Unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates said that. Okay, Plato said that but he was just repeating
what Socrates said. I am a year into
this retirement thing and what I know is what I know, and what I know is that
retirement has given me the chance to examine life. My examination has led me to the conclusion
that I have missed a lot during my lifetime because I was busy working. I think I prioritized things in approximately
the right order, but I think I put too much emphasis on and, consequently, too
much thinking time devoted to my various jobs.
In one regard, my career gave me the opportunity to have a
meager amount of money saved so I could afford to retire in the first place,
but it has taken me all of the first year to wind down. I still find myself prioritizing life like I
prioritized my time at work. That is to
say that there is never enough time to do everything one wants to do and some
things have to be glossed over or relegated to the bottom of the pending file
until the realization hits that there just isn’t enough time to do them. There is always the feeling that maybe, had I
spent another ten hours a week working that I would have gotten them done and
one or two of them would have resulted in something worthwhile.
In retirement I have little trouble pushing those thoughts
aside. If it is important I will get it
done: If not, it will wait until
tomorrow or next week, or next month.
In Wampeters, Foma and
Grandfalloons, Kurt Vonnegut says the following about Socrates’ quote:
“Plato says that the
unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to
be a clunker as well?”
It is my opinion that, since our lives are viewed from the
point of view of our own egos, we may not even know that some of our lives are
clunkers. My own life had its low
points, and many things that I should have or would have done differently, I
would like to think that my own life would stand the test, but now is the time
to examine it. And my first examination
was to go back in time. The next entry
will be the detail of that time travel.
If I was a dog with a vast knowledge of history and physics and I had a
geeky boy as a master whose name was Sherman , I
would probably say, “Turn on the WABAC machine, Sherman
I stole this photo from Wiki. It depicts
Mr. Peabody and Sherman entering the WABAC machine
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