mental capacity to make sane decisions. At what point the quality of life becomes unacceptable will vary from person to person. My guess is that by the next decade every adult will have the right to control their own dying process, with safeguards in place to avoid inappropriate use of this right. I don’t fear death, I fear a long drawn out difficult dying process. Actually, I would prefer not to be there when it happens.
In the end, those who are awed enough by the evolutionary process of which we are a brief part, and take the time to actively live the Golden Rule, will find the kind of contentment sought. We cannot escape being personally meaningless to the process itself, but we can achieve a meaningfulness to our own lives—a meaningfulness which is independent of titles, power, wealth, popularity, or individual traits such as appearance, intelligence, personality, profession, or family situation. All of us need direction to our lives, and no one’s life gives us more insight to meaningful living than Abraham Lincoln. Under the most difficult, but varied, circumstances— his entire life—the personal qualities he developed, through keen observation of the world in which he lived, enabled him to develop peace within himself, and contribute to the welfare of all those with whom he came in contact.
