Life Lessons Part 3

Here I am now in adult life having learned some basic and vital lessons along the way to here.

Two more decades to go.

My last decade which ended in October 2011 was memorable in other ways than might be expected. Lessons were learned that might have better served me had they been learned fifty years earlier. Hindsight you know?

Not to sound morbid, but how can this not? Big Life Lesson: I learned that no one gets out of life alive!

While this fact of life is true for everyone, there is an inner inkling for many of us that it is only others who will experience this, that somehow life will go on in its present form for a very long time for the "I" while those 'thems' fall around us.

This is so ludicrous and hinges on stupidity but then many of my life lessons have hinged on idiocy so why should this decade be different.

Sometime, when I have way too much time on my hand, I think about how I will leave this world. Watching TV ads for OTC and prescriptions drugs, I wonder if I'll succumb to a strange yet curable illness and think "Why didn't I buy that product?" Or perhaps get crushed within an automobile that has not passed all the dummy safety crashes. Maybe get sued to death because I carried the wrong kind of car insurance.

This kind of thinking does not happen often lest you think I should have sternly been steered toward professional help but it is an important lesson in life...and its inevitable end. It will end. Whether sadly or with joy is a choice both I and family and friends make. And this final emotion depends upon what we believe about our final decades and thus final day and further, final breath. Is it all over? Is it just beginning? How one answers those two short questions will in large part determine how one lives the last decade of their life. That's the lesson. The homework is optional.

Even though that is/was my life lesson for the last decade, I now have a brand new decade to play around with. New lessons to learn. New worlds to explore. New mistakes to make. It's fun, life. So far, in the first four months of the new decade life lessons have been sparse. I'll keep you posted.

And that's what I think about it.